Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [141]
For London, living the hobo’s life as a member of America’s “submerged tenth,” the underclass of his day, compulsory vaccination was but one in a litany of injustices that prompted his conversion from a working-class individualist into a socialist and a citizen of the world. During the experience, he said, some of his “plethoric national patriotism simmered down and leaked out of the bottom of his soul somewhere.” In another telling, London recalled with warm solidarity how another inmate, a veteran of the penal system with whom London had shared some tobacco, advised London to “suck it out”—literally to suck the vaccine from his arm. The writer was glad that he did. For afterward he saw “men who had not sucked and who had horrible holes in their arms into which I could have thrust my fist.” London could muster no sympathy for his fellows in prison stripes who had done nothing to stop the state of New York from making its mark on their bodies.81
“It was their own fault,” he said. “They could have sucked.”82
SEVEN
THE ANTIVACCINATIONISTS
The Medical News gave it a billing worthy of P. T. Barnum: “a smallpox case destined to be famous in the history of the progressive victory of therapeutic science over the ranks of ignorance, prejudice, quackery, and sentimentalism.” A more neutral observer (if one could be found) might have described the entire affair as a case of medical brinksmanship gone wrong.1
It had all started with a dare. On November 25, 1901, Dr. Samuel H. Durgin, lecturer in the Harvard Medical Department and chairman of the Boston Board of Health, made a statement to The Boston Globe. “If there are among the adult and leading members of the antivaccinationists,” he said, “any who would like an opportunity to show the people their sincerity in what they profess, I will make arrangements by which that belief may be tested and the effect of such exhibition of faith, by exposure to smallpox without vaccination, be made clear.” Chairman Durgin said he doubted there was “a man or woman among them”—Boston’s small but fervent antivaccination movement—who would accept his challenge.2
Boston was battling its most serious smallpox epidemic in a generation. The epidemic of 1872–73, Durgin’s first trial as a member of the board, had killed over a thousand people. There was no telling how many would die this time. The first cases, discovered in May 1901 in a Roxbury factory, had killed no one. It seemed that the new “mild type” smallpox, which had been troubling the southern and midwestern states for the past few years, had finally reached Boston. With summer came one small outbreak after another. September brought thirty new cases, October forty-nine, November nearly two hundred. By then, several people had died. With the smallpox hospital on Southampton Street filled to capacity, the board outfitted additional wards at the quarantine hospital on Gallop’s Island, in Boston harbor. According to city physicians, nine out of ten patients turning up at the pesthouses had never been vaccinated. The board opened free vaccine stations around the city. Durgin reached out to Archbishop John Joseph Williams, and his appeal for universal vaccination was read aloud at Sunday services across Catholic Boston. And though the board had yet to issue a vaccination order, hoping to preserve the image of voluntarism for as long as possible, the board’s “virus squad” began its bruising nighttime raids of the city’s lodging houses.3
In the midst of this public health emergency, an anonymous circular appeared on the streets of Boston. Addressed to parents, guardians, and the people, it warned that vaccination caused “disease, constitutional debility, death.” The circular advised that the state law requiring vaccination for all public school pupils—now being strictly enforced in the city—made an exception for