Anti-Vaccination and the Media: Historical Perspectives

This book explores narratives of vaccine hesitancy using samples from the UK press, and looks at the ways these have changed between the 1950s and the present. The work draws on a variety of research instruments including semantic network analysis and analysis of metaphor to provide a rich description of anti-vaccine narratives in different historical periods.

The work considers the ways that concerns about and resistance to inoculation were informed by cultural and social pressures in two...