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Gerald Markowitz, Karen L. Walloch. The Antivaccine Heresy: Jacobson v. Massachusetts and the Troubled History of Compulsory Vaccination in the United States., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 244–245, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.244
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In 1905 the United States Supreme Court issued the landmark decision Jacobson v. Massachusetts that has provided the basis for the broad police powers that local and state public-health officials possess even down to today. Karen L. Walloch’s The Antivaccine Heresy uses this famous case as the basis for a reexamination of the losing side in that case, providing some of the fullest and most detailed analyses of the anti–smallpox vaccination coalition and movement. While focused on Massachusetts, and specifically on Boston and Cambridge, Walloch seeks to complicate the story of the smallpox vaccination controversy at the turn of the twentieth century. As a result, she has produced a sophisticated and meticulously researched study of the contending forces and ideologies that surrounded the debate about vaccination.
The author criticizes historians who dismiss the views and activities of those opposed to vaccination as “irrational and antigovernment cranks” (216). Rather, she documents not only that these opponents had rational justifications for their views, but also that they were effective because they based their arguments on traditional American values. Specifically, Walloch shows that, at a time of conflicting medical ideologies and theories, the antivaccinationists did not succumb to the emerging scientific-medicine consensus that was being promulgated by medical elites, but rather sought to preserve a multiplicity of approaches (113–114). Opponents also stressed the anti-democratic nature of compulsion and coercion. In addition, compulsory vaccination was denounced as an attack on individuals’ “bodily integrity,” one that “asserted unwarranted control over the internal private space of the body” (170, 190).
