Content area
Full Text
Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907, by Nadja Durbach; pp. xiii + 276. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005, $22.95, £14.95.
The anti-vaccination movement in England during the latter half of the nineteenth century, despite its medical, political, and cultural significance, has scarcely been noticed-much less analyzed-by historians of the Victorian period. Nadja Durbach's Bodily Matters is one of the very few recent works to redress this historiographical oversight. Drawing on a variety of published as well as unpublished documents-including Parliamentary papers, newspapers and periodicals, and the archives of a wide variety of English libraries and public records offices-Durbach provides a lively and informed account of this fascinating episode in Victorian history. Durbach focuses on the period from the enactment of the Compulsory Vaccination Act in 1853 until 1907, when magistrates were authorized to grant numerous exemptions to parents who "conscientiously objected" to compulsory vaccination of their children. In one sense, the 1907 decision marked a major victory for popular protest against growing state intervention in the late Victorian period. But anti-vaccination, as Durbach demonstrates, was far more complex an issue than merely one of ever-increasing state control.
The strength of Bodily Matters is its nuanced account of the multiple factors at play in late-Victorian vaccination debates. Durbach is at her surest when she details the "events of the resistance campaign and the richness of...