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that the parents were “ignorant” (also unfair, for most of the parents were at least literate); and that they inhabited a dirty city that had experienced a spell of dusty weather (demonstrably true). For the lay public, the salient commonalities had nothing to do with social status or the weather. All of the children had been healthy until they were vaccinated. Roughly three weeks later each fell ill with lockjaw. Now six of them were dead. Most of the children had received glycerinated vaccine. To these links, the New York Sun, in a November 17 report, added another: most of the vaccine used in Camden had apparently come from a single, trusted Philadelphia firm, H. K. Mulford Company.25

It was probably inevitable that suspicion would fall upon the Mulford Company vaccine farm and laboratory in Glenolden, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. Mulford marketing materials boasted of the company’s vaccine sales in eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. When the Camden Board of Health announced its plan for wholesale vaccination, Mulford and Marietta-based Alexander Vaccine Farm vied to corner the market. According to the Sun, a local chemist who represented Alexander approached the Camden Medical Society and seemed poised to win the contract for the vaccine station. Mulford countered by offering the society a thousand free points. Demand quickly exhausted that gratis supply, and the society bought more vaccine from Mulford, as did many private physicians. Almost all of the afflicted children had received Mulford virus. Company executives insisted the vaccine was pure. The allegations, they said, had come from pharmacists who served as agents for their rival companies, Alexander and Parke, Davis.26

The parents of Camden demanded a public investigation of the tetanus outbreak. James B. Cochran, Anna’s father, swore that if the authorities did not “fix the blame,” he would “spend his last dollar doing it himself.” Every family in the city had cause for concern. Parents whose sons and daughters had dutifully submitted to vaccination were terrified they would be the next to fall ill. (The children were afraid, too. At Lillian Carty’s funeral, her schoolmates cried for her and worried for themselves.) Parents whose children had not yet been vaccinated feared that submitting now would expose them to an unacceptable risk of lockjaw.27

Camden families launched a school strike, hundreds of parents declaring that their children would not return to the classroom until the school board rescinded its vaccination order. Some parents also talked about litigation, considering whether to sue the vaccine company or seek a court order to open the schools to unvaccinated children. To a knowledgeable lawyer, neither avenue would have looked promising in 1901. One prevailing principle in tort law (“privity of contract”) insulated manufacturers from liability for injuries to anyone other than those to whom the makers sold the vaccine directly; while another principle (“contributory negligence”) limited a defendant’s liability if he could show that the plaintiff had negligently contributed to his own injury (for example, by carelessly letting dirt enter a vaccination wound). Moreover, under New Jersey’s wrongful death statute, if the plaintiff’s lawyer somehow proved the manufacturer’s liability in court, the child’s next of kin (normally, the father) would have been entitled only to compensation for his direct pecuniary loss: the child’s wages, if any. As for the other legal strategy—seeking a judicial writ to compel school officials to admit their unvaccinated children—two circumstances would have hampered that claim: the school board was acting in accordance with a state law, not merely at its own discretion, and the board had promulgated the order in the midst of an actual smallpox epidemic. In the American legal environment of the era, a school strike was a far more viable option than a lawsuit. But even that option carried a risk: school officials could have had the parents prosecuted for violating the compulsory education law.28

Increasingly,