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Authors: Michael Willrich

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77
“Tried to Burn a Smallpox Hospital,”
NYT
, Mar. 10, 1901, 3. “Police at Orange Hospital,” ibid., Mar. 11, 1901, 3. “Smallpox Hospital Razed by Mob,” ibid., Mar. 12, 1901, 2. “Hospital Ruins Set on Fire,” ibid., Mar. 13, 1901, 2.
78
“The Outrage at Orange,” ibid., Mar. 13, 1901, 8. “Orange's Smallpox Hospital,” ibid., Mar. 14, 1901, 3. “Plea of an Orange Resident,” ibid., Mar. 15, 1901, 8.
79
Potts v. Breen
, 167 Ill. 67, 76 (1897).
80
Jack London,
War of the Classes
(New York: Macmillan Co., 1905), 276–77.
81
Ibid. Jack London,
The Road
(New York: Macmillan, 1907, 1916), 74–97, esp. 90.
82
London,
The Road
, 90.
SEVEN:THE ANTIVACCINATIONISTS
1
“The Smallpox Versus Dr. Pfeiffer,”
MN
, Feb. 22, 1902, 363. “The Case of Dr. Pfeiffer,”
BMSJ
, 146 (1902): 201–11.
2
“Quarantine More Rigid,”
BG
, Nov. 26, 1901, 4. Durgin repeated his challenge at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts boards of health; “Smallpox Talk,” ibid., Jan. 31, 1902, 2.
3
BOSHD 1901
, 43–45. “Smallpox in Roxbury,”
BG
, May 18, 1901, 9. “First Death from Smallpox,” ibid., Oct. 27, 1901, 16. “Boston's Weekly Health Report,” ibid., Nov. 3, 1901, 16. “Ninety Percent Not Vaccinated,” ibid., Nov. 23, 1901, 11. “Eight New Cases,” ibid., Nov. 25, 1901, 8. “Virus Squad Out,” ibid., Nov. 18, 1901, 7. See Michael Albert et al., “The Last Smallpox Epidemic in Boston and the Vaccination Controversy, 1901–1902,”
NEJM
, 344 (Feb. 1, 2001), 375–79; and Michael Albert et al., “Smallpox Manifestations and Survival during the Boston Epidemic of 1901 to 1903,”
AIM
, 137 (Dec. 17, 2002): 993–1000. In a study of surviving medical files from the Southampton Street hospital, Albert et al. concluded that “the Boston epidemic was caused by the classic variola major form” of the smallpox virus. Ibid., 993.
4
“Vaccination Is the Curse of Childhood,” antivaccination circular distributed during the epidemic of smallpox in Boston, 1901, Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University,
http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/5817279
, accessed Jul. 8, 2009. Samuel W. Abbott, “Legislation with Reference to Small-Pox and Vaccination,”
MC
, 19 (1902), 163.
5
“Retirement of Dr. Samuel H. Durgin from the Boston Board of Health,”
AJPH
, 2 (May 1912): 384–95; C. V. Chapin, “Doctor Samuel H. Durgin,” ibid., 357–58. “Vaccination Is the Curse.”
6
“Pfeiffer Yet Alive,”
BG
, Feb. 10, 1902, 1. “Wonderful, But True,” advertisement, ibid., Jul. 22, 1900, 22. “His Long Fast Broken,” ibid., Mar. 27, 1900, 6. “Dr. Pfeiffer Protests,” ibid., Apr. 29, 1901, 8. “Dr. Pfeiffer Has Smallpox,” ibid., Feb. 9, 1902, 1. “In the Interest of Science, Boston Physician Fasts a Month,”
SFC
, Aug. 24, 1901, 6. Pfeiffer's interest in free speech made him known to the radical Emma Goldman, who nursed him in 1904, when he was stricken with pneumonia. Emma Goldman to Alexander Berkman, Jan. 18, 1904, in
Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years: Making Speech Free, 1902–1909
, ed. Candace Falk (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), vol. 2: 129. On
Our Home Rights
, see “Exchanges,”
Metaphysical Magazine
, Jan. 1902, 77–78.
Tenth Census of the United States
(1880): Schedule 1—Population: Franklin, Gloucester, New Jersey, Enumeration District No. 92.
7
“Its Big Benefits,”
BG
, Dec. 20, 1901, 5. “Dr. John H. McCollom,”
NYT
, Jun. 15, 13. Advertisement for Harvard University Medical Department,
BMSJ
, 143 (Nov. 22, 1900), 34. See, e.g., C.-E. A. Winslow, “The Case for Vaccination,”
SCI
, new ser., 18 (1903): 101–7.
8
“Its Big Benefits.”
9
Pfeiffer to Durgin, quoted in “Smallpox Versus Dr. Pfeiffer,” 363.
10
Figures from
BOSHD 1901
, 44–45. Quote from
BOSHD 1902
, 36. “Smallpox Decreasing,”
BG
, Dec. 27, 1901, 7.
11
William N. Macartney,
Fifty Years a Country Doctor
(New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1938), 245. “Pfeiffer Yet Alive,”
BG
, Feb. 10, 1902, 1. “Funeral Friday of Dr. Paul Carson,” ibid., Nov. 28, 1923, 6.
12
Commonwealth of Massachusetts,
The Journal of the Senate for the Year 1902
(Boston, 1902), 333. “Dr. Pfeiffer Has Smallpox.”
13
“Current Comment,”
PMJ
, 9 (Jan. 4, 1902), 5. Macartney,
Fifty Years
, 246.
KBOH 1898–99
, 98.
California State Medical Journal
, January 1905, quoted in
FBOH 1904
, 114. Dr. James Nevins Hyde, “The Late Epidemic of Smallpox in the United States,”
PSM,
59 (Oct. 1901), 565. Michael Specter, “The Fear Factor,”
New Yorker
, Oct. 12, 2009, 39.
14
C. F. Nichols,
Vaccination: A Blunder in Poisons
, 61. “Opposed to Vaccination,”
NYT
, Mar. 29, 1902, 10. The threat of gunplay was a cliché of manly antivaccinationist speech. “I would stand in my door with a Winchester and a brace of six-shooters and forbid any such outrages upon my family, if it cost me my life. Every other free, brave man would do the same.” “Vaccination Tyranny,”
The Life
(“A monthly magazine of Christian metaphysics”), November 1905, 222–23.
15
Samuel W. Abbott,
The Past and Present Conditions of Public Hygiene and State Medicine in the United States
(Boston: Wright & Potter, 1900).
16
John Pitcairn,
Vaccination
(Anti-Vaccination League of Pennsylvania, 1907), 8. “John Pitcairn,”
NYT
, Jul. 23, 1916, 17. Following historian Steven Hahn, I am employing “a broad understanding of politics and the political that is relational and historical, and that encompasses collective struggles for what might be termed socially meaningful power.”
A Nation Under Our Feet,
3. See James C. Scott,
Domination and the Arts of Resistance.
17
“Will Ignore Leverson,”
NYT
, Aug. 17, 1900, 2. “Defies the Health Board,” ibid., Jan. 7, 1901, 2. “To Lead Fight on Vaccination,”
CT
, Jan. 6, 1901, A2. For a revealing study of late nineteenth-century libertarian radicalism in America, see David M. Rabban,
Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years,
esp. 23–76. On the transformation of governance in the Progressive Era, see Michael Willrich,
City of Courts.
18
“An Anti-Vaccination Riot in Montreal,”
MR
, 28 (Oct. 3, 1885), 380. Jeffrey D. Needell, “The Revolta Contra Vacina of 1904: The Revolt Against ‘Modernization' in Belle-Epoque Rio de Janeiro,”
Hispanic American Historical Review
, 60 (1980): 431–49.
19
“The Hon. Frederick Douglass,”
Vaccination Inquirer and Health Review
(London), 4 (Mar. 1883), 200. (Excerpt from an 1882 letter.) Paul Finkelman, “Garrison's Constitution: The Covenant of Death and How It Was Made,
Prologue
, 32 (Winter 2000),
http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2000/winter/garrisons-constitution-1.html
, accessed Jun. 12, 2009. Pfeiffer quoted in “Exchanges,” in
Metaphysical Magazine
, Jan. 1902, 77. J. W. Hodge,
The Vaccination Superstition: Prophylaxis to Be Realized Through the Attainment of Health, Not by the Propagation of Disease
(read before the Western New York Homeopathic Medical Society in Buffalo, Apr. 11, 1902), pamphlet held at CHM, 49. “Dr. Jas. M. Peebles Dies, Almost 100,”
NYT
, Feb. 16, 1922, 12. On British antivaccinationists and their appropriation of abolitionist rhetoric, see Durbach,
Bodily Matters
, esp. 83–84. The papers of William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., including two boxes of materials on “Anti-Vaccination” (Boxes 176 and 177), are part of GFP.
20
“The Anti-Vaccinationists,”
Northwestern Lancet
(Minneapolis), 21 (Feb. 1, 1901), 61. On the groups cited between 1879 and 1900, see Martin Kaufman, “The American Anti-Vaccinationists and Their Arguments,”
BHM
, 50 (1976), 465–66. Membership numbers for 1901 from
Brooklyn Daily Eagle Almanac
, 1901 (Brooklyn, 1901), 308. On California: “Question of Compulsory Vaccination,”
SFC
, Oct. 16, 1904, 7. On Colorado: “Medical legislation in Colorado.”
NYMJ
, Mar. 2, 1901, 378. On Connecticut: “The Anti-Vaccinators of Connecticut,” by “One Who Knows Them,”
American Medical Journal
, 31 (Jan. 1903), 9–12. On Massachusetts: see the Massachusetts Anti-Compulsory Vaccination Society's 1902 pamphlet, “A Vaccination Crusade and What There Is in It” GFP, Box 177, Folder 8. On Minnesota: “Sanitation and Legislation in Minnesota,”
St. Paul Medical Journal
, 5 (June 1903), esp. 456–57. On Missouri: “Vaccination Tyranny,”
The Life
(“A monthly magazine of Christian metaphysics”), November 1905, 222–23. On Pennsylvania: Pitcairn,
Vaccination
. On Utah: “Vaccination War On,”
SLH
, Jan. 24, 1901, 8. On Berkeley: “Bitter Fights Against Law,”
SFC
, Aug. 12, 1904, 4. On Cleveland: “Medical News,”
CMJ
, 2 (Mar. 1903), 164. On Milwaukee: Leavitt,
Healthiest City
, 94, 267. On St. Paul: J. W. Griggs, of the AntiVaccination Society of St. Paul, to William Lloyd Garrison, Oct. 26, 1904, GFP, Box 176, Folder 14. On the General Federation of Women's Clubs, see Theda Skocpol,
Protecting Soldiers and Mothers.
21
Leo Tolstoy to William Tebb, quoted in
Antivaccination News and Sanatorian
(New York), June 1895, 7, GFP, Box 176, Folder 11. [George] Bernard Shaw,
Collected Letters: 1874–1897
, ed. Dan H. Laurence (New York: Viking, 1965), 448. Alfred Russel Wallace, “Vaccination a Delusion—Its Penal Enforcement a Crime,” in idem,
The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Its Failures
(New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898), 232.
Vaccination
was edited by F. D. Blue and published for the Anti-Vaccination Society of America as “a journal of health, justice and liberty, that tells the truth about vaccination.”
The Liberator
was the official organ of the Minnesota Health League and billed as “a monthly journal devoted to freedom from medical superstition and tyranny.” Its editor, from 1902 to 1907, was Lora C. Little. See William Tebb,
Sanitation, Not Vaccination, the True Protection Against Small-Pox
, A Paper Read Before the Second International Vaccination Congress at Cologne, October 12th, 1881 (London, n.d.), CHM. “Antivaccination Movement,”
MN
, Feb. 11, 1899, 178. On Harry Weinberger's career as an antivaccination attorney during the 1910s, see HWP, esp. Box 21, Folders 3–11, Box 48, Folders 4–14.
22
Nadja Durbach, “ ‘They Might as Well Brand Us': Working-Class Resistance to Compulsory Vaccination in Victorian England,”
Social History of Medicine
, 13 (2000): 45–62. Durbach, “Class, Gender, and the Conscientious Objector to Vaccination, 1898–1907,”
Journal of British Studies
, 41 (2002): 58–83. Durbach,
Bodily Matters
, 197.
23
Martin Kauffman was perhaps the first scholar to point out the connection between antivaccinationism and the licensure issue in the United States. Kauffman mistakenly concluded that this was practically all there was to antivaccinationism, and he saw the licensure debate as largely a professional grievance, rather than a larger struggle for freedom of belief. Kauffman, “American Anti-Vaccinationists.”
24
R. Swinburne Clymer,
Vaccination Brought Home to You
(Terre Haute, IN: Frank D. Blue, 1904), 27. On the history of alternative medicine, see esp. John Duffy,
From Humors to Medical Science,
80–94; Johnston, ed.,
Politics of Healing
; and James C. Whorton,
Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
25
Massachusetts Sanitary Commission,
Report of a General Plan for the Promotion of Public and Personal Health
(Boston, 1850), 58.
26
Charles E. Rosenberg,
The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 161. Whorton,
Nature Cures
, 9–19.
27
Whorton,
Nature Cures
, 69, 133, esp. 134.
28
John Duffy,
The Sanitarians,
153. Whorton,
Nature Cures
, 135–39.
29
“American Medical Association Advising Compulsory Vaccination,”
Indiana Medical Journal
, 18 (May 1900), 470. See Leslie J. Reagan, “Law and Medicine,” in
The Cambridge History of Law in America
, ed. Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), vol. 3, 232–67.
30
Davidovitch, “Negotiating Dissent,” esp. 13. J. W. Hodge, “The Decline in Smallpox Which Preceded and Accompanied the Introduction of Vaccination—To What Was It Due?,”
Medical Visitor
, 19 (June 1903), 269. New England Eclectics quoted in Alexander Wilder, “From ‘Vaccination,' ”
Health
, Oct. 1901, 340. Clymer,
Vaccination Brought Home to You
. “The Late Dr. T. V. Gifford,”
Phrenological Journal
, 116 (Nov. 1903), 164.
31
Whorton,
Nature Cures
, 19. Johnston, “Introduction,” in
Politics of Healing
, 1–11.

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