"For freedom to persist in ignorance and fear"

[velvetpage]

From "Plague: A Story of Smallpox in Montreal" come a few choice quotes.

"The old-fashioned sanitarians could not bring themselves to believe that inoculating people with the foul pox of beasts was a surer preventative of smallpox than cleanliness... Libertarians simply said it was a man's inalienable right to make up his own mind about what he would put in his or his children's bodies, including the germs of the cowpox. The state and its doctors had no right to force any specific treatment on anyone." (p. 211-212)

"They (the anti-vaccinationists) believes that the Montreal epidemic, which had not gotten fully out of control until the authorities started vaccinating completely promiscuously, spreading the poison all over the city, would further their cause." (p.212)

"There were so few anti-vaccinationists in the city by 1885 and the epidemic was so frightening that they ought to have been overcome or bypassed, swept into the dust-bin of history. They might have been, and Montreal might have been spared its awful calamity, had it not been for Bessey's use of contaminated vaccine that spring. It was the worst possible disaster at a time of staggering peril. . . giving Ross's absurd, scurrilous broadsheets a superficial credibility they would never otherwise have enjoyed, perpetuating and reinforcing the ignorance and fear of those who knew no better." (p. 213)

Now, the modern versions, as explained by me last spring:

http://velvetpage.livejournal.com/481767.html

http://velvetpage.livejournal.com/482154.html

http://velvetpage.livejournal.com/482637.html

http://velvetpage.livejournal.com/492706.html#cutid1

You tell me. Does history repeat itself?

Comments

[r-caton.livejournal.com]

Of course history repeats itself, for those that will not learn from an experience are condemned to repeat it until they do.

One recalls that Victorian pun A maiden with the Small Pox is much to be pitied

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's been suggested that young women with pock-marked faces were not entirely undesireable as mates, because they had gained lifelong immunity and wouldn't die in the next "visitation."