Victorian Anti-Vaxxers
Why did so many British citizens in the 1800s resist the smallpox vaccine?
Dr. Edward Jenner is widely associated with the development of the smallpox vaccine in Britain just ahead of the 19th century. About 60 years later, the British government mandated the vaccine for schoolchildren. This raises two questions:
Why was a mandate implemented?
Why did it take so long?
The first question is easier to answer than the second. There was widespread skepticism about the vaccine — skepticism that would span the century, cross an ocean and inspire the founding of a publication, The Vaccine Inquirer, in 1879.
How potent the skepticism must’ve been at the turn of the 19th century for so many people to resist taking the vaccine, considering smallpox’s death toll. By the time Dr. Jenner learned how to immunize against the disfiguring disease, smallpox had already snuffed out tens of millions of souls worldwide (60 million died in Europe in the 18th century alone). Thirty percent of people who contracted the disease died.
To be fair to Victorian anti-vaxxers, they had little point of reference. Jenner’s methods were crude when compared to today’s vaccine development. Now, there are multiple laboratory methods, some of which include genetic manipulation. Jenner, by contrast, sourced the material for his vaccine from a cow pustule, which he scraped into his subject’s skin.
It’s not hard to see why people would have objected to Jenner’s approach. Introducing the infected ooze of livestock subcutaneously must’ve seemed barbaric. Clergy considered the practice heretical.
“‘A cure for our most virulent disease, from the pus of a farm animal?’ According to the clergy it was positively ‘ungodly’ to take material from a diseased animal.”
(Children of the Mill: True Stories from Quarry Bank)
There were also myriad unfounded smallpox remedies that were turning quite the profit. Their purveyors were threatened by the vaccine.
Jenner’s contemporaries might’ve denounced his research, but there was method to his madness. He observed his milkmaid, who had fallen ill with cowpox, develop an immunity to smallpox. Since cowpox was much milder than smallpox, Jenner saw a relatively safe path toward immunizing against the deadly disease. He tested his hypothesis on his gardener’s 8-year-old son – a callous experiment that could easily have been used to denigrate Jenner and thereby delegitimize the vaccine, if only the nostrum peddlers had had internet access. Jenner’s methods notwithstanding, the inoculation worked.
To be fair to today’s anti-vaxxers, Covid-19 is not nearly as deadly as smallpox. As of December of 2022, 6.6 million people have died worldwide from Covid-19 – nothing to scoff at but still a fraction of smallpox’s human toll. Covid-19’s current case mortality rate ranges from roughly .1 percent to 2 percent. If Covid’s mortality rate were 30 percent, would one-sixth of Americans and nearly one-sixth of Britons refuse to take it?
Vaccine skepticism is nothing new. Following the UK Vaccination Act of 1853, smallpox rates plummeted. By the 1860s, two-thirds of British children were vaccinated. Unfortunately, this coincided with a spate of illness that rekindled vaccine skepticism, which no doubt was compounded by the global pandemic that began only a few years later.
In 1885, an estimated 80,000 vaccine dissenters mounted a protest in Leicester with banners, the coffin of a child, and an effigy of Jenner. Vaccine opposition quickly spread to North America, where it would fester and flare up in successive waves of remonstration, each generation with a fresh set of rationalizations, all united by the same credo: the cure is worse than the disease.
People have always resisted vaccines. It’s counterintuitive to put a foreign, potentially noxious agent in one’s body in an effort to defend against something that hasn’t yet harmed you. It’s no wonder, then, that in spite of the vaccine’s efficacy, government mandates and free access to the live-saving inoculation, it took another hundred years to eradicate smallpox.