Dr Sanjoy Bhattacharya and the eradication of smallpox
Dr Sanjoy Bhattacharya completed his MA at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, before moving to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London to do his PhD.
After a stint as a post-doctoral research fellow at Sheffield Hallam University and the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine in Oxford, he moved to University College London, with a three-year Wellcome Trust Project Grant to explore the history of the control and eradication of smallpox in nineteenth and twentieth century India.
The grant was extended so that he could produce two books. The first, published by Orient Longman (now Orient BlackSwan) in 2005, looked at efforts to control smallpox in colonial British India. The second, 'Expunging Variola: The control and eradication of smallpox in India, 1947-1977', published in 2006, caught the attention of public health officials and WHO policy makers.
The book used groundbreaking historical techniques, which questioned biases inherent in the source material. Tables of population data listing who had been vaccinated and who hadn't often ignore civilian and official resistance to vaccination programmes that occurred, for example. Going back to the primary data, rather than the published tables developed from it, can help health programmes (such as the current polio eradication programme in India) set more realistic targets.
Aware of the benefits of using these methods to study its own historical material to inform future action, WHO invited Dr Bhattacharya to become an organising member of its radical new project: Global Health Histories (GHH). As part of the initiative, medical historians and senior policy managers speak on specific health topics at monthly, Wellcome Trust-supported GHH seminars in Geneva, which are broadcast live over the internet.
Dr Bhattacharya received a second three-year Wellcome Trust Project Grant in 2006, to describe smallpox eradication in East Pakistan/Bangladesh - a very different story from the one in India, since the exercise was conducted in a country that was frequently ruled by the military and undergoing the upheaval of civil war and unrest.
Exploring the WHO archives (to which he was given complete unrestricted access as a result of his 'Expunging Variola' book), he stumbled upon boxes of papers dealing with Afghanistan and its complex relationship with Pakistan's north-western frontier provinces, which had accidentally been filed with the Pakistan papers. The Wellcome Trust has extended his grant to enable him to write a second book on the Afghanistan smallpox story, using these previously unseen documents.
Dr Bhattacharya joins the University of York as a Reader in History in October 2010, where he will complete his two latest books.
