The politics of prevention: Anti-vaccinationism and public health in nineteenth-century England

Abstract

The coming of compulsory health legislation in mid-nineteenth-century England was a political innovation that extended the powers of the state effectively for the first time over areas of traditional civil liberties in the name of public health. This development appears most strikingly in two fields of legislation. One instituted compulsory vaccination against smallpox, the other introduced a system of compulsory screening, isolation, and treatment for prostitutes suffering from venereal disease, initially in four garrison towns.' The Vaccination Acts and the Contagious Diseases Acts suspended what we might call the natural liberty of the individual to contract and spread infectious disease, in order to protect the health of the community as a whole.2 Both sets of legislation were viewed as infractions of liberty by substantial bodies of Victorian opinion, which campaigned to repeal them.