Diphtheria immunisation: Its possibilities and difficulties

Public Health Chronicles

“…Our respectability rebels and our insular pride stands aloof from importing into our professional problems the methods of the marketplace and the habit of mind of the huckster." 29 While many public health professionals in the U.S. framed the rise of health education in teleological terms as an inevitable advancement toward ever more enlightened means of accomplishing their goals, the use of compulsory measures hardly vanished from either the rhetoric or the practice of public health, and the new techniques of education stood in a somewhat uneasy relationship to the older, more coercive tools of law. A 1922 editorial in the American Journal of Public Health, noting with approval a recent Supreme Court ruling upholding compulsory school vaccination, acknowledged the necessity of backing up persuasive measures with the force of law.…”