Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [165]
Born in rural Yllestad, Sweden, in 1856, he had immigrated to America with his family in 1869. The Jacobsons’ adopted country was in the throes of its post–Civil War Reconstruction and just entering the explosive period of growth that would make it the world’s most productive industrial economy by 1900. As a young man, Jacobson took out naturalization papers and became a U.S. citizen. He studied at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, an institution founded by Swedish Lutheran immigrants in 1860 to prepare young men for the ministry. Jacobson founded the college orchestra. He played the contrabass, anchoring the music with deep-pitched authority.4
Swedish Lutheranism was not a radical religious sect. It was the official state church of Sweden, the faith of the overwhelming majority of Jacobson’s countrymen who migrated to the United States during the peak decades of Swedish immigration after the Civil War. Jacobson received his ordination in Kansas, in the rural heartland of Swedish America. But his future lay in an eastern industrial city. The Church of Sweden Mission Board called him in 1892 to build the Augustana Lutheran Church in Cambridge. He conducted services in his native tongue and became a regular at the Boston docks, meeting newly arrived Swedes and taking them back to Cambridge, where he helped them find jobs and homes. He would remain pastor of the Cambridge church until his death in 1930.
Nothing in the conservative biblical doctrine of Swedish Lutheranism dictated defiance to vaccination, but Jacobson practiced a form of pietism that filled the daily details of life with religious significance. His brief to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court—written by his lawyers but submitted under his name—decried compulsory vaccination as an unconscionable state sacrament. “We have on our statute book,” it said, “a law that compels such a man to offer up his body to pollution and filth and disease; that compels him to submit to a barbarous ceremonial of blood-poisoning.”5
That reference to blood-poisoning held a literal meaning for Jacobson. Though antivaccinationism ran rife in the Swedish countryside, he had undergone vaccination as a child, in accordance with national law. Early childhood vaccination spread quickly in Sweden after 1800 and became compulsory in 1816—nearly forty years before Massachusetts enacted America’s first vaccination law. Sweden was an international public health success story, championed in the American medical literature. Smallpox killed 300,000 people in the country between 1750 and 1800, most of them children. Mortality levels fell sharply after the introduction of vaccination, and by 1900 the disease had virtually disappeared. But young Henning’s vaccination had gone badly. He experienced “great and extreme suffering” that instilled in him a lifelong horror of the practice. Henning and Hattie Jacobson knew all too well the perils of a nineteenth-century childhood. Married for eighteen years by the time a U.S. Census-taker knocked on their door in 1900, they had created five children together, but only three survived. One of Jacobson’s boys (he did not say which) suffered adverse effects from a childhood vaccination, convincing the minister that some hereditary condition in his family made vaccine a particular hazard for them. Jacobson’s belief that smallpox vaccine threatened his family’s existence seemed as deeply ingrained as his religious faith.6
Pastor Henning Jacobson, circa 1902. COURTESY OF THE EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH IN AMERICA
If Jacobson made an unlikely rabble-rouser, neither did the man who stood across his threshold that March day fit the part of the heartless bureaucrat. E. Edwin Spencer had a starkly different medical background and leadership style from his counterpart across the Charles River, Chairman Samuel Durgin of the Boston Board of Health. Unlike the