The nineteenth century saw unprecedented state regulation of public health as advances in medicine were deployed against some of the major causes of death and moral decay. At the same time concerns grew about excessive state control and public surveillance in matters previously regarded as private and personal, as people saw the same mechanisms that were used to punish crime being used to regulate non-criminal behaviours.
In 1840, the British government offered free smallpox vaccinations to all citizens. In 1853 vaccination was made compulsory for all children born in England and Wales. Every child, whose health permitted, was to be vaccinated within three months of birth either by the public vaccinator of the district, or a medical professional. Parents were fined 20 shillings for failing to have their children vaccinated and faced up to three months imprisonment or have their possessions seized and sold if they failed to pay.
Some groups however, believed that the Vaccination Acts were a breach of civil liberties: They declared they were fighting for the right to manage their own, and their children’s bodies. This unpopularity was made worse by the fact that it had become associated with stigma surrounding the New Poor Law. Poor Law Guardians were initially appointed to oversee the vaccinations, locate the non-compliers and organise public vaccinations.
There were also suspicions, not wholly unfounded, that the procedure was unsafe. In the early days, the procedure was often unsanitary and public vaccinations did not have to be carried out by a medical professional.
Other concerns were religiously charged, and founded in the fact that the vaccination came from cowpox and the belief that it was ‘unchristian’ to contaminate one’s child with a ‘disease of the beast’.
Further Acts followed; the 1867 Act introduced continuous and cumulative penalties, so that a parent found guilty could be fined again and again. It also made it compulsory for children under the age of fourteen to be vaccinated, and encouraged the notification of default by doctors by providing financial inducements for compliance and penalties for failure.
The law was further tightened in 1871 when the appointment of vaccination officers became compulsory for all local authorities. A smallpox epidemic raged throughout Europe in 1871, coinciding with a House of Commons Select Committee set up to investigate the compulsory system.
In May 1883, the Western Daily Press reported that Mr. Neale of Cotham Park in Bristol was fined £7 13s for failing to have six of his children vaccinated. His first child was apparently made seriously ill by the vaccination. The report revealed that he had previously been fined about £90 plus costs for the same children.
Large scale popular resistance to compulsory vaccination came after the legislation of 1867, with the emergence of over 200 organisations by the 1890s. Resistance to compulsory vaccination had occurred from the outset. John Gibbs, a ‘hydropathic operator’ who owned an establishment in Barking, published a pamphlet in 1854 called ‘Our Medical Liberties’ claiming that vaccination, besides not preventing smallpox, caused bodily degeneration, conveyed unwanted diseases, and resulted in skin ulcers and death. His cousin, Richard Gibbs, helped to found the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League in 1867 after the extension of the law. This became the most influential of the various Anti-Vaccination organisations.
In 1880, William Tebb established the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination, and began a journal, the ‘Vaccination Inquirer’, in 1879. in 1896, Tebb amalgamated the provincial and London organisations into one National Anti-Vaccination League.
Provincial associations were also active. Henry Pitman, (brother of Isaac Pitman, inventor of Shorthand), for example, tried to popularise the cause with working-class parents from 1869 in Manchester and similar groups operated in Bath, Bristol, Gloucester and many other areas.
The Anti-Vaccination groups were not merely sources of academic debate. They were vociferous in their beliefs and routinely published in newspaers and pamphlets. They also took to the streets. In one such incident in Bath, an “Open-Air Indignation Meeting” was held..
“In the afternoon the goods of 12 persons seized under distress warrants, were put up for sale by public auction … and were ultimately knocked down to Mr. William Harbutt, the secretary of the society, who bought them in for presentation to their previous owners.”
This was a common tactic in defence of those penalised by the vaccination laws and who had had their goods seized for non-payment of fines.. This incident appears to have been largely trouble free though rowdy, although at a similar auction in Tetbury the auctioneers had to be protected by the police from the protestors determined to halt proceedings by force.
By the 1880s, the movement had a well-organised and generously funded defence committee who offered legal and financial aid to parents facing prosecution under the Vaccination Acts. The Western Daily Press reported in November 1894 that the defence committee had ‘been able to render much assistance to members’ of the Anti-Vaccination League against whom legal proceedings had been taken‘.
As for the other side of the debate, the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, John Simon, was not sure what to make of the Anti-Vaccinators. His 1857 treatise laying out the rationale for state-enforced vaccination described Gibbs and his ilk as ‘a kind of literary fossil’, reminding one of
‘something so utterly unpractical, ante-diluvian, and extinct, that the last act I would think of committing against them, would be to argue’.
He undertook a major inquiry in 1857, in which he
“endeavoured to represent what was then the experience of the civilised world as to the use of vaccination, and as to the validity of reproaches against it”.
He found cause to
“rejoice to have had the opportunity which that duty of 1857 afforded me, to collect and record so much conclusive evidence regarding Jenner’s incomparable benefaction to mankind.”
Newly developed codes of professional propriety limited doctors and surgeons to respectable channels of influence and ruled out participating in disputes with critics. One doctor’s pamphlet stated that condescending to disprove these ‘utterly irrational or intellectually dishonest’ arguments would be ‘inconsistent with [his] self-respect’. In fact, Simon suggested that it was not the doctor’s position to wrestle with distrust. Rather, it was the business of the law to conquer the people’s indolence, credulity and apathy.
Doctors generally chose to attribute rising non-vaccination rates to the ‘pernicious propaganda’ circulated by organised groups. This stream of pamphlets, tracts, leaflets, and magazines was often denounced as another unintended evil of mass literacy, akin to the risqué novels, obscenity, and other moral poisons ushered in by the cheap press.
Anti-vaccination literature was plentiful, and pitched to appeal to the people. There was no real equivalent for vaccination supporters. Popular texts written by doctors defending vaccination did appear, but these were infrequent, unsystematic, and generally unremarkable. They also typically missed the mark in appealing to a popular readership.
The government also did not see much of a role for itself in the growing controversy. Local authorities could use public funds for literature promoting vaccination, but few did.
Medical opinion continued to be divided largely due to the fact that although vaccines had been proven to work, there was no understanding of the science behind vaccination at least until the 1900s, when scientists such as Emil von Behring and Paul Ehrlich began to develop the theory of antibodies. Throughout the century, statistics of smallpox deaths among those who had been vaccinated and those who had not varied greatly depending on the source.
In 1887 the Gloucester Board of Guardians voted to cease all prosecutions of parents for non-vaccination, and within a decade nearly 85% of children in Gloucester went unvaccinated. The rapid rise of smallpox in early 1896 led city officials to issue a statement recommending the vaccination of unprotected children; it was enough to enrage local anti-vaccinationists. A large indignation meeting was treated to a two-hour speech by Dr Walter Hadwen, an agent of the National Anti-Vaccination League famed for his gripping oratory.
The outbreak in Gloucester quickly grew out of hand. By early April, with public life grinding to a halt and the city’s situation producing anxiety throughout the country, the parish Guardians voted to resume enforcement of the Vaccination Law. During the height of the panic, a special committee headed by Dr Francis Bond went door-to-door and performed nearly 35,000 vaccinations in just two months (out of a population of 42,000). Employers demanded that employees were vaccinated and according to the Gloucester Board of Guardians:
‘though some of their employees resented the pressure that was put upon them to discard their prejudices for the public good, the great majority readily accepted the offer of free vaccination which was made to them.’
It suddenly transformed Gloucester from one of the worst to the best-vaccinated town in England. There was probably no record anywhere, Bond wrote, ‘of so rapid, so extensive, and so momentous a conversion on any matter not directly connected with a question of religious belief’. He and others credited the mass vaccination campaign with bringing the epidemic to a close.
The Gloucester epidemic gave birth to the Jenner Society. The Jenner Society’s prospectus, issued in April 1896 at the height of the crisis, stated that the primary objective would be counteracting ‘the mischievous efforts so persistently made to discredit the name and work’ of Jenner and ‘bring[ing] home again to the mind of the nation, in a time of growing forgetfulness of his great discovery, the immense benefit he conferred by it upon mankind’.
Bond’s colleague in London, Dr Albert Cope, argued that the last hope for smallpox vaccination in England resided in ‘systematic, organized education on the subject’. This meant ‘plain and unmistakable presentation of the truth about vaccination’, and it necessarily involved ‘a persistent warfare against misrepresentations – if not worse – of the anti-vaccinationists’.
Bond found that the bulk of his duties as the Jenner Society’s honorary secretary consisted of personal correspondence to newspapers disputing the statements of anti-vaccinationists. It was a form of engagement he had honed in the Gloucestershire and Bristol press as a sharp-witted commentator on local sanitary matters and Home Rule debates.
He proved an extremely prolific contributor to the debate, regularly publishing more than one hundred letters to the editor per year, many of considerable length and involving multiple exchanges. Bond reported that in 1898 over 250 letters and articles by Jenner Society members had appeared in newspapers across the kingdom.
In 1889, a Royal Commission was appointed to carry out another inquiry as a result of political pressure from anti-vaccinators. There was support for an inquiry from both sides with those in support of vaccination advocating for an inquiry ‘in full confidence that it will come out of the inquiry unscathed, and, indeed, largely strengthened.’ The inquiry took seven years, during which many Boards of Guardians halted prosecution, (though Bath did not).
The final report of the Royal Commission declared smallpox vaccination overwhelmingly safe and effective, but suggested that better results might be had if enforcement were made more conciliatory. Bond put considerable effort into stressing the point: the principle of a vaccine mandate was still sound; the problem was that its uncompromising application had become simply ‘impracticable’. His main concern was that prosecution and punishment of refractory parents only lent fuel to vaccine opponents.
A new Vaccination Act was passed in 1898, relaxing the terms of compulsion by introducing the possibility of conscientious objection. If parents facing prosecution could prove to a magistrate that they had defaulted out of genuine disbelief in vaccination they could be absolved. It fell to the magistrates’ court to distinguish between conscientious objection and mere neglect.
Jenner Society memoranda unapologetically described it as a means of outmanoeuvring the National Anti-Vaccination League, essentially depriving this small band of noisy extremists of the platform given to them by prosecutions and thereby insulating the majority of parents from their cries of martyrdom.
By this time the major London and national newspapers had generally closed their columns to anti-vaccinationists, but this was not the case with much of the provincial press. Bond complained that their editors foolishly treated vaccination as if it were still a fairly divided controversy and asked whether they should accept the responsibility of allowing discourse that was ‘in the highest degree mischievous’.
References
- John, Holly. ‘A long career of brutality to the poor’: Popular resistance to the Vaccination Acts in the nineteenth century South West. Regional Historian. March 2021.
https://regionalhistorianuwe.org/2021/03/06/a-long-career-of-brutality-to-the-poor-popular-resistance-to-the-vaccination-acts-in-the-nineteenth-century-south-west/ - Wolfe, Robert M. & Sharp, Lisa K. Anti-vaccinationists past and present. BMJ. 2002 Aug 24. 325(7361). p.430-2.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1123944/ - Newsom Kerr, Matthew L. “An ‘Arsenal for the Supply of Ammunition for the Defence of Vaccination’: The Jenner Society and Anti-Anti-Vaccinationism in England, 1896–1906.” Medical History 69(1), 2025. p76–98.
https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2024.28 - Porter, D, & R Porter. “The politics of prevention: anti-vaccinationism and public health in nineteenth-century England.” Medical history, 32(3) 1988. p.231-52. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1139881/
- Report of the Bath anti-compulsory vaccination society. (Annually). 1889, 1891, 8th report, 1893. Bristol Central Library. BL 13 F 1 [Bristol Room]
- Bath and the vaccination act. Large meeting at the guildhall, &c., &c. Bath, 1884. Bristol Central Library. BL 14 G 1 [Bristol Room]
- The vaccination war at Bath. Bath, 1884. Bristol Central Library. BL 14 G 1 [Bristol Room]
- Evidences of the utility of vaccine inoculation, intended for the information of parents. Dedicated (by permission) to the right hononorable (sic) lord Somerville. Bath, 1801. Bristol Central Library. BL 15 C 1 [Bristol Room]