Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [149]
Those “persons” included a great many irregulars, who perceived that every medical society endorsement of compulsory vaccination carried a rebuke to alternative medicine. Homeopaths (who many regulars grudgingly recognized as well educated and intentioned) were in fact divided on the vaccination question. Some regarded vaccination as clear proof of the homeopathic maxim simila similibus curentur (“Let like be cured by like”), while a vocal minority, including J. W. Hodge, regarded “the state-supported vaccination rite” as an exercise in blood poisoning. The 1901 meeting of the New England Eclectic Medical Association adopted a resolution proclaiming “the right to resist the vaccinator in his disseminating of disease.” Botanical physicians of the Physio-Medical School contributed several leaders to the cause, such as Dr. Clymer, vice-president of the Terre Haute–based Anti-Vaccination Society of America and author of the intermittently brilliant 1904 tract Vaccination Brought Home to You. (Clymer figured out that the best sources of damaging material on vaccination were the regulars’ own medical journals, where doctors let down their public guards and shared personal experiences of vaccinations gone wrong.) The vaccination procedure may have garnered the greatest scorn from devotees of the least legitimate (in regulars’ eyes) schools of drugless healing—including hydropaths and chiropractors. For Dr. T. V. Gifford of Indiana, a “pioneer in Hygeio-Therapy,” antivaccination was simply another part of a sound health regimen, like taking cold baths and avoiding salt, meat, and sex.30
Although beset and beleaguered, alternative medicine survived the return of medical licensing laws. Homeopaths and eclectics won their own licensing acts in some states. And even practitioners of the new or more marginal schools held out the hope that their system would eventually triumph over medical orthodoxy. “The day of powder and pill and knife is nearing its end,” declared one osteopathic text in 1903.31
Another source of support for the antivaccinationists came from the growing communities of faith healers in turn-of-the-century America. The cause had long enjoyed support from spiritualists, a movement of alternative religion that flourished in the nineteenth century. Known for séances and “table-rappings,” spiritualists emphasized the fundamental unity of matter and spirit; their anti-institutionalism and strong belief in the sovereignty of the individual tied them to various radical causes, including women’s rights, antislavery, and antivaccination. Vaccinators were persona non grata at John Alexander Dowie’s Zion City, a settlement established outside Chicago in 1899 that banned alcohol, smoking, dance halls, and medical doctors.32
Mary Baker Eddy’s Church of Christ, Scientist, established in Boston in 1879 and reaching forty thousand members by 1906, shared the natural healers’ concerns about vaccination. Adherents of Christian Science believed in the power of the mind to cure disease through prayer. During the 1890s, Christian Scientists had denounced compulsory vaccination as a violation of the laws of God and their religious freedom. In Beloit, Wisconsin, a Christian Scientist won a major legal victory in 1897, securing the right for his unvaccinated children to attend the public schools. When the city council of Americus, Georgia, where smallpox was epidemic in 1899, passed an ordinance compelling vaccination, local Christian Scientists rebelled, insisting their faith would protect them against the disease. City authorities arrested the resisters, assessing fines from $3 to $30 and imposing jail terms from ten to thirty days. Some Christian Scientists joined antivaccinationist societies,