Inoxination

Sometimes I feel a bit disconnected from my previous clinical nursing life, despite being immersed in veterinary history every day. However there are joyous moments where everything comes together and I get to see how my journey has got me to this project, which I adore.

This week’s moment was a reminder of hearing a client ask about vaccinating their pet, using their own made-up word. They asked for information on “inoxinating” their cat – the perfect portmanteau of “vaccination” and “inoculation”.

I may not have heard the word before, but I knew exactly what she wanted. And at the time I would have struggled to explain the difference between the two words in modern usage. However, history has provided me with the answer, albeit some years after the event.

Nerd words

For any word nerds out there who haven’t time to do PhD reading, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives historic and archaic uses of words… but back to my moment of history and clinical worlds coming together: in some PhD reading around germ theory I have found the historic use of the term “inoculation”, which at the time would have been a horticultural term.

In William F Bynum’s “C’est un malade”: animal models and concepts of human diseases¹, he notes:

So, “inoculation” was taking something infectious from one subject (human or animal) and putting it into another subject to prevent disease.

While this was a major breakthrough at the time, clearly harvesting and transporting infectious agents between subjects had many limitations, therefore “vaccination” became more commonly used.

Vaccinism

While currently many would find it hard to separate “vaccination” and “inoculation”, this snapshot of the progress of language is really helpful.

The use of the term “vaccination” became more commonly used during the 19th century and Edward Jenner uses an archaic form of it (vaccinism) in a letter in 1801:

In his description we can see a similar situation with smallpox vaccines and government action as we have seen around COVID-19 in recent months and years.

Make it so

However, the definitions of “vaccine“ and “vaccination” are still complex; the OED includes mention of smallpox and “vaccine pustules” – however, as we can see, historically that would have been “inoculation”.

So maybe I can propose that, in a move for language, “inoxination” is a term we can use to describe the process of vaccination or inoculation? Modern definitions are so entwined it’s hard to differentiate, so let’s simplify it.