Note: Anti-Vaccinations groups at the turn of the twentieth century were chiefly concerned with smallpox vaccination.
The Anti-vaccination Movement in both Great Britain and the United States was able to mobilize a small but vocal minority. They questioned the competence of the medical profession to prescribe what appeared to them a dangerous and unsanitary procedure, the authority of local or federal government to require citizens to undergo smallpox vaccination, and made accusations of corruption and collusion between the medical profession and state authorities in order to fleece ordinary citizens.
A Zymotic Disease
The 1880s saw the crystallization of what has become known as the Germ Theory of Disease. Based on the works of Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and Robert Koch (supported by studies by many other scientists), this hypothesis holds that disease is the result of an invasion of microscopic invaders (germs) into the body, and the body’s response to combat this invasion. As the Germ Theory itself was the product of nearly two decades of scientific research and debate, it is unsurprising that the American public did not immediately accept the new concept. Vaccination was one arena in which adherents of the old theories of disease collided with medical authorities. Prior to the discovery of bacteriology as a field, many scientists and individuals believed that illness was caused by miasmas (foul airs) that emanated from underground sources, bad water, and sources of filth. Zymotic diseases – acute infectious diseases such as cholera, smallpox, measles, and the like – were known to be infectious, but epidemics of such diseases were aided by the presence of miasmata. Proponents of miasma theory, such as the author of this pamphlet, argued that sanitation, not vaccination, was a far more effective means of preventing epidemics of disease.
Anti-vaccinationist medical men, unified in their opposition to Pasteur’s discoveries, inaugurated an International Anti-Vaccination Congress in 1880. Papers published by the organization argued for better sanitation as a surer preventative of smallpox and compared the principle behind vaccination to homeopathy, which regular medical practitioners saw as their greatest rival, an argument meant to undermine the authority of vaccine supporters.
“Every Householder is taxed to pay Vaccinators”
In addition to listing a number of diseases that individuals had reportedly contracted after being vaccinated, Mr. Stokes provides financial figures illustrating the amount of money paid by the British government to public health officials for vaccinating citizens. The fees for these vaccinators, he noted, were funded by the country’s poor rates – taxes that were levied on property owners to pay for relief for the destitute. As Stokes also believed that vaccination was actually harmful to the individual, as it involved deliberately inserting impure matter from animals into a healthy person, it stood to reason that the practice of vaccination had become enforceable by law only to enrich doctors. Patients were much better off, he asserted, using his own plant-derived remedies.
Harvesting Vaccine Lymph
This illustration, from an anti-vaccination pamphlet, shows the cultivation and harvesting of variola vaccinae (cowpox virus) from a living calf. Pro-vaccinators have also used Illustrations and, later films (see for example, The Preparation of Diphtheria Antitoxin and Prophylaxis) of the use of animals in cultivating vaccine material, for the purpose of demystifying and explaining the process. Mr. Aitchbee, however, intended to shock and repulse his readers by asserting that infecting calves with cowpox virus and then harvesting the resulting lymph was inherently inhumane. He also cast the process of cultivation and harvesting as unhygienic, impure, and unsafe.
The American Medical Liberty League
Established in the early 1920s, the American Medical Liberty League fought against the regular (or allopathic) medical profession’s control over the practice of medicine. In particular, they opposed compulsory vaccination as an overreach of both medical and government authority. Lora C. Little, the organization’s secretary, was a strident opponent of vaccination and had been jailed in 1918 for distributing anti-vaccination pamphlets to U.S. Army recruits, in violation of the Espionage Act (enacted in 1917 when the U.S. entered World War I; it prohibited interference with military recruitment or fostering insubordination to the military command, which required all inductees to be vaccinated).
Little was especially adept at using statistics to support her arguments that vaccination was not effective. In this booklet, she republished sections from other anti-vaccinationists to outline, as a demonstration, how other anti-vaccinationists could use data from case studies that pro-vaccinationists often cited – especially Japan, Germany, and the Philippines – to turn the argument against them.
The “Savage Rite” of Vaccination
Charles Higgins, an ink manufacturer in Brooklyn, New York, co-founded the Anti-Vaccination League of America with John Pitcairn in 1908. Much like the American Medical Liberty League, members of the Anti-Vaccination League opposed compulsory vaccination, and Higgins especially fought against New York’s compulsory laws for school children. His lengthy work, Horrors of Vaccination Exposed and Illustrated, provides a series of detailed, graphic accounts especially aimed to convince President Woodrow Wilson to repeal compulsory vaccination for military personnel. In an article on the Declaration of Independence, he asserts that the inalienable rights enumerated therein includes the right not to undergo vaccination. He also asserted that vaccination was especially cruel to children, and reprinted several letters from parents and acquaintances of individuals who allegedly suffered injury or died as a result of being forced to vaccinate. The illustration he included (above) on p. 143, is meant to demonstrate “how vaccination commences in the acts of wounding and infecting the forced, frightened, suffering and protesting children.”