Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [155]
There is no way to confirm that vaccination caused all of this hurt and heartache. It is possible to dismiss Little’s project as an exercise in overly simplistic post hoc reasoning: the children died following vaccination, therefore vaccination must have been the cause. Still, many of Little’s “victims” had suffered complications acknowledged by medical scientists as possible, if rare, results of vaccination, whether caused by impure vaccine or secondary infection of the vaccine wound.
But Lora Little’s book is most powerful at its least rational, as a dutifully compiled archive of belief and grief—not just hers, but of the hundreds of parents who told her their sad stories. “91. Death. Henry C., son of H.C. Petterson, St. Paul. Vaccinated Aug. 1901 to go to school. Three vaccinations in succession were necessary to get a take. Child then took sick, and was never able to go to school. Was not confined to bed, but gradually grew weaker til he died, Nov. 2, 1901. He was a fat, healthy little fellow all his life until vaccinated. The sore that formed on his arm never healed. Three doctors tried to save his life.” Little patiently recorded hundreds of such stories. Neither doctors nor city health officials nor his boss could persuade railroad conductor Homer E. Sturdevant of Buffalo that his daughter’s death from blood poisoning in May 1902 was not caused by the vaccine that had been scraped into her arm thirteen days earlier. Sturdevant paid to have the cause of death, as he saw it, inscribed on Lucille’s tombstone in Forest Lawn Cemetery: “Lucille Sturdevant died May 28, 1902, aged 6 years. Vaccination poisoning at School 35.”54
Like its antimonopoly and child protection arguments, the distinctive libertarian thrust of American antivaccinationism engaged an area of broad public concern. A robust language of personal liberty, anchored in the Anglo-American common law tradition and the state and federal constitutions, lay at the heart of antivaccinationist ideology. “Every man’s house is his castle,” wrote the San Diego spiritualist James Martin Peebles in 1900, “and upon the constitutional grounds of personal liberty, no vaccination doctor, lancet in one hand and calf-pox poison in the other, has a legal or moral right to enter the sacred precincts of a healthy home and scar a child’s body for life.” The passage illustrates the rhetorical range of these unlikely radicals: their righteous mixture of religion and constitutionalism, masculine prerogative and republican domesticity, a faith in clean living and a suspicion of state medicine, old-fashioned populism and a new libertarianism that might have startled old John Stuart Mill himself.55
The American antivaccinationists were personal liberty fundamentalists. They quoted chapter and verse from Mill’s On Liberty (1859): “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” They reached past Mill to Sir William Blackstone, the eighteenth-century commentator on the common law whose Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69) formed part of the ideological bedrock of the American Revolution. Blackstone wrote (as Pitcairn reminded his early twentieth-century audiences), “The right of personal security consists in a person’s legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of his life, his limbs, his body, his health and his reputation.” So precious were the personal rights to life and limb, that the laws of England and America pardoned “even homicide, if committed in defense of them.” Compulsory vaccination—the only medical procedure required by the state—trampled upon these elemental liberties. The antivaccinationists found support for their beliefs in the fundamental law of their nation. As the New England freethinker George E. Macdonald commented, “The law under which [the vaccinators] operate should carry a clause providing that all sections of the Constitution guaranteeing the security of person or property are hereby repealed.”56
From alternative medicine, antivaccinationists