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Radical Perspectives
Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907
Bodily Matters explores the anti-vaccination movement that emerged in England in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth in response to government-mandated smallpox vaccination. By requiring a painful and sometimes dangerous medical procedure for all infants, the Compulsory Vaccination Act set an important precedent for state regulation of bodies. From its inception in 1853 until its demise in 1907, the compulsory smallpox vaccine was fiercely resisted, largely by members of the working class who interpreted it as an infringement of their rights as citizens and a violation of their children’s bodies. Nadja Durbach contends that the anti-vaccination movement is historically significant not only because it was arguably the largest medical resistance campaign ever mounted in Europe but also because it clearly articulated pervasive anxieties regarding the integrity of the body and the role of the modern state. Analyzing historical documents on both sides of the vaccination debate, Durbach focuses on the key events and rhetorical strategies of the resistance campaign. She shows that those for and against the vaccine had very different ideas about how human bodies worked and how best to safeguard them from disease. Individuals opposed to mandatory vaccination saw their own and their children’s bodies not as potentially contagious and thus dangerous to society but rather as highly vulnerable to contamination and violation. Bodily Matters challenges the notion that resistance to vaccination can best be understood, and thus easily dismissed, as the ravings of an unscientific “lunatic fringe.” It locates the anti-vaccination movement at the very center of broad public debates in Victorian England over medical developments, the politics of class, the extent of government intervention into the private lives of its citizens, and the values of a liberal society.
276 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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March 31, 2021
Anti-Vaccine Campaigns Then and Now: Lessons from 19th-Century England
In 1980, smallpox, also known as variola, became the only human infectious disease ever to be completely eradicated. Smallpox had plagued humanity since times immemorial. It is believed to have appeared around 10,000 BC, at the time of the first agricultural settlements. Stains of smallpox were found in Egyptian mummies, in ancient Chinese tombs, and among the Roman legions. Long before germ theory was developed and bacteria or viruses could be observed, humanity was already familiar with ways to prevent the disease and to produce a remedy. The technique of variolation, or exposing patients to the disease so that they develop immunity, was already known to the Chinese in the fifteenth century and to India, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe in the eighteenth century. In 1796, Edward Jenner developed the first vaccine by noticing that milkmaids who had gotten cowpox never contracted smallpox. Calves or children produced the cowpox lymph that was then inoculated to patients to vaccinate them from smallpox. Vaccination became widely accepted and gradually replaced the practice of variolation. By the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans vaccinated most of their children and they brought the technique to the colonies, where it was nonetheless slow to take hold. In 1959, the World Health Organization initiated a plan to rid the world of smallpox. The concept of global health emerged from that enterprise and, as a result of these efforts, the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated in 1980 and recommended that all countries cease routine smallpox vaccination.
Humanity’s greatest achievement
The eradication of smallpox should be celebrated as one of humanity’s greatest achievements. But it isn’t. In recent years vaccination has emerged as a controversial issue. Claiming various health concerns or belief motives, some parents are reluctant to let their children receive some or all of the recommended vaccines. The constituents who make up the so-called vaccine resistant community come from disparate groups, and include anti-government libertarians, apostles of the all-natural, and parents who believe that doctors should not dictate medical decisions about children. They circulate wild claims that autism is linked to vaccines, based on a fraudulent study that was long ago debunked. They affirm, without any scientific backing, that infant immune systems can’t handle so many vaccines, that natural immunity is better than vaccine-acquired immunity, and that vaccines aren’t worth the risk as they may create allergic reactions or even infect the child with the disease they are trying to prevent. Public health officials and physicians have been combating these misconceptions about vaccines for decades. But anti-vaccine memes seem deeply ingrained in segments of the public, and they feed on new pieces of information and communication channels as they circulate by word-of-mouth and on social media. Each country seems to have a special reluctance for a particular vaccine: in the United State, the MMR vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella has been the target of anti-vax campaigns. in France, the innocuity of the hepatitis B vaccine has been put into question, and most people neglect to vaccinate against seasonal flu. In the Islamic world, some fatwas have targeted vaccination against polio.
Resistance to vaccines isn’t new. In Bodily Matters, Nadja Durbach investigates the history of the first outbreak of anti-vaccine fever: the anti-vaccination movement that spread over England from 1853, the year the first Compulsory Vaccination Act was established on the basis of the Poor Law system, until 1907, when the last legislation on smallpox was adopted to grant exemption certificates to reluctant parents. Like its modern equivalent, it is a history that pits the medical establishment and the scientific community against vast segments of the population. Vaccination against smallpox at that time was a painful affair: Victorian vaccinators used a lancet to cut lines into the flesh of infants’ arms, then applied the lymph that had developed on the suppurating blisters of other children who had received the same treatment. Infections often developed, diseases were passed with the arm-to-arm method, and some babies responded badly to the vaccine. Statistics showing the efficacy of vaccination were not fully reliable: doctors routinely classified those with no vaccination scars as “unvaccinated,” and the number of patients who caught smallpox after receiving vaccination was not properly counted. The vaccination process was perceived as invasive, painful, and of dubious effect: opponents to vaccination claimed that it caused many more deaths than the diffusion of smallpox itself. Serious infections such as gangrene could follow even a successful vaccination. But people not only resisted the invasion of the body and the risk to their health: resistance against compulsory vaccination was also predicated upon assumptions about the boundaries of state intervention in personal life. Concerns about the role of the state, the rights of the individual, and the authority of the medical profession combined with deeply-held beliefs about the health and safety of the body.
Anti-vaccination in 19th-century England
While historians have often seen anti-vaccination as resistance against progress and enlightenment, the picture that emerges from the historical narrative, as reconstructed by Nadja Durbach, is much more nuanced. Through detailed analysis of the way sanitary policies were implemented and the resistance they faced, she shows that anti-vaccination in nineteenth-century England was very often on the side of social progress, democratic accountability, and the promotion of working-class interest, while forced vaccination was synonymous with state control, medical hegemony, and the encroachment of private liberties. The growth of professional medicine run counter to the interests of practitioners such as unlicensed physicians, surgeons, midwives, and apothecaries, some of whom had practiced variolation with the smallpox virus for a long time. It abolished the long-held practice of negotiating what treatments were to be applied, and turned patients into passive receptacles of prescriptions backed by the authority of science and the state. Compulsory infant vaccination, as the first continuous public-health activity undertaken by the state, ushered in a new age in which the Victorian state became intimately involved in bodily matters. Administrators—the same officers who applied the infamous Poor Laws and ran the workhouses for indigents and vagabonds—saw the bodies of the working classes themselves as contagious and, like prisoners, beggars, and paupers, in need of surveillance and control. Sanitary technologies such as quarantines, compulsory medical checks, forced sanitization of houses, and destruction of contaminated property were first experimented in this context of state-enforced medicine and bureaucratization. Several Vaccination Acts were adopted—in 1853, 1867, and 1871—to ensure that all infants born from poor families were vaccinated against smallpox. The fact that the authorities had to repeat the same laws on the books shows that the “lower and uneducated classes” were not taking advantage of the free service, and were avoiding mandatory vaccination at all costs.
Born in the 1850s, the anti-vaccination movement took shape in the late 1860s and early ‘70s as resisters responded to what they considered an increasingly coercive vaccination policy. The first to protest were traditional healers and proponents of alternative medicine who felt threatened by the professionalization of health care and the development of medical science. For these alternative practitioners, medicine was more art than science, and the state had no role in regulating this sector of activity. They objected to the scientific experimentation on the human body: vaccination, they maintained, not only polluted the blood with animal material but also spread dangerous diseases such as scrofula and syphilis. These early medical dissenters were soon rejoined by a motley crew of social activists who added the anti-vaccination cause to their broader social and political agenda. Temperance associations, anti-vivisectionists, vegetarians and food reformers, women’s rights advocates, working men’s clubs, trade unionists, religious sects, followers of the Swedish mystic Swedenborg: all these movements formed a larger culture of dissent in which anti-vaccinators found a place. They created leagues to organize against the Vaccination Acts, organized debates and mass meetings, published tracts and bulletins, and held demonstrations that sometimes turned into small-scale riots. Women from all social classes were particularly active: they wrote pamphlets, contributed letters to newspapers, and expressed strong opposition at public meetings. They often took their roles as guardians of the home quite literally, and refused to open their door to intruding medical officials. Campaigners argued that parental rights were political rights, to which all respectable English citizens were entitled. The state, they contended, had no right to encroach on parental choice and individual freedom. “The Englishman’s home is his castle,” they maintained, and how best to raise a family was a domestic issue over which the state had no authority to interfere.
Middle-class campaigners and working-class opponents
While the populist language of rights and citizenship enabled a cross-class alliance to exist, the middle-class campaigners didn’t experience the bulk of repression that befell on working-class families that resisted compulsory vaccination. Working-class noncompliers were routinely sized from their houses and dragged to jail, or were charged with heavy fines. Middle-class activists clung to the old liberal tenets of individual rights and laissez-faire: “There should be free trade in vaccination; let those buy it who want it, and let those be free who don’t want it.” By contrast, working-class protests against vaccination was often formulated at the level of the collective, and they had important bodily implications. Some anti-vaccinators considered themselves socialists and belonged to the Independent Labour Party. They aligned their fight with the interest of the working class and expressed distrust of state welfare in general and of anti-pauperism in particular. The Poor Laws that forced recipient of government relief into the workhouse were a target of widespread detestation. Vaccination remained linked to poor relief in the minds of many parents, as workhouse surgeons were often in charge of inoculation and the health campaigns remained administered by the Poor Law Board. Public vaccination was performed at vaccination stations, regarded by many as sites of moral and physical pollution. The vaccination of children from arm to arm provoked enormous fears of contamination. Parents expressed a shared experience of the body as violated and coerced, and repeatedly voiced their grievances in the political language of class conflict. Their protests helped to shape the production of a working-class identity by locating class consciousness in shared bodily experience.
Anti-vaccination also drew from an imaginary of bodily invasion, blood contamination, and monstrous transformations. Many Victorians believed that health depended on preserving the body’s integrity, encouraging the circulation of pure blood, and preventing the introduction of any foreign material into the body. Gothic novels popularized the figures of the vampire, the body-snatcher, and the incubus. They offered lurid tales of rotten flesh and scabrous wounds that left a mark on readers’ imagination. Anti-vaccinators heavily exploited these gothic tropes to generate parental anxieties: they depicted vaccination as a kind of ritual murder or child sacrifice, a sacrilege that interfered with the God-given body of the pristine child. They quoted the Book of Revelations: “Fool and evil sores came upon the men who bore the mark of the beast.” Supporters of vaccination also participated in the production of this sensationalist imagery by depicting innocent victims of the smallpox disease turned into loathsome creatures. Fear of bodily violation was intimately bound up with concerns over the purity of the blood and the proper functioning of the circulatory system. The best guard against smallpox, maintained a medical dissenter, was to keep “the blood pure, the bowels regular, and the skin clean.” Temperance advocates or proselytizing vegetarians added anti-vaccine to their cause: “If there is anything that I detest more than others, they are vaccination, alcohol, and tobacco.” As the lymph applied to children’s sores was the product of disease-infected cows, some parents feared that vaccinated children might adopt cow-like tendencies, or that calf lymph might also transmit animal diseases. Human lymph was even more problematic: applied from arm to arm, it could expose untainted children to the poisonous fluids of contaminated patients and spread contagious or hereditary diseases such as scrofula, syphilis, leprosy, blindness, or tuberculosis.
Understanding the intellectual and social roots of anti-vax campaigns
This early wave of resistance to vaccination, as depicted in Bodily Matters, is crucial to understanding the intellectual and social roots of modern anti-vaccine campaigns. Then as now, anti-vax advocates use the same arguments: that vaccines are unsafe and inefficient, that the government is abusing its power, and that alternative health practices are preferable. Vaccination is no longer coercive and disciplinary, but the issue of compulsory treatment of certain professions such as healthcare workers regularly resurfaces. More fundamentally, the Victorian era in nineteenth-century England was, like our own age, a time of deepening democratization and rampant anti-elitism. Now, too, the democratization of knowledge and truth can produce an odd mixture of credulity and skepticism among many ordinary citizens. Moreover, we, too, are living in an era when state-enforced medicine and scientific expertise are being challenged. Science has become just another voice in the room, and people are carrying their reliance on individual judgment to ridiculous extremes. With everyone being told that their ideas about medicine, art, and government are as valid as those of the so-called “experts” and “those in power,” truth and knowledge become elusive and difficult to pin down. As we are discovering again, democracy and elite expertise do not always go well together. Where everything is believable, everything is doubtable. (...)
In 1980, smallpox, also known as variola, became the only human infectious disease ever to be completely eradicated. Smallpox had plagued humanity since times immemorial. It is believed to have appeared around 10,000 BC, at the time of the first agricultural settlements. Stains of smallpox were found in Egyptian mummies, in ancient Chinese tombs, and among the Roman legions. Long before germ theory was developed and bacteria or viruses could be observed, humanity was already familiar with ways to prevent the disease and to produce a remedy. The technique of variolation, or exposing patients to the disease so that they develop immunity, was already known to the Chinese in the fifteenth century and to India, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe in the eighteenth century. In 1796, Edward Jenner developed the first vaccine by noticing that milkmaids who had gotten cowpox never contracted smallpox. Calves or children produced the cowpox lymph that was then inoculated to patients to vaccinate them from smallpox. Vaccination became widely accepted and gradually replaced the practice of variolation. By the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans vaccinated most of their children and they brought the technique to the colonies, where it was nonetheless slow to take hold. In 1959, the World Health Organization initiated a plan to rid the world of smallpox. The concept of global health emerged from that enterprise and, as a result of these efforts, the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated in 1980 and recommended that all countries cease routine smallpox vaccination.
Humanity’s greatest achievement
The eradication of smallpox should be celebrated as one of humanity’s greatest achievements. But it isn’t. In recent years vaccination has emerged as a controversial issue. Claiming various health concerns or belief motives, some parents are reluctant to let their children receive some or all of the recommended vaccines. The constituents who make up the so-called vaccine resistant community come from disparate groups, and include anti-government libertarians, apostles of the all-natural, and parents who believe that doctors should not dictate medical decisions about children. They circulate wild claims that autism is linked to vaccines, based on a fraudulent study that was long ago debunked. They affirm, without any scientific backing, that infant immune systems can’t handle so many vaccines, that natural immunity is better than vaccine-acquired immunity, and that vaccines aren’t worth the risk as they may create allergic reactions or even infect the child with the disease they are trying to prevent. Public health officials and physicians have been combating these misconceptions about vaccines for decades. But anti-vaccine memes seem deeply ingrained in segments of the public, and they feed on new pieces of information and communication channels as they circulate by word-of-mouth and on social media. Each country seems to have a special reluctance for a particular vaccine: in the United State, the MMR vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella has been the target of anti-vax campaigns. in France, the innocuity of the hepatitis B vaccine has been put into question, and most people neglect to vaccinate against seasonal flu. In the Islamic world, some fatwas have targeted vaccination against polio.
Resistance to vaccines isn’t new. In Bodily Matters, Nadja Durbach investigates the history of the first outbreak of anti-vaccine fever: the anti-vaccination movement that spread over England from 1853, the year the first Compulsory Vaccination Act was established on the basis of the Poor Law system, until 1907, when the last legislation on smallpox was adopted to grant exemption certificates to reluctant parents. Like its modern equivalent, it is a history that pits the medical establishment and the scientific community against vast segments of the population. Vaccination against smallpox at that time was a painful affair: Victorian vaccinators used a lancet to cut lines into the flesh of infants’ arms, then applied the lymph that had developed on the suppurating blisters of other children who had received the same treatment. Infections often developed, diseases were passed with the arm-to-arm method, and some babies responded badly to the vaccine. Statistics showing the efficacy of vaccination were not fully reliable: doctors routinely classified those with no vaccination scars as “unvaccinated,” and the number of patients who caught smallpox after receiving vaccination was not properly counted. The vaccination process was perceived as invasive, painful, and of dubious effect: opponents to vaccination claimed that it caused many more deaths than the diffusion of smallpox itself. Serious infections such as gangrene could follow even a successful vaccination. But people not only resisted the invasion of the body and the risk to their health: resistance against compulsory vaccination was also predicated upon assumptions about the boundaries of state intervention in personal life. Concerns about the role of the state, the rights of the individual, and the authority of the medical profession combined with deeply-held beliefs about the health and safety of the body.
Anti-vaccination in 19th-century England
While historians have often seen anti-vaccination as resistance against progress and enlightenment, the picture that emerges from the historical narrative, as reconstructed by Nadja Durbach, is much more nuanced. Through detailed analysis of the way sanitary policies were implemented and the resistance they faced, she shows that anti-vaccination in nineteenth-century England was very often on the side of social progress, democratic accountability, and the promotion of working-class interest, while forced vaccination was synonymous with state control, medical hegemony, and the encroachment of private liberties. The growth of professional medicine run counter to the interests of practitioners such as unlicensed physicians, surgeons, midwives, and apothecaries, some of whom had practiced variolation with the smallpox virus for a long time. It abolished the long-held practice of negotiating what treatments were to be applied, and turned patients into passive receptacles of prescriptions backed by the authority of science and the state. Compulsory infant vaccination, as the first continuous public-health activity undertaken by the state, ushered in a new age in which the Victorian state became intimately involved in bodily matters. Administrators—the same officers who applied the infamous Poor Laws and ran the workhouses for indigents and vagabonds—saw the bodies of the working classes themselves as contagious and, like prisoners, beggars, and paupers, in need of surveillance and control. Sanitary technologies such as quarantines, compulsory medical checks, forced sanitization of houses, and destruction of contaminated property were first experimented in this context of state-enforced medicine and bureaucratization. Several Vaccination Acts were adopted—in 1853, 1867, and 1871—to ensure that all infants born from poor families were vaccinated against smallpox. The fact that the authorities had to repeat the same laws on the books shows that the “lower and uneducated classes” were not taking advantage of the free service, and were avoiding mandatory vaccination at all costs.
Born in the 1850s, the anti-vaccination movement took shape in the late 1860s and early ‘70s as resisters responded to what they considered an increasingly coercive vaccination policy. The first to protest were traditional healers and proponents of alternative medicine who felt threatened by the professionalization of health care and the development of medical science. For these alternative practitioners, medicine was more art than science, and the state had no role in regulating this sector of activity. They objected to the scientific experimentation on the human body: vaccination, they maintained, not only polluted the blood with animal material but also spread dangerous diseases such as scrofula and syphilis. These early medical dissenters were soon rejoined by a motley crew of social activists who added the anti-vaccination cause to their broader social and political agenda. Temperance associations, anti-vivisectionists, vegetarians and food reformers, women’s rights advocates, working men’s clubs, trade unionists, religious sects, followers of the Swedish mystic Swedenborg: all these movements formed a larger culture of dissent in which anti-vaccinators found a place. They created leagues to organize against the Vaccination Acts, organized debates and mass meetings, published tracts and bulletins, and held demonstrations that sometimes turned into small-scale riots. Women from all social classes were particularly active: they wrote pamphlets, contributed letters to newspapers, and expressed strong opposition at public meetings. They often took their roles as guardians of the home quite literally, and refused to open their door to intruding medical officials. Campaigners argued that parental rights were political rights, to which all respectable English citizens were entitled. The state, they contended, had no right to encroach on parental choice and individual freedom. “The Englishman’s home is his castle,” they maintained, and how best to raise a family was a domestic issue over which the state had no authority to interfere.
Middle-class campaigners and working-class opponents
While the populist language of rights and citizenship enabled a cross-class alliance to exist, the middle-class campaigners didn’t experience the bulk of repression that befell on working-class families that resisted compulsory vaccination. Working-class noncompliers were routinely sized from their houses and dragged to jail, or were charged with heavy fines. Middle-class activists clung to the old liberal tenets of individual rights and laissez-faire: “There should be free trade in vaccination; let those buy it who want it, and let those be free who don’t want it.” By contrast, working-class protests against vaccination was often formulated at the level of the collective, and they had important bodily implications. Some anti-vaccinators considered themselves socialists and belonged to the Independent Labour Party. They aligned their fight with the interest of the working class and expressed distrust of state welfare in general and of anti-pauperism in particular. The Poor Laws that forced recipient of government relief into the workhouse were a target of widespread detestation. Vaccination remained linked to poor relief in the minds of many parents, as workhouse surgeons were often in charge of inoculation and the health campaigns remained administered by the Poor Law Board. Public vaccination was performed at vaccination stations, regarded by many as sites of moral and physical pollution. The vaccination of children from arm to arm provoked enormous fears of contamination. Parents expressed a shared experience of the body as violated and coerced, and repeatedly voiced their grievances in the political language of class conflict. Their protests helped to shape the production of a working-class identity by locating class consciousness in shared bodily experience.
Anti-vaccination also drew from an imaginary of bodily invasion, blood contamination, and monstrous transformations. Many Victorians believed that health depended on preserving the body’s integrity, encouraging the circulation of pure blood, and preventing the introduction of any foreign material into the body. Gothic novels popularized the figures of the vampire, the body-snatcher, and the incubus. They offered lurid tales of rotten flesh and scabrous wounds that left a mark on readers’ imagination. Anti-vaccinators heavily exploited these gothic tropes to generate parental anxieties: they depicted vaccination as a kind of ritual murder or child sacrifice, a sacrilege that interfered with the God-given body of the pristine child. They quoted the Book of Revelations: “Fool and evil sores came upon the men who bore the mark of the beast.” Supporters of vaccination also participated in the production of this sensationalist imagery by depicting innocent victims of the smallpox disease turned into loathsome creatures. Fear of bodily violation was intimately bound up with concerns over the purity of the blood and the proper functioning of the circulatory system. The best guard against smallpox, maintained a medical dissenter, was to keep “the blood pure, the bowels regular, and the skin clean.” Temperance advocates or proselytizing vegetarians added anti-vaccine to their cause: “If there is anything that I detest more than others, they are vaccination, alcohol, and tobacco.” As the lymph applied to children’s sores was the product of disease-infected cows, some parents feared that vaccinated children might adopt cow-like tendencies, or that calf lymph might also transmit animal diseases. Human lymph was even more problematic: applied from arm to arm, it could expose untainted children to the poisonous fluids of contaminated patients and spread contagious or hereditary diseases such as scrofula, syphilis, leprosy, blindness, or tuberculosis.
Understanding the intellectual and social roots of anti-vax campaigns
This early wave of resistance to vaccination, as depicted in Bodily Matters, is crucial to understanding the intellectual and social roots of modern anti-vaccine campaigns. Then as now, anti-vax advocates use the same arguments: that vaccines are unsafe and inefficient, that the government is abusing its power, and that alternative health practices are preferable. Vaccination is no longer coercive and disciplinary, but the issue of compulsory treatment of certain professions such as healthcare workers regularly resurfaces. More fundamentally, the Victorian era in nineteenth-century England was, like our own age, a time of deepening democratization and rampant anti-elitism. Now, too, the democratization of knowledge and truth can produce an odd mixture of credulity and skepticism among many ordinary citizens. Moreover, we, too, are living in an era when state-enforced medicine and scientific expertise are being challenged. Science has become just another voice in the room, and people are carrying their reliance on individual judgment to ridiculous extremes. With everyone being told that their ideas about medicine, art, and government are as valid as those of the so-called “experts” and “those in power,” truth and knowledge become elusive and difficult to pin down. As we are discovering again, democracy and elite expertise do not always go well together. Where everything is believable, everything is doubtable. (...)
April 12, 2020
A frequent advice to PhD students is to turn their doctoral dissertations into a book that is readable for a wider, not necessarily expert, public. This is not an easy task and Bodily Matters is no exception. The text is repetitive and too academic to make the reading experience enjoyable.
Nonetheless, by the very nature of its primary sources, Bodily Matters is a book full of surprises. The anti-vaccination movement was one of the most challenging and insistent protest movements in 19th century Britain. Durbach makes a clear argument that far from being a motley crew of backward-looking eccentrics, anti-vaccinators raised important questions about the nature and limits of medical power over individual bodies and also challenged the notion of compulsory state intrusion into personal and collective independence under the guise of "public health".
Under the current COVID-19 global crisis and the dramatic changes imposed on our notions of personal liberty, social intercourse and collective choice-making, the histories of protest and counter-medical discourse discussed in the book could not have been more relevant today.
Of course, don't expect any easy answers here, but the questions raised in Victorian Britain regarding compulsory preventive medicine, will be (hopefully) widely discussed the closer we come to the introduction of a coronavirus vaccine. Let us learn a lesson or two from history then, epsecially as regards the different structures and function of public health according to the categories of gender, class and nation.
If you can put up with the academic and rather dry prose give this book a critical try.
Nonetheless, by the very nature of its primary sources, Bodily Matters is a book full of surprises. The anti-vaccination movement was one of the most challenging and insistent protest movements in 19th century Britain. Durbach makes a clear argument that far from being a motley crew of backward-looking eccentrics, anti-vaccinators raised important questions about the nature and limits of medical power over individual bodies and also challenged the notion of compulsory state intrusion into personal and collective independence under the guise of "public health".
Under the current COVID-19 global crisis and the dramatic changes imposed on our notions of personal liberty, social intercourse and collective choice-making, the histories of protest and counter-medical discourse discussed in the book could not have been more relevant today.
Of course, don't expect any easy answers here, but the questions raised in Victorian Britain regarding compulsory preventive medicine, will be (hopefully) widely discussed the closer we come to the introduction of a coronavirus vaccine. Let us learn a lesson or two from history then, epsecially as regards the different structures and function of public health according to the categories of gender, class and nation.
If you can put up with the academic and rather dry prose give this book a critical try.
March 17, 2019
Does the Body Matter?
Bodily Matters is a historical account of the anti-vaccination movement which emerged in England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It describes the earliest crude and dangerous vaccination procedures as well as detailing compulsory vaccination laws that blatantly targeted the poor. Politics played the heaviest hand in vaccination laws. The scientific evidence for the validity of compulsory vaccination was, in fact, completely lacking. The anti-vaccination movement was strong during this time and well mobilized within the political realm. The biggest pitfall to the movement was any bargain struck that invited complacency or a lowering of their guard.
Durbach goes deep into the individual indignities and the right to bodily integrity. True ownership of an individual’ body has been a long debated topic. The question of public health (based on dubious claims) trumping individual rights will make the reader realize that these issues have always been with us, right from the start. Bodily Matters also explores the prevalent beliefs about what truly bolsters robust health. This is a book about a movement, not a one-sided debate.
Bodily Matters is a slow and repetitive read. However, this has more to do with book’s genre than the author’s writing. The repetition is critical to understanding history. Bodily Matters is an academic text. It is the kind of book used for education, information-gathering, and research. It should be read by anyone who has ever received a vaccination of any kind or has permitted vaccination of another. It is unfortunate that most who need to understand this issue from a historical perspective probably never will. This book is recommended to anyone who wishes to.
Along with Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk’s book Dissolving Illusions, this book will provide critical background and context for today’s most violent and contentious issue.
BRB Rating. Read It.
Bodily Matters is a historical account of the anti-vaccination movement which emerged in England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It describes the earliest crude and dangerous vaccination procedures as well as detailing compulsory vaccination laws that blatantly targeted the poor. Politics played the heaviest hand in vaccination laws. The scientific evidence for the validity of compulsory vaccination was, in fact, completely lacking. The anti-vaccination movement was strong during this time and well mobilized within the political realm. The biggest pitfall to the movement was any bargain struck that invited complacency or a lowering of their guard.
Durbach goes deep into the individual indignities and the right to bodily integrity. True ownership of an individual’ body has been a long debated topic. The question of public health (based on dubious claims) trumping individual rights will make the reader realize that these issues have always been with us, right from the start. Bodily Matters also explores the prevalent beliefs about what truly bolsters robust health. This is a book about a movement, not a one-sided debate.
Bodily Matters is a slow and repetitive read. However, this has more to do with book’s genre than the author’s writing. The repetition is critical to understanding history. Bodily Matters is an academic text. It is the kind of book used for education, information-gathering, and research. It should be read by anyone who has ever received a vaccination of any kind or has permitted vaccination of another. It is unfortunate that most who need to understand this issue from a historical perspective probably never will. This book is recommended to anyone who wishes to.
Along with Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk’s book Dissolving Illusions, this book will provide critical background and context for today’s most violent and contentious issue.
BRB Rating. Read It.
October 28, 2009
Very interesting topic, very well-written, and does a great job showing connections between the various groups of people who participated in the anti-vaccination movement. Also, Durbach makes use of interesting sources and reads them in semi-nuanced ways. The main problem with this book is that it fails to mention that SMALLPOX HAS BEEN ERADICATED! She villainizes the state so much that she fails to note the tremendous benefits vaccination has brought. I agree that vaccination may not be "the greatest triumph of modern medicine," and obviously it came at a cost. But, Durbach needs a more balanced approach that at least acknowledges its merits.
September 5, 2025
I read this book for a new project I am working on. With anti-vaccination being mainstreamed, I wanted to look into the history of the movement. This one centers the anti-vaccination efforts in Britain between 1850 and 1910. Britain had mandatory vaccination passed in several waves, many of the modifications being passed in response to the political lobbying of the very vocal anti-vaccination movement. Some really great stuff in here analyzed from a variety of perspectives. Being anti-vax was associated with the working class, as requirements largely fell on them. If you were middle class, you could get away with not getting vaxxed, or have your preferred doctor vaccinate you. But the free version available through the public vaccinator? You might have to wait in line at the local pub, and the vaccinator would do arm-to-arm vaccinations, passing lymph from the guy who was in front of you. This was the smallpox vaccine, mind you, way before the days of modern medicine. Germ theory wasn't even quite there yet. Quite the story that you might not have been aware of! A few cameos too-- Charles Dickens used a lot of the language surrounding miasma and filth in his books. And Alfred Russell Wallace, credited as the co-father of evolution alongside Darwin, was an anti-vaxxer.
June 25, 2013
This is a fascinating book about the political and social history of anti-vaccination movements in the UK. Durbach particularly focuses on the class dynamics at issue in vaccine resistance and the relationship between working class political movements and anti-vaccine arguments. Perhaps the newest addition to the scholarship on resistance to public health is her chapter on the Gothic Body. She suggests how anti-vaccine activists used the vampire and vivisectionist to motivate their followers. She also outlines why these figures were particularly associated with doctors and vaccination.
This is a dense but well written book. It is also well illustrated. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in medical history, public health policy, or vaccination.
This is a dense but well written book. It is also well illustrated. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in medical history, public health policy, or vaccination.
March 4, 2010
Way, way, WAY too repetitive!!!
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