A Short History of Anti-Vaxxers: The Early Years

by Jack Johnson 11.2021

Graphic illustration by Doug Dobey

It’s a sad truism that anti-vaccination movements have existed for as long as vaccination itself. You can start with the first vaccine in modern history for small pox or even before.  In fact, you could start with what we might think of as the UR vaccine, a process called variolation or inoculation. Rather than a medically engineered vaccine, to combat smallpox centuries ago people simply inhaled the dried scabs of smallpox lesions. Or they rubbed or injected pus from smallpox lesions into a healthy person’s scratched skin.  This process, though primitive, was used to effectively prevent smallpox in Africa, China, India and the Ottoman Empire.

According to Dr. Vincent Iannelli, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu originally introduced variolation to England, having witnessed the practice in Turkey in 1717. On her return to England, she had her four-year-old daughter variolated in the presence of physicians of the Royal Court in 1721. Later on that year an experimental variolation of six prisoners in Newgate Prison in London was conducted. In the experiment, six condemned prisoners were variolated and later exposed to smallpox with the promise of freedom if they survived. The experiment was a success, they survived and were set free. Soon variolation was drawing attention from the royal family, who helped promote the procedure throughout England. However, the process wasn’t 100% safe. In fact, it caused adverse reactions and sometimes death in about 2% of the cases.  The death of Prince Octavius of Great Britain, eighth son and thirteenth child of King George III in 1783 brought about some of the very first anti-vaxxer sentiments. 

While variolation was being debated in Europe, Cotton Mather (yes, that Cotton Mather of the Salem witch trials) was doing a great deal to promote the variolation or inoculation as it was called in the colonies to combat the 1721 small pox epidemic in Boston. Mather is believed to have first learned about inoculation from a different source: his West African slave Onesimus. Mather wrote in his journal: “he told me that he had undergone the operation which had given something of the smallpox and would forever preserve him from it, adding that was often used in West Africa.’’ After confirming this account with other West African slaves and reading of similar methods being performed in Turkey, Mather became an avid proponent of inoculation. When the 1721 smallpox epidemic struck Boston, Mather took the opportunity to campaign for the systematic application of inoculation. What followed was a fierce public debate, but also one of the first widespread and well-documented uses of inoculation to combat such an epidemic in the West.

Cotton Mather initially reached out to the medical community of Boston, imploring them to use the inoculation method. One physician, Zabdiel Boylston, heeded his call, but most other doctors were hostile to the idea. At the forefront of the anti-inoculation contingency was one of Boston’s only physicians who actually held a medical degree, Dr. William Douglass. The arguments against inoculation have a familiar ring, ranging from disagreement on religious grounds to scientific uncertainty. While many argued that inoculation violated divine law, by either inflicting harm on innocent people or by attempting to counter God’s specific will, the main argument that Douglass made was that inoculation was untested and seemingly based on folklore. Douglas feared that unchecked use of inoculation would only quicken the spread of disease throughout the city.

Most Bostonians were understandably skeptical as well. One of them was a teenage boy who would grow up to become one of America’s founding fathers: Benjamin Franklin. At the time, Franklin was a lowly apprentice at a newly-launched Boston paper with literary pretensions, the New England Courant. His boss was also his older brother, James Franklin. The elder Franklin sibling was dead-set against inoculation for many of the reasons listed above. He was also against Puritan ministers like Cotton Mather—so there was an unspoken political angle to their antipathy.

According to Kiona N. Smith, “Franklin insisted, officially, that the Courant didn’t take sides, but he happily gave anti-variolation advocates a platform in its pages. And with his younger brother’s help, he also printed pamphlets denouncing the idea, and the words published by the Franklin brothers incited violence against Mather, Boylston, and other proponents of inoculation. One reader even tossed a lit firebomb through Mather’s sitting room window in the wee hours of the morning. A breeze put out the fuse just in time, allowing Mather to read the attached note: “I’ll inoculate you with this,” it read.

As the epidemic began to diminish in early 1722, Mather and Boylston had collected surprisingly thorough data that made a clear argument for the effectiveness of inoculation. Boylston, who had personally inoculated some 287 people, recorded that of those inoculated only 2% had died. In comparison, the mortality rate of the naturally occurring disease during that year was 14.8%. 

A scientist at heart, this helped to change Benjamin Franklin’s mind. But it was the death of his young son that really cinched the matter. In 1736, he watched his four-year-old boy Francis die of smallpox. That loss changed Franklin’s views forever. “I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation,” he wrote. 

Benjamin Franklin wasn’t the only one who saw the importance of inoculations. Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, insisted that her children be inoculated. In February of 1777, George Washington wrote to one of his army doctors in Philadelphia: “I have determined that the troops [of the Continental Army] shall be inoculated ... Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence we should have more to dread from it than from the Sword of the Enemy.” According to Jonathan Stolz, it was the first government sponsored mass inoculation in this country.

In 1796 Dr. Edward Jenner would develop a much safer method for controlling smallpox, a vaccine based on the cowpox that would eventually go on to eradicate smallpox across the world. Yet that amazing goal wouldn’t happen until well into 1980, nearly 200 years later—primarily because of the continued resistance from those who refused to be vaccinated.