Criminal Conversations: Victorian Crimes, Social Panic, and Moral Outrage (review) (original) (raw)
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2007
In the 1880s, Alfred Russel Wallace, the celebrated co-discoverer of natural selection, launched himself into the centre of a politicised and polarised debate over the unpopular compulsory vaccination laws in England. Wallace never wavered in his belief that smallpox vaccination was useless and likely dangerous. Six years before his death, the anti-vaccinationists successfully secured a conscience clause that effectively dismantled the compulsory vaccination laws. Several other important Victorian scientists joined Wallace in the fight to repeal compulsory vaccination arguing that widely held views on the effectiveness of vaccination and evidence for immunity were inconclusive in the light of (then) contemporary standards of evidence. This article situates Wallace's anti-vaccination logic within the broader matrix of sociopolitical and cultural reform movements of the late Victorian era. Additionally it provides the first detailed analysis of his critique of vaccination science, in particular the role statistics played in his arguments. In this period, both pro-vaccinationists and anti-vaccinationists invested great efforts in collating and analysing statistical data sets that either supported or refuted the claims of vaccination's effectiveness. While each side presented 'controlled' case studies to support their assertions, without an unambiguous test to measure or demonstrate vaccination's effectiveness, the anti-vaccinationists continued to mount credible statistical critiques of vaccination science.
The politics of prevention: Anti-vaccinationism and public health in nineteenth-century England
Medical History, 1988
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
Alfred Russel Wallace and the Antivaccination Movement in Victorian England
Emerging Infectious Diseases, 2010
eminent naturalist and codiscoverer of the principle of natural selection, was a major participant in the antivaccination campaigns in late 19thcentury England. Wallace combined social reformism and quantitative arguments to undermine the claims of provaccinationists and had a major impact on the debate. A brief account of Wallace's background, his role in the campaign, and a summary of his quantitative arguments leads to the conclusion that it is unwarranted to portray Victorian antivaccination campaigners in general as irrational and antiscience. Public health policy can benefi t from history, but the proper context of the evidence used should always be kept in mind.
The numerous Vaccination Acts passed between 1840 and 1907 were innovations in every sense of the word. They heralded a new approach to the role of the state in the population’s health. They consolidated the new relationship between the state and medical science. They also ultimately brought forth a new term: ‘conscientious objector.’ For us—sitting in the comfort of the twenty-first century—this innovation was unquestionably a boon to humanity. Smallpox is all but eradicated. In this regard, state-directed schemes such as the Vaccination Acts were key vectors of this victory over one of the great scourges of humanity. Nonetheless, a significant minority of the population vehemently opposed the Vaccination Acts. Their ranks did contain a number of cranks and charlatans. However, they also included well-respected scientific figures whose opposition was genuine and at least partly justified. One such figure was the co-discoverer of natural selection with Darwin: Alfred Russel Wallace. This paper considers why Wallace was opposed to such an apparently beneficent procedure. He was no anti-science anti-innovator. Instead he provided a compelling critique of a scientific innovation we take for granted today. He questioned the virtue of state medicine. He questioned the growing power and unaccountability of the medical profession. He questioned their statistical evidence (in the process offering an innovative fully-statistical assessment of the value of a medical procedure). What emerges is a genuine concern for what may be termed ‘medical ethics.’ This developed from Wallace’s broader belief—unusual at the time—that scientific innovation did not inherently represent a cut-and-dry case of ‘progress.’ Scientific innovations had to be weighed against deeper political, social and ethical considerations. This stance—controversial at the time—appears comparatively commonplace today. Wallace’s prescience reflects a mature and self-conscious appreciation of potential problems of scientific progress in regards to man.
2021
Epidemics have always deeply affected societies. They almost inevitably lead to negotiations of questions referring to identity, belonging, and foreignness. Furthermore, epidemics create bogeymen. The biographical study by Prof. Dr. Paul Arthur Förster, founder of the first German association of vaccination opponents and an enthusiastic "völkisch" and anti-Semitic agitator, stands here as a prototype for a multitude of vaccination opponents and should help us to understand what kind of influence epidemics have on the creation of bogeyman. In a second step, the question of bogeyman highlights the underlying aspects of the anti-vaccination movement. It directly leads to relating questions concerning ideological proximity of anti-vaccinism to the milieu critical of scientific medicine, with its numerous organizations of alternative medicine and its associations.
Predisposing Causes and Public Health in Early Nineteenth-Century Medical Thought 1 Downloaded from
SUMMARY. The key aetiological issue of the early British public health movement is often seen to be the controversy between contagionism and anticontagionism. More fundamental, however, was a legacy from older constitutional conceptions of disease, of a distinction between exciting and predisposing causes. The centrality of predisposition was a theme in a wide range of medical writings; often predisposing causes were seen as sufficient causes for outbreaks of disease. Physicians who focused on predisposition often, though not always, took an interest in social factors that generated disease. The early public health movement associated with Edwin Chadwick represented then, not the victory of anticontagionism over contagionism, but the gratuitous rejection of a sophisticated understanding of the manifold determinants of health, in favour of a focus on a single, and hypothetical exciting cause. This article points out the inadequacies of the contagionism-anticontagionism characterization of early nineteenth-century aeti-ological theory, examines the concept of predispositionism as it appeared in the works of many writers, and considers in detail investigations of the Irish fever outbreak of1817— 19, where the concept of predisposition was extensively utilized, and the arguments with which the concept was rejected by Chadwick's associates Thomas Southwood Smith and Neil Arnott. In a classic essay on the 'Therapeutic Revolution' Charles Rosenberg took on the task of laying out the framework within which 'traditional' therapeutics 'worked'; what made the purges, emetics, bleedings, and tonics seem the rational, obvious, and necessary interventions to doctors in early nineteenth-century America and to their patients as well? 2 These remedies worked, Rosenberg pointed out, within a framework of pathologies of imbalance— pathologies that were still humoral, however far they might have evolved from classical humoral tradition. It was a framework that integrated body and mind, pictured health as the maintenance of a delicate equilibrium in the face of all manner of disturbing influences on the constitution. Perhaps most importantly, it was a framework in which the ill person shared the responsibility for defining his or her condition. In this paper I focus on that framework as it existed in Britain in the same period, and on another component: its conventions with regard to explaining the causes of disease. By exploring how aetiological questions were handled both in general medical textbooks and in works on particular diseases or particular epidemics, we can, I hope, recognize more
Vaccination and the Body Politic
1969
Nadja Durbach’s Bodily Matters is an engaging study about the politics of anti-vaccinationism in England from 1853 to 1907. Durbach explores anti-vaccinationism on its own terms, questioning the validity of statistics to discern the efficacy of the practice, and locating vaccination as an “invasive, insanitary, and sometimes disfiguring procedure” (p. 3). In Durbach’s story, the state is the representative of coercive policies of compulsory vaccination, fought against by the combined forces of medical, social, and religious dissent. These were alternative healers, liberal individualists, and the poor whose bodies were the targets of the offending legislation. The groups that argued against vaccination did so from convictions about society, politics, and the body that could be violently at odds with those making policy and those wielding the “parliamentary lancet.” Durbach convincingly shows how the anti-vaccination movement was fundamental to debates about medicine, the state, and s...