Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [144]
The surveillance went on for a week, eight days, nine, ten.... Then, on February 3, the eleventh day after his exposure to smallpox—right about the time when a person infected with the virus would be expected to fall ill and become contagious—Durgin’s agents lost Pfeiffer.
Iconoclasts! Charlatans!! Cranks!!! Of “the little coterie of obstructionists who call themselves antivaccinationists,” the leaders of scientific medical opinion in turn-of-the-century America had little good to say. “To call him an ass,” the New York country doctor–cum–memoirist William Macartney said of the antivaccinationist, “is to disparage donkeys in general.” With the same stubborn sort in mind, health officials from Kentucky to California called a tough case of smallpox “the fool-killer.” Dr. James Hyde, the small-pox expert at Rush Medical School, offered a more searching psychological profile of vaccination’s discontents. “A class of men,” he imagined them, “whose minds are so curiously constituted that they will select for study the nether side of the social fabric, the weakness of the best of governments, and the minor defects in the character of the world’s heroes.” For years to come, few medical historians or science writers would feel any professional obligation to soft-pedal their contempt when writing about the “antivaccine, anti-government, and anti-science crowd.”13
To be sure, the turn-of-the-century antivaccination movement attracted more than its share of odd characters and showboating extremists. As Boston’s Dr. Charles F. Nichols (the author of Vaccination: A Blunder in Poisons) observed, “The subject evokes strong language—explosives, not apologetics.” The aptly named Dr. Robert A. Gunn told an audience at the Manhattan Liberal Club in 1902 that he would “shoot down as he would a burglar” any health officer who attempted to vaccinate his family, confident “no jury of American freemen” would find him guilty of murder.14
With the passage of time, the ideas of the early twentieth-century antivaccinationists may seem quaint, or worse. But those ideas, so markedly wrong by modern scientific standards, still offer critical insights into the tumultuous transformation of American society, culture, and government in the Progressive Era. Dr. Hyde’s unflattering psychological profile of the antivaccinationists hints at their deeper historical significance. These men and women, for whom opposition to compulsory vaccination had become a political cause, were profoundly disaffected by the growing administrative power and social reach of the American government in their time. For many of them, active opposition to “state medicine”—a term embraced by the state itself—was part of a larger social and cultural struggle against the dramatic extension of governmental power into the realms of education, family life, personal belief, bodily autonomy, and speech.15
The antivaccinationists’ sense of themselves as members of a political movement distinguished them from the far greater numbers of Americans who resisted compulsory vaccination during the smallpox epidemics of 1898–1903. For the African American coal miners of Birmingham, the tenement mothers of Italian Harlem, or the barrio dwellers of Laredo, resisting compulsory vaccination was indisputably a political act. By rioting, forging vaccination scars, scrubbing vaccine from their children’s arms, or driving vaccinators from their neighborhoods, thousands of ordinary Americans rebelled against government authority. Their actions emboldened antivaccinationists, but that did not make every “vaccine refuser” an antivaccinationist. For most refusers, resistance was an act in and of the moment; it lasted only so long as