What's really I think important to understand about the first anti-vax nation movement, the one that erupted in Britain in the 1850s, is that it was made up with a lot of different groups of people.

This is very much an American political and legal tradition to allow governments under their police powers to protect the public health.

You're listening to Epidemic, the podcast about the science, public health and social impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.

I'm your host, Dr. Celine Gounder.

Nadia Derbach is a professor of history at the University of Utah. Nadia loves archives.

Oh, the archive is a wonderful place.

A lot of the things Nadia is interested in are documents from the Victorian era. They're kept in these plain, unassuming boxes.

It could be very small, it could be huge. Some of the documents I was recently working with came in boxes that were almost as big as I was.

And there were 300 of them and the archivist was not that happy to pass over 300 of these boxes over the course of weeks and weeks.

It may sound dry to some, but for Nadia, it's like a treasure hunt.

You know, it's like opening a present. You open the box up and you see what's in there. And so what I love is the serendipity of it.

You go through and you look at the thing you wanted, but sometimes beside it in the box that you're allowed access to is something you didn't know existed.

So one day when Nadia was a graduate student, she was in an archive looking for something that could become her dissertation topic.

And so I was trolling around in the National Library of Medicine and I stumbled upon what I think is the original anti-vaccination pamphlet that was written in the 1850s.

The pamphlet was called Our Medical Liberties by John Gibbs. It was opposing mandatory vaccination against smallpox in England.

Last session, a measure robbing the subject of some of his dearest personal rights and liberties was indecently hurry through parliament under the modest and unassuming title of the vaccination extension bill.

In reality, it was a bill of pains and penalties.

And I got really hooked by his language and his articulation of the vaccination issue as one that was about the personal rights to control your body versus the government's right to control its subjects.

The Vaccination Extension Act, or rather the Compulsory Vaccination Act, is the first direct aggression upon the person of the subject in medical matters.

If not checked by a timely and energetic opposition, the medical profession will intuitively succeed in establishing a tyranny as odious, galling, insulting and injurious as any against which Britons have ever successfully struggled.

And at the same time, a kind of gothic language of fears around the body being violated and penetrated and entered, and this sort of clash between what seemed like a kind of ideological opposition to vaccination.

And at the same time, a really kind of emotional resistance.

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