Mary Augusta Brazelton is a Senior Lecturer in Global Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine. Her 2019 book, Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China, examines the history of mass immunization in twentieth-century China. It suggests that the origins of the vaccination policies that eradicated smallpox and controlled other infectious diseases in the 1950s, providing an important basis for the emergence of Chinese health policy as a model for global health, can be traced to research and development in southwest China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Mary’s research interests lie broadly in historical intersections of science, technology, and medicine in China and around the world. Current projects include a study of the Sino-French Institute in Lyon, a collaborative exploration of the history of transportation technologies with particular consideration for transnational histories of civil aviation, and the history of early penicillin development in China. She received her PhD in History from Yale and taught at Tufts University before coming to Cambridge, where she is also a Trustee and Research Fellow of the Needham Research Institute.
“Viral Reflections: Placing China in Global Health Histories”, Journal of Asian Studies 79, no. 3 (2020): 579–88.
Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China (Cornell, 2019).
“The production of penicillin in wartime China and Sino-American definitions of ‘normal’ microbiology.” Journal of Modern Chinese History 13, no. 1 (2019): 102–123.
“Danger in the Air: Tuberculosis Control and BCG Vaccination in the Republic of China, 1930–1949.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 8, no. 1 (May 2019).
