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whom to vaccination in a particular condition of his health or body, would be cruel and inhuman in the last degree. We are not to be understood as holding that the statute was intended to be applied to such a case, or, if it was so intended, that the judiciary would not be competent to interfere and protect the health and life of the individual concerned.” The Massachusetts court had explicitly rejected this reading of its own state’s law. It seems that Williams’s emphasis on State v. Hay in his brief attracted Harlan’s notice. The justice defended his rendering of the harm avoidance principle with a noteworthy rule of statutory construction: “General terms should be so limited in their application as not to lead to injustice, oppression, or absurd consequence.”109

Of course, Henning Jacobson had been making precisely that argument since he first set foot in Judge McDaniel’s Cambridge courtroom more than two and a half years earlier. Unschooled in American legal traditions, he had tried to explain to the court his sincere belief, founded in his own family’s experience with vaccination and the stories he had heard from others, that the operation threatened his health. Justice Harlan, however, was unwilling to concede that Jacobson might himself fall under the novel standard of protection he had just outlined. “No such case is here presented,” Harlan declared, without foundation. “It is the case of an adult, who for aught that appears, was himself in perfect health and a fit subject of vaccination, and yet, while remaining in the community, refused to obey the statute” at a time when the people of Cambridge were “confessedly endangered by the presence of a dangerous disease.”110

Justice David J. Brewer and Justice Rufus Peckham, the Court’s two most conservative members, dissented from the decision without comment.

Pastor Henning Jacobson had reached the end of his legal odyssey. He would return one last time to the Middlesex County Superior Court and pay his $5 fine, perhaps only dimly aware that his case would become the most important legacy of the turn-of-the-century smallpox epidemics. Even in defeat, the minister had won some valuable constitutional safeguards for individual liberty and due process—if not for him, then for the rest of us.

The Jacobson ruling drew loud applause from the medical profession. The Wisconsin Medical Journal called it “a decision of very far-reaching significance.” Public health officers welcomed this vindication from the nation’s highest court. As one New York official said of the decision, “it has elevated our profession.” The Cambridge and Boston newspapers hailed the decision for resolving a question that had caused so much controversy in their cities. As the Boston Journal commented, “Thus falls the theory of the few who wilfully blind themselves to the enormous good accomplished by vaccination, that personal liberty is violated by the enforcing of a salutary and reasonable health regulation.” The New York Times relished the moment. “This will not end the discussion of vaccination as a measure against the one disease which it perfectly controls,” the Times declared, “but it should end the useful life of the societies of cranks formed to resist the operation of laws relative to vaccination. Their occupation is gone.” Once again, the Times underestimated the antivaccinationists.111

The antivaccinationists’ reactions to the decision were appropriately ambivalent. To be sure, some decried it as an unmitigated disgrace. The Providence, Rhode Island, bookseller Sidney S. Rider compared the decision to Dred Scott. “This Court once decided that a negro had no rights which a white man was bound to respect,” Rider seethed. “Is it going now to decide that a white man who abhors vaccination as a deadly poison has no rights which a doctor is bound to respect?” But many critics of compulsory vaccination recognized that the Jacobson litigation had in fact secured important gains for personal liberties—including the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s public condemnation of forcible vaccination