Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [105]
Many of the earliest vaccine producers were men much like Martin and Griffin—reputable local physicians who knew their way around a stable. Some traded on their prominence as members of state or local boards of health. But so low were the barriers to entry—a bit of seed virus, a few cows, and some ivory points—that men on the make from many walks of life entered the business. With equal parts admiration and distaste, the Brooklyn Eagle captured the spirit of the new enterprise. “If it be true that what is one man’s meat is another man’s poison, it is equally true, of course, that what is one man’s poison is another man’s meat,” the Eagle said. “The axiom, as amended, is fully verified in this good city of Brooklyn, where men are deriving handsome incomes from that most disgusting and abhorrent of all diseases, small-pox. A new business of vital importance to the community has been started, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children are walking about with its badge on their arms.” In 1871, the New York Department of Health became the first municipal agency in the United States to produce its own vaccine. But elsewhere private makers had the field almost entirely to themselves. And as compulsory vaccination and its handmaiden, compulsory education, spread in the late nineteenth century, the opportunities for profit expanded apace.42
To distinguish their products on the open market, vaccine makers appealed to the late nineteenth-century romance of the pastoral and the era’s penchant for pedigree. Americans had a fascination with animal breeding and family genealogies, informed by the transatlantic flourishing of hereditarian ideas in the age of Darwin and Galton. Dr. W. E. Griffiths of Brooklyn boasted that his stock derived from a case of spontaneous cowpox discovered in Central New York. Dr. J. W. Compton & Son of Indiana advertised “pure Beaugency cow-pox lymph, non-humanized.” In 1885, John Wyeth & Brother, Philadelphia druggists, announced their entry into the field with a full-page advertisement in Drugs and Medicines of North America. Calling its new Chester County farm “the model vaccine propagating establishment of the United States,” the Wyeth Company obtained its seed virus from the Belgian government. Like many vaccine ads, this one pictured a cow: a healthy looking heifer, bound to a table beneath a lace-curtained window; on the calf’s lower belly were several rows of incisions, where the seed had been introduced. Vaccine companies’ claims to exalted origins for their products were greeted with jeering from some quarters. Dr. J. W. Hodge insisted, to everyone who would listen, that no vaccine maker had “any definite or exact knowledge as to the real nature, composition or original source of the complex poisonous mixture which they foist upon gullible doctors as ‘pure calf lymph.’”43
Hodge had a point. In an era when neither smallpox nor cowpox could be seen under the most powerful microscope, the manufacturers’ genealogical claims were beyond verification. It was not until 1939 that a British scientist established that most vaccines contained neither smallpox nor cowpox, but a related orthopoxvirus called vaccinia. At some time between Jenner’s first experiments with cowpox in 1796 and the 1930s, vaccine makers had started working with this different virus, which also occurs naturally in cows. No one knows when the exchange occurred, though the late nineteenth century would seem a good bet. In any event, vaccinia worked. Like cowpox, when introduced in the human system it caused an immune response, usually mild, that conferred a lasting (though not permanent) immunity to smallpox.44
The makers’ claims to product purity were easier to test than their pedigree claims. In 1895, Walter Reed of the Army Medical Department presented a paper to the District of Columbia Medical Society entitled “What Credence Should Be Given to the Statements of Those Who Claim to Furnish Vaccine Lymph Free of Bacteria?” His answer: none at all. Reed had examined points from several leading U.S. makers. The number of bacteria