Nadja Durbach, Bodily Matters

Bodily Matters

Durbach, Nadja, Bodily Matters: The Anti-vaccination Movement in England, 1853–1907. xiii + 276 pp., figs., notes, bibl., index. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8223-3423-2; $22.95 (paper)

Bodily Matters is Nadja Durbach’s examination of the English anti-vaccination movement from 1853 to 1907. These years correspond to the period of compulsory smallpox vaccination in the British Isles. In the book, Durbach gives scant attention to the motivations and rationales of pro-vaccination elements of the government and medical community, and clearly her intent is not to weigh the relative merits of competing arguments of the time. Instead, Durbach aims to contextualize and respectfully elevate the positions, convictions, and fears of vaccination objectors. She succeeds in her goals by identifying a pattern of unjust treatment of the working class and by presenting the strong imagery of medical case histories and of anti-vaccination propaganda. Bodily Matters is an engaging, well-written work that explores issues of body integrity, class, and gender, and it emphasizes the incongruity between professional and popular notions of health.

The vaccination resistance movement in England existed on both local and national levels. Some early protest organizations were aligned with the cooperative movement, in which consumer groups sought to avoid exploitation by establishing community-owned stores and espousing independent thought and action (pp. 42–43). Protest groups also overlapped with trade unionists, who objected to employer-mandated vaccination, as well as with religious dissenters who preached the primacy of personal conscience. Still other groups derived support from women’s rights and universal-male suffrage campaigners.

Vaccination objectors appealed to a variety of intellectual and emotional arguments in their cause. For one, most objectors viewed vaccination as inherently dangerous. The procedure involved cutting multiple places on the arm and smearing lymph matter into the cuts. Children were known to become seriously ill following vaccination, sometimes developing putrid sores that led to painful death. Besides fearing permanent harm to their children, objecting parents resented the state’s infringement of sovereignty over their children. Concomitant with middle-class laissez-faire economic ideals that arose with industrialization, objecting parents argued that they, not the state, were better positioned to decide which medical treatments were best for their children.

In the book, Durbach capably elucidates nineteenth-century popular notions of health maintenance. She quotes intemperance leaders and alternative medical practitioners such as hydropaths who taught that disease could be avoided by keeping sanitary living environments, eating healthy foods (Durbach notes that vegetarianism is an allied movement), and abstaining from alcohol and tobacco. Clean living was believed to promote a strong constitution and to preserve blood “purity.” Given these notions of health, it is obvious why objectors viewed vaccination as diametrically opposed to good health. Not only was smearing pox residue into an open wound counterintuitive but it horrified some due to its “unnaturalness.” The unequal treatment of the lower economic classes was embodied by the arm-to-arm vaccination method, in which lymph was cultivated from recently vaccinated infants for use in other children. This sharing of bodily fluids fostered fears of miscegenation and the capricious spreading of venereal diseases, idiocy, and other maladies, but it was free to the public and usually the only method that laborers could afford. Members of the middle class could afford private vaccinators who used the “safer” method involving calf lymph, but even this method was abhorrent to many objectors. To mix animal fluids with human blood risked monstrosity, the spectre of which was raised in H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau.

According to Durbach, the state enforcement of vaccination laws in England almost exclusively targeted working-class families. Vaccinators, who were compensated on a per-procedure basis, were motivated to identify non-compliers. Judicial officers hounded these parents with notices and threats. When a working father was tried in court for non-compliance or was subsequently imprisoned, the lost wages created additional hardships. Public resistance to the vaccination regime took a variety of forms. To avoid detection, some parents provided false addresses on birth registrations. Some families moved residences. Anti-vaccination leagues mobilized collective support to assist prosecuted families; for example, by paying fines and court costs and by purchasing seized personal property at auction to return to the owner. These groups also staged parades for recently released prisoners to honor their “martyrdom” for the cause.

By 1907 opposition to vaccination laws had grown sufficiently enough that Parliament provided for an effective conscientious-objector clause. Some activists still aimed for full repeal of compulsory vaccination, but the revised system appeased enough people that the movement waned. It did not disappear completely, however. In her concluding chapter, Durbach connects the issue of conscientious objection in the anti-vaccination movement and in the conscriptions for the Great War. She also references activist groups who question the safety of present-day medical practices, specifically the mumps, measles, rubella (MMR) vaccination. Here, as in the rest of her historical study, Durbach presents these citizen concerns in an objective, non-condescending manner. This posture seems to be in deliberate opposition to some historiography and contemporary analysis in which such notions have been marginalized as the product of an “uneducated fringe.”

In summary, Bodily Matters is an absorbing, well-researched, and occasionally moving and disturbing book. It is recommended to anyone interested in the history of medicine or the social history of Victorian England.