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Smallpox Anti-Vaccination Movement

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years ago

 Smallpox Anti-Vaccination Movement

 

 

 

 

Caption:

"My little Boy, Sir, died when he was only Two Months old, just after he

had been Vaccinated."  "How very sad!  Had he been Baptised?"

"Yes, Sir; but it was the Vaccination as carried him off, Sir!"

 

 

From Punch, September 19, 1891

 

 

 

 

              Commentary on the Text

 

 

 

By the time this political cartoon appeared in Punch in 1891 the smallpox vaccine had already been in use for over a hundred years and had been regulated by the government for over fifty. However the nineteenth century marked a significant change in how medicine was practiced in England: “Regular medicine expanded its mandate and sought increasingly to provide treatment to many more people by way of the general practitioner” (Durbach 14). With the advent of the Poor Law in 1834, there was a movement to provide medical relief to the lower and working classes.  However, this medical relief was often administered in a humiliating manner that shamed and punished those it intended to serve (Durbach 16). This new approach to alleviating poverty created even more class tension, an issue that became especially pressing with the introduction of the mandatory smallpox vaccination in 1853 with the Compulsory Vaccination Act. This new legislation required parents to vaccinate their children before the age of three months. Parents who refused to do so were fined (Lambert 3). The rationale behind this law (and subsequent vaccination laws) held that the public, especially the working class, harbored dangerous diseases because they lived in unsanitary conditions. Previously, in the 1840s, the government had offered free and voluntary vaccinations targeted at the poor. This effort failed when people, wary of the effects of the vaccination, refused it. Thus, the Compulsory Vaccination Act was passed and with it was born a strong anti-vaccination movement.

The movement was nation-wide, although it found the strongest support in the working class regions and neighborhoods. The journeyman laborers, artisans, and factory workers that were more likely to use public facilities suffered the indignities of being tracked or punished by the local authorities for avoiding the vaccination. They were stereotyped as more likely to be “apathetic, indifferent and neglectful parents” whose children needed protection through government intervention (Durbach 23). Although the law only mandated that children receive the vaccination, employers could demand that employees also be vaccinated. After a smallpox outbreak in Sheffield in 1887 thousands of adults were vaccinated or revaccinated under the threat of losing their jobs if they did not comply (Durbach 92).

Although the anti-vaccination advocates acknowledged that smallpox was a dangerous, legitimate threat to public health, they refused to accept vaccination as a safe, sanitary and humane alternative to the disease itself. Through their protests, anti-vaccinators “maintained that vaccination caused indescribable pain and suffering and terribly disfigured the bodies of its victims” (Durbach 114). Stories of infants dying from flesh-destroying infections as a result of the vaccine were rampant. Pro-vaccinators argued that the horrors of smallpox were worse and more pressing than the adverse effects of a few poorly taken vaccinations and urged parents to choose the vaccination over the possibility of contracting the deadly disease. The anti-vaccinators constantly referred to the new Romantic idea of the child as an innocent and pure being, created perfectly by God and with inherent rights and value. They argued that vaccination literally injected “demons and ghouls” into the body and damaged children not only physically, by leaving an obvious scar, but also spiritually tainted them (Durbach 119).

The physical damage wreaked by the vaccine, coupled with a growing distrust of the medical community by the lower classes, led many parents to question the true nature of the vaccine and the legislation requiring it. Medical doctors were accused of injecting impure strains of the vaccine lymph (or not giving parents a choice between calf lymph and human lymph, drawn from subjects who had survived the vaccine) because they were being paid by the government to do so and had little investment in the success or failure of the vaccine in an individual; they were just performing their government-assigned job. Members of the lower class also feared that their children were being used as test-subjects in medical experiments and that inherent racism and classism was driving the administration of the vaccines. Blood contamination between different races (through the use of human lymph) was a major concern, and parents of non-white children worried that the vaccine would not work on their children and lead to disastrous ends (Durbach 135).

Although widely unpopular, the vaccine was effective in reducing the number of deaths from smallpox; in children under the age of five, the number of deaths dropped from 1514 per million in 1848-54 to 50 per million in 1885-94 (Humphreys 510). However, between the years 1881-89 half of all deaths associated with the smallpox vaccination were caused by blood poisoning or erysipelas (as a result of vaccinating children). In 1891, the year the political cartoon appeared in Punch, the Royal Commission, the group responsible for investigating claims regarding vaccination deaths in infants, reported on the number of deaths. Of 43 deaths, 36 were infants of mechanics, artisans, laborers or the illegitimate children of domestic servants, four were children of shopkeepers and shop assistants, two were children of commercial clerks and one was the child of a farmer. The Royal Commission said that these vaccination deaths were limited to the lower class because of neglect, lack of cleanliness, and the filthy surroundings of the infant (Humphreys 531).

 

 

Commentary by Naseera A.

18 March 2008

 

The first thing that this political cartoon brings to mind is the anti-vaccination movement that is happening today due to the association of the MMR vaccine with a rise in autism, the diagnosis of which, not coincidentally, occurs at the age the MMR vaccination is given.  Just as this political cartoon in Punch seems to suggest that the anti-vaccination sentiments of that day can be attributed to a muddling of cause and effect, the reason for the anti-vaccination sentiments of today also seems to be able to be attributed to faulty cause-and-effect reasoning.  Therefore, although this cartoon is over a hundred years old, it seems to be remarkably relevant to today’s society.  However, as the research by the editors of this page reveals, there was a deeper issue involved in the anti-vaccination movement of 1891 that does not appear to be present in the similar movement today: the class struggle and division that pervaded nineteenth-century England.  I think that, due to the discrimination towards the lower class that seems to have been rampant in England during that time, they had reason to be wary of the vaccination administered by the medical community, especially if it was “administered in a humiliating manner that shamed and punished those it intended to serve.”  Also, I wonder if their worry that their children were being used as test subjects was not far off from the truth.  Finally, even though the anti-vaccination movement of today might not be linked to class tension, there does still seem to be a disparity in the quality of medical services overall among class and racial divides, which makes the issues brought up by the political cartoon on the smallpox anti-vaccination movement still relevant today.        

 

 

 

 

 

 

                Works Cited

 

 

Please be sure to cite reference works, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, scholarly articles, other 19th century sources, and other websites that you used in preparing this page.  In particular, it is extremely important to use quotation marks when copying material directly from another source, to provide a parenthetical citation to the source and relevant page number, and to include that source here.  If you do not know how/when to decide what to cite or how to format citations in MLA Style, please consult your instructor. [Please retain these directions.]

 

 

Durbach, Nadja. Bodily Matters: The Anti-vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

 

Humphreys, Noel A. “English Vaccination and Small-Pox Statistics; with Special Reference to the Report of the Royal Commission, and to Recent Small-Pox Epidemics”. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. 60:3 (1897) 503-551.

 

Lambert, R. J. “A Victorian National Health Service: State Vaccination 1855-71”. The Historical Journal. 5:1 (1962) 1-18.

 

 

                For Additional Reading

 

This is the place to add bibliographic information for print OR online sources that usefully supplement your chosen text.  Please format entries for print sources in MLA style.  Please format links to websites using brief titles (e.g. The Charles Dickens Page) followed by a one-two sentence description of the contents of the site.  [For the benefit of future users, please do not delete these directions.]

 

 

Duncan, S.R., Susan Scott and C. J. Duncan. “Smallpox Epidemics in Cities in Britain”. Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 25:2 (1994) 255-271.

 

--- “The Dynamics of Smallpox Epidemics in Britain, 1550-1800”. Demography. 30:3 (1993) 405-423.

 

Huth, Edward. “Quantitative Evidence for Judgments on the Efficacy of Inoculation for the Prevention of Smallpox: England and New England in the 1700’s”. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 99.5 (2006) 262-266.

 

Mercer, A. J. “Smallpox and Epidemiological-Demographic Change in Europe: The Role of Vaccination”. Population Studies. 39:2 (1985) 287-307.

 

Milnes, Alfred. “Statistics of Small-Pox and Vaccination, with Special Reference to Age-Incidence, Sex-Incidence, and Sanitation”. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. 60:3 (1897) 552-612.

 

Newsom Kerr, Matthew L. Fevered Metropolis: Epidemic Disease and Isolation in Victorian London. Diss. University of Southern California, 2007. Proquest Digital Dissertations. Proquest. Western Libraries, Bellingham, WA. 14 Feb. 2008. <http://www.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/>

 

Winslow, E. A. “The Case for Vaccination”. Science. 18:447 (1903) 101-107.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                Project Group Members

 

Member Name

University

Course

 Andria Fenner  Western Washington University  Love and Money in the 19th Century British Novel
 Emily Freece  Western Washington University  Love and Money in the 19th Century British Novel
 Amanda Ferenchak  Western Washington University  Love and Money in the 19th Century British Novel
     
     

 

 

             

 

 

     Project Completed: Winter 2008

 

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Use this chat room to facilitate collaboration if you are working on this project from multiple locations. [Please don't delete these directions.]

 

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Comments (3)

Anonymous said

at 8:21 am on Apr 3, 2008

4/3/08
I like this comic a lot. Not only does it show the inherent classism of the age, but it shows the unethical behavior that not only government but doctors took to see if things worked. While it was true that lower class people lived in squalor, the government solution was simply to vaccinate, not actually fix the problem by giving people better housing, wages, etc. The idea that all the upper class wanted was for the dirty, subhuman people of the lower classes was to make sure they won't spread disease, but like their attitudes in their colonies, they didn't really promote good hygiene and living in cleaner places, if the people could actually afford it, but instead created yet another problem that would need to be fixed.
The idea that doctors would use this required vaccination act to do experiments on people does not seem surprising to me (sadly) at all. I think doctors were extremely shady during the nineteenth century. Just look at how they obtained dead bodies for their experiments. Not only that but the fact that they used laudinum on women in labor. All the things that they did to live people were experiments because they had no real idea of what worked and what didn't, although the doctors pretended that they did know. The idea of giving doctors a large portion of the public to place experiments on doesn't seem unlikely not only for the nineteenth century, but sometimes I wonder if it's not true for the twentieth and twenty first centuries as well.

Anonymous said

at 5:41 am on Apr 11, 2008

I think this article is really interesting, given the current salience of the issue. I enjoyed how you discussed the competing viewpoints in this debate, and the very personal ramifications of the decision made by the parents. I particularly liked your discussion of the complicity of the doctors in these events. It was something I had never considered. Clearly, this was before the time of malpractice litigation.

It's interesting to find out that even in this case - where the vaccine was mandatory - the issue was capable of affecting the different classes in different ways.

The idea of children being used as test subjects was particularly compelling for me. This case and the issue as a whole disturbed me. I had not been aware of the complexities involved in the smallpox vaccination. Your commentary was very helpful in understanding the historical contexts and social ramifications.

Anonymous said

at 3:27 am on Apr 30, 2008

I enjoyed reading about this cartoon and the history behind it. I thought that the Poor Laws were an interesting parallel to today and medicare. What kind of judgments are those, who can't afford the medicine/doctors, under when they step into a clinicians door. Yes, the law states that everyone must have equal access to medical attention and that HIPA should protect the medical staff from knowing about the patients financial status-but this is not always the case. When reading your analysis, I also thought how pertinent the information about the vaccine is to today. I thought that overall, your analysis worked well because it urges the reader to apply the historical/social context to ideologies of today and that is what we all attempt to do in our analyses-to prove it means something in the larger sense. Thank you!

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