Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [153]
James agreed. His quarrel with the bill reflected a set of ideas about the contingency of truth that he would later develop in his famous lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901–2) and Pragmatism (1907). He noted that of the therapeutic methods presently in good repute, many had arisen from outside the regular medical profession. Successful treatments “appealed to experience for their credentials”—not to some state board. In an age of medical hubris, the professor asked for some professional humility. “The whole face of medicine changes unexpectedly from one generation to another in consequence of widening experience; and as we look back with a mixture of amusement and horror at the practice of our grandfathers, so we cannot be sure how large a portion of our present practice will awaken similar feelings in our posterity.” To the lawmakers he warned, “You dare not convert the laws of this Commonwealth into obstacles to the acquisition of truth.” The committee voted unanimously to reject the bill.46
Few antivaccinationists were as open-minded as William James. But like him, the antivaccinationists who railed against medical monopoly saw licensure as a threat to personal beliefs and to scientific progress. Three years later, in April 1901, the Massachusetts General Court debated another medical licensing bill. This time, Immanuel Pfeiffer testified. Though himself a registered physician, Pfeiffer demanded an amendment that would prevent the state from interfering with the practice of “any cosmopath, clairvoyant, hypnotist, magnetic healer, mind curist, masseur, osteopath or Christian Scientist.” The lawmakers assented—but only so long as no such healer held himself out as a bona fide “practitioner of medicine.”47
Antivaccinationism also spoke to the era’s heightened social concern for children. Twelve-year-olds tending dangerous machines in textile mills, little boys playing unsupervised in city streets, fourteen-year-old delinquents tried as if they were grown men in municipal police courts: these once familiar sights became unthinkable in a relatively few short years around the century’s turn. Infant and child mortality emerged as major social issues, with reformers pushing for better maternal and infant health care. Even as health officials promoted vaccination as a boon to childhood, antivaccinationists reached out to parents with their message that mandatory childhood vaccinations endangered the young, a modern-day reprise of Herod’s “Slaughter of the Innocents.” “There is a great cry of ‘Save the children,’” said Harry Bradford of Kensington, Maryland. “Let us begin by stopping the infliction of compulsory disease on the defenseless.”48
The vaccine safety issue was always the most politically promising of the antivaccinationists’ arguments. Even the staunchest defenders of vaccination had to concede, as did Dr. William Welch of Philadelphia Municipal Hospital, “this measure is not entirely devoid of some danger.” The appalling record of American-made vaccines during the 1898–1903 epidemics lent the issue a new urgency. Vaccine safety concerned everyone, especially parents. In most communities, children were the segment of the population most vulnerable to compulsory vaccination and thus to whatever dangers attended the procedure. Many antivaccination texts featured photographs of children—deformed, disabled, or lying dead in their coffins—identified