Laurent-Henri Vignaud

History, History of Sciences – LIR3S (Société, Sensibilités, Soin) – UMR 7366

My research initially focused on the development of natural history in late Renaissance and the social, intellectual and political conditions of its production, with a focus on biology and on natural “wonders”, defined as hardly-believable and nevertheless natural phenomena. While working on the “translation notebooks” of Louis Pasteur, in which the French biologist kept translations of almost all foreign articles making mention of him, I came to be interested in the “Pasteurian controversies”, and from there in the global history of vaccines and vaccine hesitancy. In 2019, with immunologist Françoise Salvadori, we published a book on the anti-vaccine movement from the eighteenth century to the present day. We conceived it as a research guide bringing together a number of scattered studies on the opposition to vaccination, whether socially, politically, religiously or otherwise motivated.