“A Simple Matter”: Physicians, Sentiment, and Resistance to Immunization

Contemporary narratives describing debates over immunization practices often highlight parents as emotionally and irrationally resisting scientific certainty. The commitment of health professionals to immunization is usually assumed. Yet, public health statistics reveal that immunization among health care workers—even for routine flu shots—can be quite low. For many this presents as a bewildering contradiction. However, physicians were among the first to organize against inoculation when it was introduced into Western medicine in the eighteenth century. And physicians continued to offer various arguments against vaccination through the nineteenth century. While scholars have previously addressed factors such as professional rivalry and intellectual conservatism in explaining medical dissent, the role of sentiment in these reactions to vaccination has not been fully examined.

In this paper, I will examine the role of sentiment in the rejection or hesitation of physicians in the long eighteenth century toward the implementation of inoculation as a routine or compulsory practice. I will focus on the published papers of several physicians in England and France, such as the French physician Andrew Cantwell, who discussed the reasons for their opposition to inoculation. I will also examine some of the published critiques of these physicians to judge how sentiment was problematized as a valid criticism. These writings demonstrate that parental sentiment was a key component in the resolve of many physicians on the medical procedure and their attempts to influence the public. Understanding the role of sentiment in the past and how emotional resistance to immunization became identified with irrationality can help us understand interactions between medical professionals and the public today.