The politics of prevention: Anti-vaccinationism and public health in nineteenth-century England

Abstract

The coming of compulsory health legislation in mid-nineteenth-century England was a political innovation that extended the powers of the state effectively for the first time over areas of traditional civil liberties in the name of public health. This development appears most strikingly in two fields of legislation. One instituted compulsory vaccination against smallpox, the other introduced a system of compulsory screening, isolation, and treatment for prostitutes suffering from venereal disease, initially in four garrison towns.' The Vaccination Acts and the Contagious Diseases Acts suspended what we might call the natural liberty of the individual to contract and spread infectious disease, in order to protect the health of the community as a whole.2 Both sets of legislation were viewed as infractions of liberty by substantial bodies of Victorian opinion, which campaigned to repeal them. These opponents expressed fundamental hostility to the principle ofcompulsion and a terror of medical tyranny. The repeal organizations-above all, the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League and the National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts-were motivated by different sets of social and scientific values.3 Nevertheless, their activities jointly highlight some of the political conflicts produced by the creation of a public health service in the nineteenth century, issues with resonances for the state provision of health care up to the present day. Compulsory vaccination was established by the Vaccination Act of 1853, following a report compiled by the Epidemiological Society on the state of vaccination since the

Vaccine refusal and the endgame: walking the last mile first

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‘MMR talk’ and vaccination choices: An ethnographic study in Brighton

“…The literature on anti-vaccination movements emphasises not only their long history, but also their articulation of wider social and political concerns. Durbach (2000), for example, links dissent to smallpox vaccine in the 1880s with working class movements, although Porter and Porter (1988) emphasise greater social diversity in movement concerns even at this time. While some argue that a UK anti-vaccination movement has gradually developed over the last century (Baker, 2003), others point to significant changes in social and political context and agendas (Fitzpatrick, 2004).…”

Sanitary inspection and the public sphere in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain: a case study in liberal governance

“…Smallpox vaccination, for instance, raised a host of issues about citizenship, political rights, the authority of science, and the nature and scope of the state. 128 As was noted in the introduction, there is now greater recognition of the tentative and contested nature of Victorian and Edwardian state-formation: of its evolutionary rather than revolutionary nature. It is worth re-emphasizing, then, the constitutive nature of the struggles comprised by activities like sanitary inspection, for the assumption remains in the existing historiography that the public -or society -is outside power, and thus an object over, upon or into which the state intervenes or asserts an objectifying gaze.…”