28 SOCIAL SCIENTIST India and the techniques necessary to effectively introduce the requisite dose in the patient. This article attempts to assess the insights provided by some of these official discussions. I. VACCINES, EXPERIMENTS AND DISCORD A number of factors, most of them inter-linked, ensured a high level of experimentation with smallpox lymph in India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perhaps the most significant of these was the fact that the supply of vaccines from Britain - sent usually from the National Vaccine Establishment in London and the Royal Dispensary in Edinburgh - remained spasmodic, and that the potency of the lymph that did ultimately arrive would very often be damaged during the journey to India.2 The consignments of lymph could get stuck at any one of the stops along the mail route, and the Medical Board of Bombay - the city was a major centre for the receipt and redistribution of European lymph - would, therefore, quite often be faced with delays in supply. A complaint made by them in 1854, typical of many of the other objections raised during the period, wondered why a consignment of lymph had been kept at the offices of the General Department of the Government of Bombay for nine days after arrival from Britain, when their own policy was to redirect lymph within a few hours after receipt so as to avoid its deterioration by heat. The objection was noted and the General Department made a promise it would flout frequently in the future: the consignments of European lymph would be sent to the Board as soon as they were received in Bombay.3 But, the main problem was that the supplies from Britain remained unreliable, both in quality as well quantity. In 1862, for instance, Dr. M. Stovell, the Principal Inspector General of Government of Bombay's Medical Department, declared that 'lymph, obtained from Europe, sometimes succeeds, but more frequently fails, is a fact quite in accordance with the result of general experience on this point in other parts of India'4. In 1891, for example, the results of the two batches of sixty five tubes of humanised and calf lymph sent to India from Europe were considered unsatisfactory. A report concluded that the first supply was 'tolerably successful, but the second nearly all failed.'5 And years when supplies failed to materialise were hardly rare.6 This state of affairs forced officials to rely on locally harvested lymph, even though some within the senior ranks of the vaccinating establishment believed, at least till the 1860s, that the incidence of