• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 321 0

Waterhouse of Harvard performed the first American vaccinations, physicians and clergymen in Boston formed the Anti-Vaccination Society, declaring vaccination an act of “defiance to Heaven itself, even to the will of God.” American antivaccinationists owed a heavy intellectual debt to their British counterparts, who generated a vast literature on the subject between the rise of compulsory vaccination in the 1850s and the act of 1898. And the Americans, in their continuing search for evidence to support their views, kept tabs on the experience of compulsion and opposition on the Continent (and, to a far lesser degree, in Asia and Latin America). Some contributors to the American literature of antivaccination did little more than compile the arguments and data of others; if the Springfield, Massachusetts, physician C. W. Amerige had an original thought as he wrote Vaccination a Curse (1895), he failed to put it on the page. And even the more original and lively writers, such as J. W. Hodge, tended to grow shrill with time, recycling their own arguments at an ever increasing volume. Still, these were not shortcomings unique to antivaccination writing. Their opponents were guilty of the same excesses.37

The sharp-penned English polemicist Alfred Milnes observed that the nineteenth-century debate had produced “a double history to vaccination.” To mainstream medical leaders, the introduction of vaccination in 1798 was the greatest gift ever bestowed upon civilization by science. To the antivaccinationists, the record of vaccination was a “history of failures.”38

The historical debate was really a quarrel about the efficacy of vaccination. Did the practice really deserve credit for causing the sharp decline of smallpox in the West during the first thirty years after its introduction? To antivaccinationists, much of that credit belonged not to the adoption of a new medical practice, vaccination, but to the banning of an old one, inoculation. Inoculation (using actual smallpox virus) had once enjoyed the broad support of the medical profession, notwithstanding the serious risk that a person inoculated with smallpox would infect others. With the arrival of vaccination, the profession discredited inoculation. The abrupt cessation of that perverse practice, antivaccinationists argued, was one key factor in the declining incidence of smallpox. The others were stricter isolation of smallpox patients, rising standards of cleanliness, and the large-scale sanitation projects introduced in European and American cities. Antivaccinationists believed smallpox to be preeminently a “filth disease.” By diverting public attention and government resources from sanitary measures, they argued, the “vaccine nostrum” had been “instrumental in perpetuating the very disease it is supposed to prevent.”39

Both sides drew upon the discipline of statistics to make their cases. Defenders of vaccination marshaled hospital data to show that unvaccinated individuals were far more vulnerable to smallpox than the vaccinated. Antivaccinationists in England and America accused their opponents of obtaining their data from biased sources (hospitals) and of missing the data’s true significance. “Of course the death-rate is greater among the unvaccinated,” said Hodge, building upon an argument made by Wallace. After all, who were the unvaccinated? The poor: ill fed, ill housed, ill clothed, and, consequently, just plain ill. The political solution to smallpox was broad-based structural reform to improve the lives of the laboring poor. “It should require no argument to convince a physician that people who live in sanitary dwellings, on clean streets, and who eat wholesome food, drink clean water and breathe pure air are in a better position to resist diseases, small-pox included, than are other people living under opposite conditions.”40

Statisticians love an army. England’s Wallace built much of his case against vaccination in 1898 by citing the incidence of smallpox among the well-vaccinated troops of the British army. American antivaccinationists updated the argument