Bodily Matters

Durbach Nadja Durbach

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clearly articulated pervasive anxieties regarding the integrity of the body and the role of the modern state.Analyzing historical documents on both sides of the vaccination debate, Durbach focuses on the key events and rhetorical strategies of the resistance campaign.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.

Sujets

• Médecine
• History of medicine

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 30 décembre 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822386506
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Bodily Matters

a b o ok i n t h e s e r i e s

Radical Perspectives

ARadical History Reviewbook series

Series editors:

Daniel J. Walkowitz, New York University

Barbara Weinstein, University of Maryland

at College Park

p

nadja durbach

Bodily Matters

the anti-vaccination

movement in engl and,

1853–1907

Duke University Press

Durham and London 2005

∫2005 Duke University Press

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper$

Designed by C. H. Westmoreland

Typeset in Scala with Octavian display

by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data appear on the last printed page

of this book.

to my mother and father

with love, affection, and gratitude . . .

about the series

History, as radical historians have long observed, cannot be severed from authorial subjectivity—indeed, from politics. Political concerns animate the questions we ask, the subjects on which we write. For over thirty years, the Radical History Reviewled in nurturing and advancing politically en- has gaged historical research. Radical Perspectives seeks to further the journal’s mission: Any author wishing to be in the series makes a self-conscious decision to associate her or his work with a radical perspective. To be sure, many of us are currently struggling with what it means to be a radical historian in the early twenty-first century, and this series is intended to provide some signposts for what we would judge to be radical history. It will o√er innovative ways of telling stories from multiple perspectives; compara- tive, transnational, and global histories that transcend conventional bounda- ries of region and nation; works that elaborate on the implications of the postcolonial move to ‘‘provincialize Europe’’; studies of the public in and of the past, including those that consider the commodification of the past; and histories that explore the intersection of identities such as gender, race, class, and sexuality with an eye to their political implications and complica- tions. Above all, this book series seeks to create an important intellectual space and discursive community to explore the very issue of what con- stitutes radical history. Within this context, some of the books published in the series may privilege alternative and oppositional political cultures, but all will be concerned with the way power is constituted, contested, used, and abused. Fears of anthrax, smallpox, and other forms of biological attack in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, and controversial calls for compulsory vaccination makeBodily Matters, Nadja Durbach’s study of the anti-vaccination movement in late Victorian and Edwardian England, a timely contribution to this series. As Durbach points out, major issues in the current debate—about the e√ectiveness and safety of vaccines, government abuse of power, and calls for alternative health practices—echo concerns from the anti-vaccination campaign of a century earlier.Bodily Matters lo- cates the English anti-vaccination movement at the center of a series of broad assaults by the liberal state on the private lives of its citizens. Fore-

shadowing the global reach of contemporary health crises, the book also places this movement in the context of international debates about the role of the modern state and the regulation of the body. Few today may question the value of immunization against smallpox, but Bodily Matters demon- strates that vaccination, the development and implementation of medical technologies, and the anti-vaccination movement they spawned, must still be understood as political acts.

Contents

p

Acknowledgments xi

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