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What is Anti-Vaccinationism?
Anti-vaccinationism is opposition to vaccination. The anti-vaccinationist opposes vaccination for one or more reasons, e.g., belief that vaccination is unsafe, ineffective, oppressive or religiously intrusive. Vaccination is the intentional administration of a foreign material (vaccine) to produce immunity to (protection against) a disease. Vaccinationism is the belief that vaccination is safe and effective in producing immunity to disease and the very best way to prevent disease. (1)
The United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) experienced the rise, rigid enforcement, and modification of compulsory smallpox vaccination during the 19th century. The United States’ experience with smallpox vaccination has paralleled that of the United Kingdom, e.g., see “Who is Reverend Henning Jacobson?” and others, available elsewhere. (2-4) The astonishing plethora of historical works produced by British sanitarians, physicians, philosophers, scientists, religious leaders, writers, and government officials for and against smallpox vaccination, supplemented by American examples, provide breadth and depth for understanding the anti-vaccinationism phenomenon in modern Western history. (3-4)
In 19th century Dickensonian Britain, smallpox was a terrifying, disfiguring, and often fatal scourge on the people. Smallpox epidemics were so devastating, vaccination against smallpox, when originally suggested by Dr. Edward Jenner, was rapidly embraced by the State, becoming its first ever continuous health activity, according to British historian Royston Lambert. (5)
Forty-nine-year-old English country physician Edward Jenner (1749-1823), who lived in Berkeley, Gloucestershire (southwestern England) published his famous three treatises on smallpox vaccination between 1798 and 1800. (6-7) The Royal Society of Medicine had earlier elected him a Fellow in 1789 based on his discovery that the newly hatched cuckoo bird ejected newborn nestlings of its foster parents from the nest. The First Parliament of the United Kingdom (composed of members of the former Parliaments of the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland) awarded Dr. Jenner relatively large sums of money in 1802 and again in 1807 for his apparent demonstration that cowpox infection conferred immunity to smallpox. Several private bodies in London provided the poor with free vaccinations against smallpox. One of these entities, supported by the Royal College of Physicians, pressed Parliament to sponsor the further public use of the preventive method, i.e., smallpox vaccination. (8) In 1808, by sixty votes to five, Parliament set up the National Vaccine Establishment, staffed by medical doctors from the London Royal College of Physicians and the London Royal College of Surgeons and financed by public funds. This event, argues Lambert, is the “first direct connexion [sic] of government with vaccination and, indeed (except for quarantine and the medical services of the [military] Forces), the first continuous health activity of the state.” (8) How successful was the National Vaccine Establishment in realizing its mission? The Board of the National Vaccine Establishment proudly wrote in 1813, During the year 1811, the surgeons appointed by their authority to the nine stations in London, have vaccinated 3,148 persons, and have distributed 23,794 charges of vaccine lymph to the public. The number vaccinated this year rather exceeds that of the year 1810, and the demand for lymph has been often so great that it could not be immediately supplied. They have the great satisfaction in stating, that, since the commencement of this establishment, not a single instance of the accession of smallpox, after vaccination, has occurred to any of the vaccinating surgeons of the nine stations…. Through the different counties of England, the practice of vaccination is becoming general, and the small-pox is gradually declining; and even in London, where the opposition to the new inoculation has been most violent [emphasis added], it is prevailing, and its salutary effects are becoming daily more evident. At present, by the best estimate we are able to make, it appears that nearly two-thirds of the children annually born in the metropolis, are vaccinated either by charitable institutions or private practitioners; and that the number of deaths by small-pox has proportionally decreased. Previous to the discovery of vaccination, the average number of deaths by smallpox within the bills of mortality, was 2,000 annually; whereas, in the last year, only 751 persons have died of that disease, although the increase of population within the last ten years has been 133,139. (9) The National Vaccine Establishment concentrated on providing free supplies of vaccine lymph on a large scale to medical and non-medical vaccinators all over the country, notes Lambert. (8) Despite the 1813 glowing report issued by the Board (above), over time the smallpox vaccination initiative did not meet expectations: smallpox epidemics still occurred. For example, the smallpox epidemic of 1837-1840 killed an average of 12,000 people per year. (10) The inability of the 1808 government smallpox vaccination initiative to meet expectations prompted the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association (which later became the British Medical Association) to convene a committee in 1838 to inquire why. The committee’s report, adopted by the Association, said that non-medical vaccinators were dangerously inoculating people (note here the word “inoculating”). The committee recommended that the state needed to provide in a direct manner “universal and gratuitous vaccination.” In other words, the National Vaccine Establishment’s role needed strengthening and expansion beyond solely functioning as a lymph supplier. The United Kingdom needed to create a comprehensive universal preventive system whose mission was to produce immunity to smallpox of all British people. The committee importantly distinguished between “inoculation” and “vaccination.” Before Jenner’s introduction of vaccination in 1798, practitioners intentionally inoculated (deposited) actual smallpox matter into the skin of recipients. For example, American Puritan minister Cotton Mather (1663-1728) used bits of lint dipped in pox matter, which he inserted into cuts made in the skin of the arm. After twenty-four hours, he withdrew the lint and dressed the wounds with warm cabbage leaves. On the seventh day after the inoculation, the patient sickened with smallpox and pustules appeared, sometimes few, sometimes hundreds. (11)
This process of inoculation also went by the name of “variolation.” Intradermal inoculation of a suitably prepared patient at a chosen time usually resulted in a less severe smallpox eruption, because variolators introduced the smallpox virus through the skin, rather than through the respiratory tract, or so the rationale goes. In some countries, such as India, smallpox scab material was inserted up the nose, so the intradermal route was by no means universal in the pre-vaccination days. Baxby notes that inoculation/variolation differ from vaccination in three important respects: higher mortality, greater communicability, and the production of a generalized eruption. (7) Variolation had been practiced for centuries as there was no alternative. Lord Landsowne followed up on the report produced by the vaccination committee of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association. Lambert writes, When, on March 10, 1840, Lord Landsowne presented his petition to the House of Lords, Lord Ellenborough suggested obtaining legislation to fulfil [sic] its objects, and on March 12th promptly introduced a Private Bill which passed through Parliament with the Government’s approval. The Act made it imperative upon all Boards of Guardians in England and Wales to contract with practitioners and to provide free vaccination to all-comers, gave the central Poor Law Commission (as it then was) “most stringent control,” and banned inoculation [variolation]. (8) (Emphasis added) The Boards of Guardians and the Poor Law Commission previously had dealt exclusively with the needs of poor people. Thus, explains Lambert, “many people deprecated the connexion of this health service [smallpox vaccination] with the destitution authority.” However, no other authority (besides the Poor Law Commission) then existed to make the Act work. (10) “In 1841 the non-pauperism nature of free public vaccination was explicitly reaffirmed by Act. Thus a free, nationwide and state-provided system now existed, brought into being, it should be noted, principally by informed medical pressure and by Private Members’ legislation,” notes Lambert. (10) The state-provided system was not, at this point, compulsory; rather, it was voluntary. For the next decade, the initiative to provide free smallpox vaccination to the masses achieved some success. Some 30% of United Kingdom citizens, mostly middle class, still preferred to receive their smallpox vaccinations from their private doctors, rather than from government-contracted vaccinators. (10) The incidence of smallpox still remained high, however, with deaths from it stabilizing at around 5,000 people per year in spite of the expanded government involvement in smallpox control. Thus, another private body—the Epidemiological Society of London—formed in 1850 to determine why smallpox still remained a scourge. A surgeon named John Simon (1816-1904) (subsequently Sir John Simon), who was later to become the most senior medical person in the government of the United Kingdom, sat on the Epidemiological Society of London’s council, but its leading light was Edward Cator Seaton (1815-1880), who was deeply interested in and knowledgeable about all facets of smallpox vaccination. (12-13) Dr. Seaton was fanatical about reaching a state of universal smallpox vaccination in the United Kingdom. Dr. Seaton, as secretary of the Epidemiological Society of London’s vaccination committee, organized an investigation that produced a “startling, authoritative condemnation of the inadequacies of the state of affairs.” The Committee called for “a general national system” with “compulsory infant vaccination, an improved registration system, central medical supervision and local prosecuting officers.” (10) Lord Lyttleton responded by introducing a Private Bill that he developed in consultation with the Society’s vaccination committee. Parliament was so impressed with Lord Lyttleton’s “extraordinary piece of legislation” that it passed “through all of its stages without even a division and with but little discussion.” (10)
The result of Lyttleton’s Private Bill was the seminal Vaccination Act of 1853, which made vaccination compulsory upon all infants born in England and Wales within three or four months of birth, imposed penalties on parents who failed to have their children so vaccinated, fixed minimum fees to be paid by Guardians to the public vaccinators, instructed the local Registrars to notify parents of the law and the local vaccinators to inform Registrars of successful performance. (13) Lambert’s analysis of the new government compulsory smallpox vaccination mandate follows: Somewhat indifferently, Parliament had elaborated the new service and created a stringent, universal and utterly novel interference with individual liberty. There is no other case in English history before or since of a prophylactic method being thus enforced upon every newborn child, and thereby, ultimately on the whole civilian population. It stands, in the words of an anti-vaccinationist, as “the first [and only] direct aggression upon the person of the subject in medical matters…attempted in these kingdoms.” As in 1840, it had taken organized medical pressure, wielding incontestable evidence, and a Private Member’s Bill, to attain this result. Once more, the Government itself neither inquired nor legislated on the matter, Parliament was passive, and public opinion indifferent or hostile. Throughout, the development had been cyclical. The failure of each previous stage of state interference, provided and publicized by expert report, paved the way for yet a further and more effective intrusion—we recognize the administrative process again. By 1853, the logic of the tentative step of 1808 was fulfilled and the third phase in the development of a free, compulsory health service now opened. (14) The 1853 Vaccination Act passed by Parliament caused an outcry among at least eight British publics (more below). So great was the reaction by the mid-1850s that Dr. John Simon, who was by then chief of the Medical Department he had created within the kingdom’s Privy Council, and his counselor Edward Seaton, began to investigate complaints about the quality of the vaccine. Simon declared, “Hitherto, no security had been taken that the vaccination, so universally offered and so extensively enforced, should be useful or even harmless to the recipient.” (15) Based on what he found, Simon proceeded to reshape the system of vaccine (lymph) supply. The old National Vaccine Board which had distributed free lymph gathered from its London vaccinating stations, found its sources dwindling progressively as the Poor Law authorities took over the task of public vaccination. In an emergency, the Board might not have enough vaccine to meet the widespread demands for preserved lymph. So, late in 1858, Simon decided to link the Board to the state system by making certain public stations in large towns the contributors to the central vaccine pool. As Simon characteristically insisted on “very strict scrupulousness—almost fastidiousness” in everything concerning this compulsory medical service, the fifteen lymph-contributing stations were “very carefully chosen” and “vigilantly superintended.” Empirically, in the yearly visitation of the lymph stations, the first small, but regular, cycle of departmental inspection came into being. Though Simon and Seaton always maintained that vaccination directly from arm to arm was more effective than the use of preserved lymph, their reforms had secured an elastic and adequate supply of high-grade vaccine for the coming decade. And in 1861 the Medical Department of the Council extinguished the Vaccine Board altogether. (15) Simon also investigated the quality of the vaccinators, finding that “no medical school provided either training or certification in the subject, and the Epidemiological Society had gathered conclusive evidence of the incredible and dangerous laxity and variety of performance by the public vaccinators. Impelled by a sense of moral and medical obligation to the vulnerable public, and by the expert’s concern for superlative standards, Seaton and Simon were determined to raise and render uniform the quality of public vaccination.” (16) The Privy Council began to operate its own vaccination education and qualification system, issuing certificates to vaccinators who had successfully completed the program. By January 1860, nobody could be a public vaccinator unless he possessed the Privy Council’s certificate, as well as qualifications in both medicine and surgery.
Meanwhile, pro-vaccinationists discovered to their dismay that the Vaccination Act of 1853 had imposed a fine “on any parent or guardian who failed to have a child vaccinated within three months of birth; but experience revealed a grave defect in the law,” wrote William White, the British historian of the anti-vaccinationist movement. There was no provision for the prosecution of defaulters; and those who had no faith invaccination, or accounted it a nuisance, enjoyed immunity without serious annoyance.” (17) After years of dickering on how to force parents to comply with the law requiring vaccination of their children, Parliament passed a more stringent bill in 1867 that fined parents every year (up to age 14 years of each child) until they complied with the vaccination law. The infamous Section 31 read as follows: If any Registrar, or any Officer appointed by the Guardians to enforce the provisions of this Act, shall give information in writing to a Justice of the Peace, that he has reason to believe that any child under the age of 14 years, being within the Union or Parish for which the informant acts, has not been successfully vaccinated, and that he has given notice to the parent or person having the custody of such child to procure its being vaccinated, and that this notice has been disregarded, the Justice may summon and upon the appearance, if the Justice shall find, after such examination as he shall deem necessary, that the child has not been vaccinated, nor has already had the Smallpox, he may, if he see fit, make an order under his hand and seal directing such child to be vaccinated within a certain time; and if, at the expiration of such time, the child shall not have been so vaccinated…the person upon whom such as order shall have been made shall be proceeded against summarily, and, unless, he can show some reasonable ground for his omission to carry the order into effect, shall be liable to a penalty not exceeding [a certain amount]. (18) William White declared that Section 31 of the Act of 1867 implied the doom of vaccination. “It was bad enough to fine a parent for refusing to vaccinate his child; it was, however, a circumscribed annoyance; but to make of refusal a continuous offence until a child attained the age of fourteen was to set up a cause of quarrel that had to be fought out.” (19) White continued: Slavery in the United States is abolished, but slavery might have endured to this day had the Southerners been more forbearing; but, in the arrogance of their power, they imposed on the Union the Fugitive Slave Law, compelling the people of the North to surrender runaway negroes. This triumph of the slaveholders determined the fate of slavery. In like manner the arrogance of the vaccinators overcame their prudence. Resolved to subdue resistance to their rite, they drove resistance to extremity, and set up an irreducible insurrection. As a medical prescription accepted at discretion, vaccination might have survived unquestioned and paid for; but its transition into an aggressive statute removed it from the safe realm of professional mystery into the jurisdiction of common sense, common observation, and every man’s business. (19) In 1885, a Royal Commission convened and reported out in 1892. (20) It endorsed the efficacy and safety of vaccination against smallpox. However, one of its recommendations concerned “whether any alterations should be made in the arrangements and proceedings for securing the performance of vaccinations, and, in particular, in those provisions of the Vaccination Acts with respect to prosecutions for non-compliance with the Law.” The Commission recommended that “conscientious objectors are to be allowed to make a declaration before a magistrate; this would be still more effective were it necessary to go before the magistrate in open court.” (20) In 1898, Parliament passed a new vaccination law, which reinforced the need for compulsory vaccination against smallpox and provided incredible detail on how the state would work to enforce compulsory vaccination. However, the new Act removed cumulative monetary penalties and permitted parents to file conscientious objection to vaccination before a magistrate. (21) Vaccination against smallpox made compulsory by the State precipitated a backlash among many groups of people for many different reasons, as described below. Sanitarians, such as Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale, championed the creation of a central public health administration that directed local authorities in the provision of drains, sewers, street cleaning and the environmental regulation of housing, nuisances and offensive trades. Sanitarians believed vaccination was wasteful and inefficient in comparison to the benefits of sanitation improvements. Chadwick, for example, who shared with philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) a “utilitarian hatred of waste, a love of efficiency, and a belief in the social necessity and potentiality of legislative and administrative intervention,” believed filth was the major cause of preventable illness. Removal of filth would produce health. It was that easy. (22)
In 1842, Chadwick produced one of the most important and most widely read social documents of the 19th century--Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population—in which he wrote, That the various forms of epidemic, endemic, and other disease caused, or aggravated, or propagated chiefly amongst the labouring classes by atmospheric impurities produced by decomposing animal and vegetable substances, by damp and filth, and close and overcrowded dwellings prevail amongst the population in every part of the kingdom, whether dwelling in separate houses, in rural villages, in small towns, in the larger towns — as they have been found to prevail in the lowest districts of the metropolis. That such disease, wherever its attacks are frequent, is always found in connexion with the physical circumstances above specified, and that where those circumstances are removed by drainage, proper cleansing, better ventilation, and other means of diminishing atmospheric impurity, the frequency and intensity of such disease is abated; and where the removal of the noxious agencies appears to be complete, such disease almost entirely disappears. (23-24) Chadwick obtained government power and funding for his sanitary endeavors, but not for vaccination programs. His report noted above formed the basis for the 1848 Public Health Act, which established a Central Board of Health, gave responsibility for water supplies and sewerage and drainage, amongst other things, to corporations (towns), and granted permission to towns that did not have corporation status to create a Local Board of Health. The Act also enabled 1) the levying of taxes locally to pay for the improvements and 2) the Central Board of Health to impose a Local Board of Health where the death rate exceeded 23 in every 1000 in a given corporation. Chadwick characteristically shunned physician input in most of his sanitary initiatives and indeed, very few physicians could claim any real sanitary experience. Not everyone agreed, however, that physicians lacked value in affairs concerning the public’s health. When cleaning up filthy cities took longer than expected and disease was thus not eradicated as swiftly as desired, non-sanitarians pushed for physician input to help guide government health initiatives. As a result, Dr. John Simon was elected October 19, 1848, as only the second Medical Officer of Health (London) ever in the British Isles; Dr. W.H. Duncan preceded him as the Medical Officer of Health of Liverpool in 1847, the first ever Medical Officer in the United Kingdom. (25) Anti-contagionists were anti-vaccinationists because they believed vaccination was a “foul poisoning of the blood with contaminated material [contagion], which could provide no protection from a disease caused by effluvia arising from decaying organic matter.” (1) Anti-contagionists, like sanitarians, believed the miasmatic theory of disease (bad air in the environment causes disease), but, unlike sanitarians, believed vaccination was extremely efficient in its ability to cause, not prevent, disease. They abhorred the intentional placement of what they saw as filthy material (smallpox- or cowpox-containing lymph) into someone’s skin. John Gibbs, an articulate and persuasive anti-vaccinationist and founder of the hydrotherapy movement who was born in Ireland in 1811 (more below) wrote that many parents and others abhorred vaccination because they do not believe that it affords an efficient and assured protection against the invasion of smallpox: they have a natural disgust of transferring to the veins of their children a loathsome virus derived from the blood of a diseased brute [a cow] and transmitted through they know not how many unhealthy mediums [i.e., by the arm-to-arm method]: they have a dread, a conviction, that other filthy diseases, tending to embitter and shorten life, are frequently transmitted through and by the vaccine virus [e.g., syphilis]. (26) Probably the most vocal anti-contagionist was Scotsman Dr. Charles Creighton (1847-1927). He wrote a withering diatribe against Edward Jenner, titled Jenner and Vaccination, calling Jenner an “imposter” and “shuffler” who had “duped Parliament and the scientific and medical worlds into believing in his mythical method.” (1, 27) Creighton and others shared their knowledge of experiences in which syphilis in the lymph was invaccinated during the act of vaccination against smallpox. For example, William White wrote, The great question before the Committee…is whether vaccine poison can contain within itself syphilitic or any other poison. That question…[Dr.] Jonathan Hutchinson [1828-1913, eminent English surgeon, dermatologist, venereologist and pathologist whose name is attached to “Hutchinson’s teeth,” indicating congenital syphilis], an expert in syphilis, determined. He had been called to examine thirteen persons, mostly young adults, engaged in a London shop, who had been revaccinated by order of their employer during the prevalent smallpox panic. The vaccinifer was “a fine, full-grown, healthy child,” yet it conveyed syphilis, beyond mistake, to 11 of the 13 vaccinated. Mr. Hutchinson allowed that the vaccinator was not to be blamed for the disaster saying, “I very much doubt whether it could have been avoided by inspection. The child looked healthy, and it had passed at the Vaccine Station as healthy.” Having similar cases within his experience, and convinced “that syphilis can be communicated in the act of vaccination,” Mr. Hutchinson was asked by Mr. Candlish whether he was aware that the medical profession in general denied the possibility. He replied, “I am not aware that the authorities on the subject deny it; I believe that several of them hold it very clearly; I am aware that the general opinion of the profession is perhaps opposed to it, but not the opinion of those who have carefully investigated the question. To reduce the effect of testimony so injurious to vaccination, it was attempted to make out that the danger was limited to virus tainted with blood; and although Mr. Hutchinson conceded that blood might be the medium of transmission, it was undecided. “It is not a subject on which I should like to infer anything…” Subsequent experience has shown that with blood or without blood, syphilis may be invaccinated. Still, Mr. Hutchinson, as an advocate of vaccination, and of its compulsory infliction, “considering it of the utmost necessity and importance,” conceded that the risk was infinitesimal; but (as was remarked at the time) unless the diffusion of syphilis were infinitesimal, there was no ground for the assumption of an infinitesimal risk. As Mr. Hutchinson admitted, “I believe there are cases of latent Syphilis which cannot be detected by any medical man, unless he examines into the history of the child as well as its appearance.” (28) Dr. Creighton and most other anti-contagionists did not subscribe to the notion that individual diseases were caused by individual etiologies (later determined to be bacteria and other microorganisms). However, highly-respected Dr. Edgar M. Crookshank (1858-1928), a well-trained physician and professor of bacteriology at King’s College London, was an anti-contagionist who did subscribe to the germ theory of disease. Dr. Crookshank noticed that in spite of compulsory Jennerian vaccination in the United Kingdom, devastating smallpox epidemics persisted. He questioned Jenner’s claim that the use of cowpox immunized recipients against smallpox. In 1889 he published his two-volume corpus titled A History and Pathology of Vaccination: A Critical Inquiry (29) in which he showed that the “allegedly prophylactic material had itself been the source of a separate disease, vaccinia, and was responsible for the secondary transmission of syphilis.” (1) In other words, he believed that vaccination against smallpox, as then practiced, was unsafe and inefficacious. The storm of controversy he engendered led to his quitting King’s College for the veterinary profession. Beginning in the 18th century, the spread of inoculation concerned many people of various religious faiths who believed inoculation and later vaccination interfered with “the ways of Providence.” (1) John Gibbs published a manifesto in reaction to passage of the Act of 1853 noted above, in which he wrote that people “have a conscientious conviction that voluntarily to propagate disease is to fly in the face of God and to violate that precept which says “Do thyself no harm.” Are such scruples entitled to no respect?” Many religious people believed that to be vaccinated was to change the natural course that God wanted for people. (2) Dr. Robert Watt from Glasgow and others suggested that removing smallpox from the community simply redistributed mortality amongst other diseases, maintaining a regular, almost fixed level of disease in general. (30) Gibbs argued that vaccination was responsible for an increase in mortality due to measles, whooping cough, scarlatina, and consumption. (1) When Parliament made vaccination against smallpox compulsory for newborns and infants in 1853, anti-statists (people opposed to expanding the role of the state) became enraged. For example, English philosopher-sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) used vaccination to exemplify his belief in the folly of increasing the roles of the state. (1,31) He wrote: The measures enjoined by the Vaccination Act…were to have exterminated smallpox; but the Registrar General’s reports show that the deaths from smallpox have been increasing. Yet scarcely a doubt seems to arise respecting the competency of legislators to do what they propose. From the times when they tried to fix the value of money down to our own day, when they have just abandoned the attempt to regulate the price of corn, statesmen have been undertaking all kinds of things, from prescribing the cut of boot-toes, up to preparing people for Heaven; and have been constantly failing.…[T]he belief that Boards of Health, and the like, will never effect what is hoped, needs not wholly rest either on abstract considerations, or on our experience of State-instrumentalities in general. We have one of these organizations at work, and, as far as may be at present judged, it has done anything but answer people’s expectations. (32) Professor F. W. Newman (1805-1897) asserted in his book The Coming Revolution (1882) that “modern government had placed the ‘goddess of EXPEDIENCY’ above a philosophy of justice. Justice had been left without a champion, since not only collectivist Toryism, but Benthamites, Liberals, and Radicals as well, all subscribed to the doctrine of expediency.” Newman expressed his moral outrage at the “presumptuous paternalism of the expedient State” in compelling vaccination. (1) Scientist William Hume-Rothery (1899-1968) agreed with Professor Newman, saying that “an overprotective State undermined individual responsibility, ‘and it is only by the voluntary and judicious exercise of their own powers that the people can progress; it is clear so far as the State does for them…the duties which are within their own sphere and competence, to that extent it limits and retards their development. On this basis, he suggested, ‘if even vaccination were the greatest blessing in existence it would not be the duty of the State to enforce it,’ [emphasis added] for each must be free to choose for himself. And ‘as to their children: If good parents may not do what they conscientiously believe is best for them…then there would be an end to civil and religious liberty.’” (1) Hume-Rothery was referring to the British government’s prosecution of parents who held the deep conviction that vaccination endangered their children’s health. (1) Between 1878 and 1895, 3,000 parents accumulated who were awaiting prosecution for resisting smallpox vaccination of their children. (1) Dr. John Simon’s well-intentioned effort to bring the entire Board of Health apparatus for enforcing compulsory smallpox vaccination under medical control, as described above, another backlash let loose against physicians. For example, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), Charles Darwin’s nemesis, “gave evidence to the Royal Commission in 1889, denouncing the insidious growth of the power of the medical profession in vaccinating the public. He wrote in his 1898 treatise Vaccination a Delusion: Its Penal Enforcement a Crime, the following: Before proceeding to adduce the conclusive evidence that now exists of the failure of vaccination, a few preliminary misconceptions must be dealt with. One of these is, that as vaccination is a surgical operation to guard against a special disease, medical men can alone judge of its value. But the fact is the very reverse, for several reasons. - In the first place, they are interested parties, not merely in a pecuniary sense, but as affecting the prestige of the whole profession. In no other case should we allow interested persons to decide an important matter. Whether iron ships are safer than wooden ones is not decided by ironmasters or by shipbuilders, but by the experience of sailors and by the statistics of loss. In the administration of medicine or any other remedy for a disease, the conditions are different. The doctor applies the remedy and watches the result, and if he has a large practice he thereby obtains knowledge and experience which no other persons possess. But in the case of vaccination, and especially in the case of public vaccinators, the doctor does not see the result except by accident. Those who get small-pox go to the hospitals, or are treated by other medical men, or may have left the district, and the relation between the vaccination and the attack of small-pox can only be discovered by the accurate registration of all the cases and deaths, with the facts as to vaccination or revaccination. When these facts are accurately registered, to determine what they teach is not the business of a doctor but of a statistician, and there is much evidence to show that doctors are bad statisticians, and have a special faculty for misstating figures. This allegation is so grave and so fundamental to the question at issue, that a few facts must be given in support of it. (33) Practitioners of spiritualism, homeopathy, natural healing, and hydropathy were often anti-vaccinationists. They competed directly with vaccinators. (1) Around 1890, the German physician and bacteriologist Dr. Robert Koch articulated the germ theory of disease, which said that microorganisms caused many diseases. By isolating people with active disease or quarantining people who had been exposed to people with active disease, an epidemic could be mitigated or even prevented. Why? The infectious microorganisms would remain sequestered with the infected person. Some British observers noted with interest that an efficient and effective notification and isolation system could achieve the same outcomes as the more invasive approach of universal vaccination. (1)
Many anti-vaccinationists simultaneously espoused more than one of the above anti-vaccinationist belief systems. For example, John Gibbs said: The partisans of compulsory vaccination cast away every gentlemanly feeling, disregard every principle of justice, violate the spirit of freedom, outrage the precepts of Christianity, trample upon common sense, betray their own rights and dearest interests….[while anti-vaccinationists] do not believe [vaccination] affords an efficient and assured protection against the invasion of smallpox: they have a natural disgust of transferring into the veins of their children…(26) American Swedish Lutheran Minister Henning Jacobson (1856-1930), the most famous opponent of vaccination in United States history as described elsewhere, told the magistrate that he and his son had sustained injury from earlier smallpox vaccinations. (2) He also said compulsory vaccination violated the liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction as laid out in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. His lawyers, whose briefs burst with colorful language and religious allusion, claimed that compulsory vaccination was a “greater outrage than the scalping of a living victim by an Indian savage or the tattooing of a captive of a South Sea Islander.” They ended their brief by proclaiming that, “here—in Massachusetts…a law complies a man to offer up his body to pollution and filth and disease; that compels him to submit to the barbarous ceremonial of blood-poisoning and virtually to say to the sick calf, ‘Thou art my saviour: in thee do I trust,’ and to bear ever after on his defiled body literally and truly the MARK OF THE BEAST.” (2)
Smallpox was a horrific scourge in 19th century Great Britain, which prompted British Parliament to engage in schemes to eradicate the disease through universal vaccination. Vaccination was the procedure suggested by Dr. Edward Jenner in which cowpox lymph replaced actual smallpox lymph previously used in variolation/inoculation procedures. Anti-vaccinationism flared in reaction to State compulsory vaccination against smallpox enacted by well meaning but zealous physicians and elected officials in Great Britain beginning with the Parliamentary Vaccination Act of 1853. Anti-vaccinationists professed varied reasons for their belief that vaccination was harmful and/or undesirable. Parliament eventually responded in 1893 to their concerns by inserting a clause for conscientious objection to vaccination, but made objectors plead their cases individually before a magistrate. The penalty for refusing compliance with the vaccination law was a fine. Vaccinators did not strap down people and forcibly vaccinate them by order of the State, to the best of this writer’s knowledge. Notes:
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