Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 (review)

Antivaccinationism was one of the unjustly forgotten popular movements of the nineteenth century. It was strong in Germany, but nowhere more so than in Britain. Indeed, so resonant are its echoes that such attitudes persist today in the skeptical approach to MMR vaccination still nurtured in certain circles in England. Despite the absence of persuasive evidence, parents believe that the triple jab of measles, mumps, and rubella may cause autism. Such fears have recently claimed their first victims: children suffering from autoimmune diseases who could not be vaccinated and had to rely on herd immunity, but—betrayed by the selfishness of their playmates' parents—died of measles.

Despite the continuing importance of antivaccinationism, the nineteenth-century movement in Britain has not previously received adequate historical treatment. Nadia Durbach's book accomplishes this: it is a sympathetic, nuanced, well-researched, and clearly written account of antivaccinationism in its historical context. Although Durbach tends to portray the movement as one of an oppressed popular constituency against the machinations of public authority and scientific orthodoxy, she is subtle and imaginative enough to realize that this will not suffice—and so she also touches on the religious roots of protest, the geographical localism of the movement, and the self-contradictory gender politics of antivaccination, relying as they did sometimes on a maternalist concern for the welfare of children, other times on a paternalist insistence that the husband and father take decisions concerning his family that were now claimed by the state. Durbach's attempt to frame the protest in terms of "body politics," though trendy, adds only modest insight to a topic that obviously, but therefore also trivially, concerned bodies. The delineation of parallels between antivaccination and ideas of the "gothic body" starts imaginatively, but quickly subsides into a conventional account of the more unpleasant aspects of the movement's ideology: its fixation on blood purity, its racism, its fears of contamination and degeneracy.

Most important, Bodily Matters makes clear the roots of antivaccination in the peculiar medical worldview of its adherents. This was a mélange of different and sometimes mutually contradictory ideas. Antivaccinators often believed that smallpox was caused by irregular habits and noxious environments, and that the only cure lay with changes in diet or surroundings. They were often allied with various practices that, during this period, were slowly being forced by the accumulating victories of scientific medicine to identify themselves as alternative or heterodox. Anachronistically, Durbach presents vaccination as "orthodox" medicine (p. 17) against which rose up the populist forces of alternative therapies. Yet, in fact, at the time that vaccination was first being enforced, what now seems like orthodox medicine was the avant garde, while the antivaccinationists spoke for inherited orthodoxy. Moreover, as Durbach herself shows (pp. 28–29), during this period a division into ortho- and heterodox medicine is difficult, and even more complicated is the assignation of any particular characteristics to either category. Alternative medicine could be as harsh, "unnatural," and interventionist as any, while "orthodox" medicine, as with vaccination, often built empirically on folk remedies and customs. When the American Institute of Homeopathy was founded in 1844, it was the country's first national medical organization, followed after only three years by the AMA—so which is the orthodoxy? An overly facile analogy, in other words, is drawn here between heterodox medicine and heterodox politics.

An insistence on coming back, in the final analysis, to politics, even though Bodily Matters itself contains the empirical material for a more imaginative explanation, is the book's main weakness. In order apparently to fulfill the mandate of the series in which it appears of bringing a "radical" perspective to bear on antivaccination, the movement is here portrayed ultimately as one of a popular, indeed working-class, resistance to a scientific orthodoxy imposing its dogmatic tenets through a collaborating state.

Antivaccination was a popular movement, to be sure, but largely in...