CROTCHETY PEOPLE Williamson, Stanley
The Vaccination Controversy,
12/2007
Book Chapter
Allen v. Worthyopened the floodgates. Parents objecting to the vaccination of their children found themselves in court time and time again, paying fines and costs that for many of them amounted to a ...severe financial burden. Refusal or inability to pay could result in their possessions being seized or sold off, or even a prison sentence. Typical of those who faced what was for them a desperate moral dilemma was a parent who ascribed his eldest childʹs death to vaccination, no doubt without justification, and felt he must resist the compulsory vaccination of a second child. He was summoned,
A LOATHSOME VIRUS Williamson, Stanley
The Vaccination Controversy,
12/2007
Book Chapter
As has been noted, condemnation of compulsory vaccination dates from shortly after the passage of the Act of 1853, with the letter from John Gibbs to the President of the Board of Health. Born in ...Ireland in 1811, Gibbs was described by an acquaintance as ʹsagacious, bright, earnest and independentʹ, with a passion for ʹsuch things as made for human welfare and improvementʹ. He became interested in hydropathy and in particular in its use in cases of smallpox. In later life he made his home in St Leonards, in Sussex. His influential letter to the Board of Health was based
Although no legislation on the subject of vaccination was enacted between 1871 and 1898, apart from the short Act of 1874, which was designed to clarify the Act of 1871, the anti-vaccination movement ...continued to bring the opposition to compulsion before the House of Commons, concentrating mainly at first on the question of repeated penalties for default. Three attempts in six years to amend the law ʹso far as accumulating penalties are concernedʹ made no progress. There was considerable astonishment and derision when in 1880 J. G. Dodson, President of the Local Government Board in Gladstoneʹs second administration, appeared to
Following the mass demonstration the Leicester guardians voted by 26 to eight to cease prosecutions. There was no response from the Local Government Board, but a carefully worded passage in a report ...by its Medical Officer of Health, written before the demonstration took place, illustrated clearly the Board’s awareness of the dilemma with which the advocate of compulsion was confronted:
Whether or not, in face of the accumulated evidence of the importance of vaccination to children, who cannot judge for themselves of its value, it may be expedient to relax those provisions of the Compulsory Vaccination Acts which allow of
Among the most prominent opponents of vaccination were two members of the medical profession, one more eminent than the other. Edgar Crookshank, Professor of Comparative Pathology and Bacteriology ...and Fellow of Kingʹs College, London, wrote aHistory and Pathology of Vaccinationin two volumes (1889). The Preface to the first volume described how, following some investigations into an outbreak of cowpox, he became convinced that
the commonly accepted descriptions of the nature and origins of Cow Pox were purely theoretical … I gradually became so deeply impressed with the small amount of knowledge possessed by practitioners concerning Cow Pox, and
