
Enrica Medugno
Senior Sale Coordinator




Sold for £1,920 inc. premium
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Senior Sale Coordinator

Head of Department
Inscriptions: in the wide band around the rim, The call to God to bless the Fourteen Innocents; in a lobed cartouche, 'Its owner Haydar 'Ali, smallpox vaccinator (abalah-kub), 1271 (1854-5)'; in the small cartouches, around the body, in a poor hand, repeat of a few couplets from a ghazal of Hafiz, ending with the call to God to bless the Chosen Muhammad (repeated twice).
Smallpox vaccination in Iran commenced on a limited scale in the 19th century by the order of Abbas Mirza (1789 - 1833), the Crown Prince of Fath Ali Shah Qajar (reg. 1797 - 1834), and was reinforced in 1848 by Mirza Taghi Khan Amir Kabir (1807 - 1852) the Prime Minster of Naser ad-Din Shah. It became more popular after the establishment of the Pasteur Institute in Tehran in 1921, where considerable doses of smallpox vaccine were produced. In addition, in subsequent years, a law that mandated public smallpox vaccination was passed by the Iranian parliament in 1953 and eventually the mass vaccination program led to the complete eradication of smallpox in Iran by 1978.