Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [142]
It must have seemed to Durgin’s peers that the stress of the job had finally gotten to him. Had the respected chief of one of the nation’s leading public health departments really just dared unvaccinated citizens to expose themselves to smallpox? In all likelihood, Durgin expected no one to take the bait. A man of his experience knew the antivaccinationists were nothing if not sincere. But their beliefs did not constitute a suicide pact. While antivaccinationists considered vaccination a medical fraud and compulsory vaccination an “atrocious crime,” few imagined themselves invulnerable to smallpox.5
One of the few was Dr. Immanuel Pfeiffer of Boston. A Danish immigrant and former dealer in real estate, the sixtyish physician was a handsome man with an erect bearing, a thick head of hair, and a well-groomed beard. He was a public figure of well-known enthusiasms: spiritualism, physical culture, free speech, and, uniting them all, antivaccinationism. An apostle of the idea that the mind possessed almost limitless power over the material world, Pfeiffer offered his own body as the proof of his beliefs, winning a Houdini-like reputation for his vigorous constitution and capacity to withstand physical hardship. In 1900, he garnered national press attention by fasting for twenty-one days. A year later, he fasted for a month. “He has been considered a crank by many people,” the Globe observed; and yet those who knew the man acknowledged that he had “a brain of unusual power and activity, a fitting concomitant of his stalwart figure and imposing carriage.” In his heterodox medical journal, Our Home Rights, Pfeiffer taught readers that the best way to ward off disease was through sanitation, proper diet, and impeccable hygiene. He advertised his services as a “renowned natural healer” who “successfully treats all kinds of chronic diseases by the simple laying on of hands, after having been pronounced incurable by regular physicians.” Regular physicians: to Pfeiffer, that phrase signified unthinking medical orthodoxy and creeping state regulation of the healing arts, a trend he fought as president of the Massachusetts Medical Rights League.6
Pfeiffer’s views on vaccination were a matter of public record. In December 1901, one month after Durgin issued his challenge, Pfeiffer attended a lecture at a meeting of the Ladies’ Psychological Institute of Boston. The speaker was Dr. John H. McCollom of Boston City Hospital, an instructor in contagious diseases at Harvard and a prominent member of the Massachusetts Medical Society—a “regular,” through and through. McCollom presented a by-the-book argument for vaccination. As gruesome images of smallpox patients beamed onto a screen from his stereopticon, McCollom narrated humankind’s long struggle with smallpox, culminating in the scientific triumph of Jennerian vaccination. He traced the development of vaccine, touting the virtues of modern glycerinated lymph. He marshaled statistics from historical epidemics to demonstrate that well-vaccinated people rarely contracted smallpox and, when they did, suffered far less than their unvaccinated neighbors. The same argument could be found in countless medical journals, government reports, and newspapers. But with smallpox spreading in the city—perhaps in that very room—the audience hung on McCollom’s every word. Coming