The news is rife with fear. Influenza is abroad. Worse still, measles is
said to be making a big comeback. But disease is not the only problem. The
flames of fear are being fanned by the opponents of
vaccination. Measles, for example, is entirely preventable, but remains among
us because of concerns that the vaccine prophylactic is worse than the
disease. The thoroughly debunked notion that the MMR
vaccine causes autism is still at large, and with it a
cluster of nebulous fears of Big Pharma conspiracies and the risks of
contaminating children with manufactured diseases. Yet such fears are not new.
The fear of vaccination is as old as vaccination itself. Edward Jenner’s method
for preventing smallpox summoned the spectre of sinful flesh. Vaccination was
akin to bestiality; the vaccine itself was a beastly sexual disease.
The original ‘vaccine’, named after the cow from which it came, was a
massive step forward in smallpox prevention. Until then, children were commonly
inoculated with smallpox itself, which usually resulted in a light dose of the
disease. Inoculation, however, killed many who underwent it, and left the rest
fully contagious. Nevertheless, when Jenner’s Inquiry into the matter
finally appeared in 1798, explaining how an animal disease would prevent a
human one without resorting to dangerous inoculation, it attracted as much
odium as it garnered support.
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| Wellcome Library, London |
James Gillray’s popular 1802 print of the bestial effects of cowpox strikes the modern viewer as ridiculous: cows
emerging from heads, trunks and limbs. Jenner stands centrally, penetrating the
arm of a terrified patient with ‘vaccine pock, hot from ye cow’. The patient
has previously been ‘opened’ by a special brew. To the right, those already
vaccinated undergo a series of horrors caused by contamination with animal
disease. The image is shot through with innuendo about sexual transgression
(communing with the beast) and venereal disease (syphilis).The pregnant hag on
the extreme right seems at once to vomit and give birth to bovine progeny,
while behind her another matron sprouts the satyr-like horns of the beast. The
breeches of a bumpkin are breached. The faces of others are marked by monstrous
eruptions of ‘the pox’.
The image reflects the intensity of the debates and fears around
vaccination. Gillray’s caption directs us to the publications of the
‘Anti-Vaccine Society’: not a formal body, but a reference to Jenner’s
principal opponents. The prominent physician Benjamin Moseley was the culprit in
chief, responding to the ‘Cowmania’ in 1800 with a series of concerns. While Jenner
had styled cowpox Variolae Vaccinae, smallpox of the cow, Moseley called
it Lues Bovilla, bovine syphilis, with all the long-term mental and
nervous consequences of the human ‘pox’. He asked:
Can any person say
what may be the consequence of introducing the Lues Bovilla, a bestial
humour – into the human frame, after a long lapse of years? Who knows,
besides, what ideas may rise in the course of time, from a brutal fever
having excited its incongruous impressions on the brain? Who knows, also, but
that the human character may undergo strange mutations from quadrupedan
sympathy and that some modern Pasiphaë may rival the fables of old?
His classical reference might pass us by, but the invocation of
bestiality would have been obvious to the educated in 1800. Pasiphaë, cursed by
Poseidon, had copulated with a bull. Having built a wooden cow and covered it
with cowhide, she had hidden inside it in order to receive her desired mate.
She later gave birth to the Minotaur. Moseley played not only on the taint of
venereal disease, but also on the fragility and sanctity of the human, warning
of a hybrid and brutal progeny. Vaccination was not only dangerous, it was
immoral.
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| Wellcome Library, London |
The search was on for proof of the bestial consequences of being
inseminated with animal disease. In 1805 Dr Rowley, who derived his living from
the impugned technique of inoculating with smallpox, claimed to have found it
and to have showed it to Moseley. Moseley marked the animalistic transformation
and Rowley published exaggerated
portraits of Gillray-esque figures, supposedly drawn from life. The ‘Oxfaced
boy’ was presented as tangible proof of the brutal result of bestial infection.
Beware the ‘modern chimera’, went the cry.
Vaccination did not properly shake the fear of bestial venereal disease
until the end of the nineteenth century, with some still adamantly
claiming an identity between cowpox and syphilis. From 1853, responsibility for
administering the vaccine in England was put in the hands of the Poor Law
Guardians. The association of vaccination with the workhouse caused a
resurgence of the syphilitic fear among the well-to-do. Jenner’s innovation
helped fuel concerns. After an initial vaccination from the cow, he realised
that it could then be carried on from arm to arm. The matter from one
vaccination pustule could be collected and inserted into the arm of the next
child. What respectable mother would take her child to be contaminated with matter
drawn from the arm of a ne’er-do-well? Cowpox was one thing, but what about all
the other diseases that riddled the poor? The class system relied on bodies
being kept apart. The State’s insistence on bringing them together seemed to
risk the fabric of civilisation, even if the risk of disease was actually minute. While most doctors
believed that cowpox was not related to syphilis, how could they be sure that
the vaccine wasn’t tainted with the diseases of the immoral when incubated in
the arms of the poor? Better to risk smallpox than to invite syphilis into
one’s children.
The fearful kept their children away and a preventable disease continued
to rage, often to epidemic proportions. The form taken by fear reflects the
preoccupations of the society that produces it. In our times it is a fear of
corporate medicine and its reckless advocates, forcing unknown risks upon our
children. For early nineteenth-century anti-vaccinists, cowpox vaccination was
a sordid and unholy communion, the embodiment of an immoral trinity: animality,
bestiality and sexually transmitted disease.
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