A massive corpus of historical scholarship has been produced in the last few decades exploring specificities underlying the triad of disease, health and medicine. The present work explores the linkages between medical knowledge and colonial power drawing resources from the medical archive. The focus of this essay pertains to the study of disease and medicine in relation to their extent of influence on colonial policy and the colonising process and on those who were colonised in the context of a specific locality or a region. It seeks to delineate the career of vaccination as it shaped up through a web of complexities in the context of Orissa including the attendant response of people to such interventions during the colonial rule. The colonial strategy to address the issue of smallpox epidemic and vaccination not only provides an understanding of the acutely limited nature of preventive medicine but also how a ‘political’ reading of the disease took precedence over its overt medical implications. The study further attempts to illustrate the specificities associated with the processes of colonial medical interventions to discipline a region like Orissa which the colonial authorities saw as a ‘pathological province’.

在过去的几十年中，已经产生了庞大的历史学术资料集，探讨了疾病，健康和医学三合会的特殊性。本工作探讨了医学知识与从医学档案中汲取殖民力量之间的联系。本文的重点是疾病和医学的研究，涉及其对殖民地政策和殖民化进程的影响程度以及在特定地区或区域内被殖民者的影响。它试图描绘疫苗接种的职业，因为它是在奥里萨邦的背景下通过复杂网络形成的，包括人们在殖民统治期间对这些干预措施的随之而来的反应。解决天花流行和疫苗接种问题的殖民策略不仅提供了对预防医学的严重局限性的理解，而且使人们对这种疾病的“政治”解读如何优先于其明显的医学含义。这项研究进一步试图说明与殖民医学干预过程相关的特殊性，以规范奥里萨邦（Orissa）等地区，殖民当局将其视为“病理省份”。