Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853?1907

Bodily Matters

The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853?1907
 
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Date of Publication:
Number of Volumes: Cloth over boards
 
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Product details:

ISBN13:9780822334125
ISBN10:0822334127
Binding:Hardback
No. of pages:296 pages
Size:250x150x15 mm
Weight:540 g
Language:English
Illustrations: 12 illus.
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Long description:
Bodily Matters explores the anti-vaccination movement that emerged in England in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth in response to government-mandated smallpox vaccination. By requiring a painful and sometimes dangerous medical procedure for all infants, the Compulsory Vaccination Act set an important precedent for state regulation of bodies. From its inception in 1853 until its demise in 1907, the compulsory smallpox vaccine was fiercely resisted, largely by members of the working class who interpreted it as an infringement of their rights as citizens and a violation of their children’s bodies. Nadja Durbach contends that the anti-vaccination movement is historically significant not only because it was arguably the largest medical resistance campaign ever mounted in Europe but also because it clearly articulated pervasive anxieties regarding the integrity of the body and the role of the modern state.

Analyzing historical documents on both sides of the vaccination debate, Durbach focuses on the key events and rhetorical strategies of the resistance campaign. She shows that those for and against the vaccine had very different ideas about how human bodies worked and how best to safeguard them from disease. Individuals opposed to mandatory vaccination saw their own and their children’s bodies not as potentially contagious and thus dangerous to society but rather as highly vulnerable to contamination and violation. Bodily Matters challenges the notion that resistance to vaccination can best be understood, and thus easily dismissed, as the ravings of an unscientific “lunatic fringe.” It locates the anti-vaccination movement at the very center of broad public debates in Victorian England over medical developments, the politics of class, the extent of government intervention into the private lives of its citizens, and the values of a liberal society.



“All too often the large-scale resistance to compulsory vaccination in England has been treated as a quaint case study in ‘anti-modern’ or ‘irrational’ opposition to scientific progress. Nadja Durbach has made a key contribution to modern British history in particular and to the analysis of class culture more generally by rescuing this resistance to state medicine from what E. P. Thompson memorably termed ‘the enormous condescension of posterity.’”—George Behlmer, author of Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850–1940
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1. The Parliamentary Lancet 13

2. Fighting the “Babies’ Battle” 37

3. Populism, Citizenship, and the Politics of Victorian Liberalism 69

4. The Body Politics of Class Formation 91

5. Vampires, Vivisectors, and the Victorian Body 113

6. Germs, Dirt, and the Constitution 150

7. Class, Gender, and the Conscientious Objector 171

Conclusion 199

Notes 209

Bibliography 243

Index 269