Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [147]
In England, antivaccinationism fostered a cross-class alliance of factory workers, artisans, clerks, and shopkeepers. English vaccination measures explicitly targeted working-class families, and antivaccinationism gained strongholds in workers’ neighborhoods, especially those with robust labor movements. For a half century after the passage of England’s first compulsion statute in 1853, hundreds of thousands of parents joined the movement to resist government-mandated vaccination of their children. Many were fined or jailed. Government distraint sales—public auctions of property seized from resisters who failed to pay their fines—spawned riots. An estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people participated in the Leicester Demonstration of 1885, a grand urban spectacle that featured the hanging of Edward Jenner in effigy. Parliament established the Royal Commission on Vaccination in 1889. After studying the subject for seven years, the commission endorsed vaccination as scientifically sound but advised Parliament to create an exemption for “conscientious objectors”: people who sincerely believed the procedure threatened their own or their children’s health. Parliament introduced that exemption by law in 1898. Within ten years, conscience exemptions reached one quarter of all births in England.22
In the United States, organized antivaccinationism never enjoyed such a broad, politicized working-class base. Most activists instead came from the country’s broad, educated middle class. A typical league counted among its members businessmen and lawyers, shopkeepers and artisans, schoolteachers and housewives. To an outsider, the most striking fact about antivaccination activists—particularly those who wrote tracts and made public speeches—was how many of them were doctors. Or how many called themselves doctors, a regular physician would have said.
The controversy over the vaccination question was closely tied to the contemporary battle over state medical licensing and the increasing dominance of “regular,” allopathic medicine. So intertwined were the two issues in some states (including New York and Massachusetts) that at times the political fight over compulsory vaccination could seem little more than a proxy war for the professional struggle over licensure. But it was much more than that.23
The ranks of the antivaccination movement teemed with practitioners of the stunningly diverse systems of alternative medicine to be found in turn-of-the-century America. For many so-called irregular practitioners, the rise of state medicine in the late nineteenth century—with its boards of health, medical licensing bodies, and compulsory vaccination orders—was an insidious development. State medicine posed a direct challenge to their livelihoods and to their ways of understanding the body, nature, and the world. For many alternative practitioners, the fights against compulsory vaccination and medical licensure were two fronts in the same war. By discrediting vaccination, the Indiana “Physio-Medical” practitioner Dr. R. Swinburne Clymer declared, “we are striking at the very root and foundation of so-called scientific or ‘regular’ medicine.”24
It was a long-running war. In the early republic, state licensing laws had granted a professional monopoly to mainstream physicians of the allopathic school. It had been their idea to call themselves “regular” physicians and their upstart competitors in homeopathy and Thomsonianism “irregulars.” During the 1830s and 1840s, those laws were wiped off the books by state lawmakers, part of the broad Jacksonian-era assault on intellectual elitism and government-granted special privileges of all sorts. As the Massachusetts Sanitary Commission lamented in 1850, henceforward “any one, male or female, learned or ignorant, an honest man or a knave, can assume the name of physician, and ‘practice’ upon any one, to cure or to kill, as either may happen, without accountability. ‘It’s a free country!’” Free to healers and also free to patients, who could choose among practitioners, all of whom were equally entitled to hold