I just finished reading a biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, the guy who co-discovered natural selection. Seems that Wallace got himself wrapped up in several whacko causes, including Spiritualism. He also wrote and spoke against vaccination.
This sparked my interest, and I’d like to know more about the anti-vaccination movement of the 19th century. The biography I read mainly seemed to imply that they thought that vaccination would cause disease, but I’m not sure how that could be statistically supported. I googled around a bit, but mostly found screeds from modern-day anti-vaccination crusaders.
Can anyone give me a summary of their arguments? How do they differ (if at all) from the current vaccination opponents? Is there a great deal of continuity in the movement? Any good books or websites I could look into?
Here’s a paper looking at the anti-vaccination arguments in the 19th century, and again today. It doesn’t go into much detail, though, but you can check the footnotes.
And here’s an anti vaccination argument from 1911 (admittedly, 20th century, but I think it repeats earlier arguments). It somes from some sort of website that seems kind of conspiracy theory-ish, but as far as I know, the paper is accurate.
For Wallace in particular, here’s his work Vaccination a Delusion, which argues that smallpox vaccination doesn’t work in reducing cases of smallpox, and is dangerous to those vaccinated.
I read up on this subject a while ago for a debate on another board. It seems that opposition to the vaccination programmes (this may be UK specific) came mainly from the working classes who saw themselves being unfairly discriminated against. I think a famous quote from that period was “they might aswell brand us” (indeed Googling that phrase returns this: http://shm.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/13/1/45).
Of course, for some diseases there was already a method of innoculation being used and the mandatory vaccination programmes were lambasted by liberals, claiming that they reduced choice. (IIRC, this was especially true of smallpox, where the old method of innoculation involved using puss directly applied to a cut).
Bear in mind that this is from memory, so may not be entirely accurate.
I remember reading that some people objected to vaccination on religious grounds as well. The arguments were that being vaccinated against a disease meant that you had no faith in God’s protection and/or that you were denying the will of God-- meaning that if He decided to smite you will smallpox, smitten He intended you to be and to try to prevent it was sinfully subverting His plan. (Several sects still follow a similar viewpoint.)
There were similar objections to the use of anesthesia during childbirth. When Queen Victoria gave birth to her last child, she finally allowed doctors to use (IIRC) chlorform to dull the pain. She was quite pleased with the effect. Preachers, however, saw a defiance of God’s laws in its use: God decreed that women would bring forth children in pain and travail. To take away that pain was sinfully avoiding the punishment meeted out to all the Daughters of Eve. *Shirking, * if you will.
And, again, similar objections were made to birth control by Comstock and his ilk. To use contraception meant avoiding the consequences of sex, especially illicit sex.
I’ve argued that this unease and fear of displeasing the Allmighty with medical advances had a lot to do with technophobia and the fear that a way of life was slipping away caused in many people. Some were terrified that the changes they saw around them would spread so rampantly as to disrupt the entire social order and ethics of man.
I believe that the outcry against vaccination was part superstition, part religion, part technophobia, and partly classism. After all, outbreaks of disease were mainly confined to the urban lower classes who lived in squallid conditions. The wealthy often fled to the countryside during times of pestillence, thus reducing the number of their class which was infected-- and thus reducing the need for widespread vaccination.
Some believed that, literally, their righteousness would protect them-- that disease was a punishment sent from God for specific sins (sometimes not even the sin of the victim, but that of the parents of the victim.)
Perhaps the fear that these folks had was that this would be the final straw for God: that modern life so displeased Him that vaccinations would puch Him over the edge.
They meant it in a punitive way, not just risking having an inconvenient pregnancy. Having a child out of wedlock at the time, as you know, was social suicide. The idea that women might have illicit sex and avoid the righteous shaming of society was horrifying. Likewise sexually transmitted disease. Why, if women could avoid that consequence, men might accidently marry them assuming them to be virgins.
As with absitinance program advocates, birth control opponents seemed to believe that women were naturally whores, kept in check only by their fear of STDs and illegitimate children. Without these threats, women would run wild, fornicating gleefully.
Worse than that, for some, was the idea people would be fucking for the fun of it, not for the proper, joyless purpose of creating heirs. Remember, at one time doctors wrote with all apparent seriousness that women were, for the most part, mercifully untroubled by sexual passion. One weeps for his poor wife.
At the same time, some doctors were preforming clitoridectomies, in which women were surgically mutilated to remove disturbing tendancies toward sexual excitement. While during previous generations, female orgasm was thought to be necessary for conception, during the Victorian times that idea fell into disfavor. Rather, men were socially programmed to look for an angel of the household-- a spotless, aloof creature unsoiled by something as dirty as lust.
Of course, remember that not all men and women followed these roles. I’ve read diaries and letters of women who frankly enjoyed their marital relations. Queen Victoria was one of these. Her diary entry on the morning after her wedding contains many exclamation points, underlinings and all-caps.
The argument she used on this was another bible quote, from the part of Genesis where God takes a rib from Adam to create Eve: “and the Lord caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep…”. Thus proving that God approved of anesthesia!
Victoria used chloroform for her last two children-Prince Leopold, the Duke of Albany, and Princess Beatrice. Prior to the birth of Leopold, very few doctors would agree to use chloroform for births, citing the same “women should bring forth children in pain” argument.
However, once the Queen used it, it became more widely accepted, at least in Britain.
One wonders if another reason for the anti-vaccination feeling was perhaps due to the method-injecting a person with a small bit of a particular disease to cause immunity. I’m rereading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for about the fiftieth time. The story is set in the early 1900s (about 1900-1918) and one chapter sees the protagonist going to get vaccinated before she and her brother start school. It mentions that many of the immigrant parents were very much against the law-“putting dangerous germs into a healthy child’s body.” As the story is based on the author’s experiences growing up in Brooklyn prior to the first World War, perhaps that’s an accurate interpretation?
