Lot of interesting information, but the slanted perspective and obnoxious loaded language make it hard to read and make me trust the author less.This was the end of the 19th century: Medicine barely grasped germ theory. The author's admiration of anti-vaccinators no longer makes sense *over a hundred years later* when vaccines are far more advanced and safer. In that regard, we are not in the same situation as we were in 1899. (And I say this as someone with a close relative who is immune suppressed and has no choice but to depend on herd immunity for protection, which is why I get flu shots even though they make me feel like crud for awhile.) "Using the flawed late nineteenth-century census returns to bolster their case, white experts claimed that the health of African Americans had plummeted since emancipation. This proved, the authorities claimed, that blacks had benefited from slavery and were so ill suited to freedom that they were now destined for extinction.""Frequent bouts with naysayers led some officers to wish, in published government health reports, for the appearance of a "fool-killer": a fatal case of smallpox. As one North Carolina official put it, the best cure for a doubting public was "a good first-class case of small-pox." "...many citizens saw no reason to elevate the medical opinion of a health official above their own.""Communities of cotton mill workers, who notwithstanding their claims to white privilege were among the most exploited and marginalized southern laboring people, were deeply distrustful of medical authority." "But the essence of the plan was to mobilize African Americans at the grassroots to fight a deadly infectious disease.""Before setting sail, Balmis inoculated the first child with vaccine; as the expedition made its way across the seas, the doctor kept the "precious fluid" alive by vaccinating each child in succession, with pus from the vaccine sore of the previous child, in a continuous arm-to-arm relay." "...the board refrained from endorsing any make of vaccine and offered no advice as to how anyone might distinguish the "trustworthy" from the more dubious products on the market. Trust was a commercial transaction, not a public dispensation." "The vaccine crisis seemed to require a new role for the state in controlling production... The disasters in St. Louis and Camden convinced many physicians and health officials that vaccine production had been left to the free market for too long. "The lesson we have principally to learn from these catastrophes," said Dr. Dalton of New York, "is the necessity of eliminating commercialism from matters pertaining to public health." "Vaccination should be the seal on the passport of entrance to public schools, to the voters' tooth, to the box of the juryman, and to every position of duty, privilege, profit or honor in the gift of either the State or the Nation." "As health officials and police tightened enforcement of vaccination at public schools, industrial work sites, and railroad depots, Americans started forging scars... "Get a little strong nitric acid," advised the Colombus, Ohio-based journal Medical Talk for the Home. "Take a match or a toothpick, dip it into the acid, so that a drop of the acid clings to the end of the match. Carefully transfer the drop to the spot on the arm where you with the sore to appear. Let the drop stand a few minutes on the flesh. Watch it closely." After a few minutes, the skin, stinging, turned red..."This sore will gradually heal by producing a scar so nearly resembling vaccination that the average physician cannot tell the difference." Health officials condemned the "vile crime" as the handiwork of a few antivaccination fanatics. But these intimate acts of civil disobedience were part of something larger, a groundswell of popular opposition to "state medicine." "The presence of smallpox in any community endangers business as well as life," said the times.""It may sound absurd to contemporary ears, but antivaccinationists were in fact more conscious than were most progressives of the coercive potential of the new interventionist state. In a few short years, American eugenicists would be persuading state legislatures to enact compulsory sterilization laws for the "feeble-minded" epileptics, and other people deemed "unfit" to reproduce. The eugenicists' chief legal precedent for their measures would be compulsory vaccination."
What do You think about Pox: An American History (2011)?
Really good facts about Pox in the early states, but it drags on and on and on... I felt
—shanu
Heard the author interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air... Very intriguing.
—Mely2009
fantastic history - readable and accessible and so current
—mybooks
It was an interesting read, albeit tedious at times.
—pachola
Started out ok but got boring and repetitive.
—gina
