Pox: An American History

by Michael Willrich Narrated by K. Todd Freeman

Overview

The untold story of how America's Progressive-era war on smallpox sparked one of the great civil liberties battles of the twentieth century.

At the turn of the last century, a powerful smallpox epidemic swept the United States from coast to coast. The age-old disease spread swiftly through an increasingly interconnected American landscape: from southern tobacco plantations to the dense immigrant neighborhoods of northern cities to far-flung villages on the edges of the nascent American empire. In Pox, award-winning historian Michael Willrich offers a gripping chronicle of how the nation's continentwide fight against smallpox launched one of the most important civil liberties struggles of the twentieth century.

At the dawn of the activist Progressive era and during a moment of great optimism about modern medicine, the government responded to the deadly epidemic by calling for universal compulsory vaccination. To enforce the law, public health authorities relied on quarantines, pesthouses, and "virus squads"-corps of doctors and club-wielding police. Though these measures eventually contained the disease, they also sparked a wave of popular resistance among Americans who perceived them as a threat to their health and to their rights.

At the time, anti-vaccinationists were often dismissed as misguided cranks, but Willrich argues that they belonged to a wider legacy of American dissent that attended the rise of an increasingly powerful government. While a well-organized anti-vaccination movement sprang up during these years, many Americans resisted in subtler ways-by concealing sick family members or forging immunization certificates. Pox introduces us to memorable characters on both sides of the debate, from Henning Jacobson, a Swedish Lutheran minister whose battle against vaccination went all the way to the Supreme Court, to C. P. Wertenbaker, a federal surgeon who saw himself as a medical missionary combating a deadly-and preventable-disease.

As Willrich suggests, many of the questions first raised by the Progressive-era antivaccination movement are still with us: How far should the government go to protect us from peril? What happens when the interests of public health collide with religious beliefs and personal conscience? In Pox, Willrich delivers a riveting tale about the clash of modern medicine, civil liberties, and government power at the turn of the last century that resonates powerfully today.

Editorial Reviews

Megan Buskey

Part of the satisfaction of this lively and assiduous history is the discovery that though smallpox is long gone, the debates that swirled around it continue.
—The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Today's controversies over vaccinations pale beside the pitched battles fought at the turn of the 20th century, to judge by this probing work. Historian Willrich (City of Courts) revisits the smallpox epidemic that ravaged the United States from 1898 to 1904 and sparked a showdown between the burgeoning Progressive-era regulatory regime and Americans fearful of the new Leviathan state and the specter of "state medicine." Anxious to stamp out the contagion, public health officials in the South quarantined African-Americans in detention camps if they were suspected of carrying the disease and vaccinated others at gunpoint; in New York "paramilitary vaccination squads" raided immigrant tenements, forcibly inoculating residents and dragging infected children off to pesthouses; their coercive methods sparked occasional riots and lawsuits that helped remake constitutional law. Willrich sees merit on both sides: draconian public health measures saved thousands of lives, but resisters did have legitimate concerns about vaccine safety and side effects, racial targeting and bodily integrity. He does tend to romanticize anti-vaccine activists, whose movement he associates with feminism, free speech, and abolitionism, styling them as "libertarian radicals" engaging in "intimate acts of civil disobedience." Still, his lucid, well-written, empathetic study of a fascinating episode shows why the vaccine issue still pricks the American conscience. Photos. (Apr. 4)

Wall Street Journal

In Pox: An American History," Michael Willrich meticulously traces the story of how the smallpox vaccine was pressed into service during a major outbreak. Sometimes the shots were physically forced on people, outraging their sense of personal freedom and—when the vaccine sickened some and killed others—galvanizing suspicion of vaccination programs. The episode, Mr. Willrich says, prompted large swaths of Americans to insist that "the liberty protected by the Constitution also encompassed the right of a free people to take care of their own bodies and children according to their own medical beliefs and consciences.--(SCOTT GOTTLIEB)

Library Journal

Willrich (City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago) chronicles the U.S. smallpox epidemic at the turn of the 20th century when American expansionism, migrant work patterns, and cramped tenement living created a massive public health disaster with far-reaching implications. He traces the creation of smallpox vaccine technology, still known as "the most dangerous vaccine," from Edward Jenner's late 18th-century development of the cow pox vaccine to recent freeze-dried versions. He describes the disfiguring suffering of smallpox victims in cringe-worthy, heartbreaking detail. Willrich shines when illuminating the profound civil rights and medical ethics issues that arose at a time when national, state, and local public health authorities were just being formed. Heavy-handed government health-care workers would handcuff resistors to vaccinate them. Poor black and immigrant families routinely revolted against the compulsory vaccinations, either hiding their sick or burning "pest houses" built in their neighborhoods. The anti-vaccinationists of the time parallel a modern movement against vaccines for purported dangers, whether scientifically proven or not. VERDICT There is fertile ground for debate here among public health professionals, medical ethicists, those involved in current health-care issues, and historians.—Megan Curran, Univ. of Southern California Lib., Los Angeles

Library Journal - Library Journal Audio

This is not just a book about the smallpox epidemic that swept this country at the dawn of the 20th century. Multi-award-winning historian Willrich shows that resistance to the federal government's efforts to halt the epidemic by enforcing quarantine and vaccination programs sparked a civil liberties debate that's with us today.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169205664
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/31/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged

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