Luka Stulli: Vaccinatio

This elegiac poem by Luka Stulli (Luko Stulli), a physician of Dubrovnik, celebrates the discovery of vaccination against smallpox. Stulli opens by rebuking those who, poring over the monuments of the Romans, claim that modern men are degenerate and made of inferior clay. He lists the wonders of the ancient world, the pyramids, the temple of Diana and the labyrinth, alongside modern feats such as the tunnel through Posillipo near Virgil’s tomb and the draining of the Pontine marshes, and argues that his own age has produced achievements as great.

The heart of the poem praises vaccination for freeing families from the terror of smallpox: girls can now marry in the bloom of youth, childbirth brings less anxiety, and infants are no longer torn from their mothers’ breasts by the plague, which once cut them down like hail on violets and roses. The poem is an example of the Latin verse still written by educated professionals in Dubrovnik in the early nineteenth century, and a document of the enthusiasm with which Jenner’s discovery was received in the Adriatic world.