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Bestiality in a Time of Smallpox: Dr. Jenner and the “Modern Chimera”

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Exploring Animal Encounters

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ((PSAAL))

Abstract

Edward Jenner asserted that modern diseases arose from a closeness to animals that was not intended by nature. Jenner became famous for his successful method of preventing smallpox. The original “vaccine” was named after the cow from which it came. But despite the success of Jenner’s method, many of his critics were concerned about the mid- and long-term effects of vaccination: they feared that to be vaccinated was to become animal. Even worse, this communion with beastly matter was seen as a kind of degenerate lust, a form of bestiality and monstrous reproduction, which would bring forth a “modern chimera.” For some, cowpox vaccination was a sordid and unholy communion, the embodiment of an immoral trinity of animality, bestiality, and sexually transmitted disease.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Edward Jenner, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, a Disease Discovered in Some of the Western Counties of England… Known by the Name of the Cow Pox (London, 1798), 1. For Jenner’s life, medical context, and implications of his discovery see Rob Boddice, Edward Jenner (Stroud: The History Press, 2015); Richard B. Fisher, Edward Jenner: A Biography (London: Andre Deutsch, 1991).

  2. 2.

    Jenner, Inquiry, 2–3.

  3. 3.

    There are a number of surveys of the advent and spread of smallpox inoculation. In favor of a long list, see a recent thorough overview that in turn documents the principal sources: Gareth Williams, Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 71–160.

  4. 4.

    For general surveys of the rise of compulsory vaccination and the anti-vaccination movement, see Nadja Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853–1907 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Stanley Williamson, The Vaccination Controversy: The Rise, Reign and Fall of Compulsory Vaccination for Smallpox (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007); Deborah Brunton, The Politics of Vaccination: Practice and Policy in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, 1800–1874 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008); Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter, “The Politics of Anti-vaccinationism and Public Health in Nineteenth-century England,” Medical History 32 (1988): 231–252; Nadja Durbach, “‘They Might as Well Brand Us’: Working-Class Resistance to Compulsory Vaccination in Victorian England,” Social History of Medicine 13 (2000): 45–62.

  5. 5.

    L. Vigni, “Smallpox Vaccination in Siena during the Napoleonic Era,” Le Infezioni in Medicina: Rivista Periodica di Eziologia, Epidemiologia, Diagnostica, Clinica e Terapia Delle Patologie Infettive 9 (2001): 115–118; E.P. Hennock, “Vaccination Policy against Smallpox, 1835–1914: A Comparison of England with Prussia and Imperial Germany,” Social History of Medicine 11 (1998): 49–71; Boddice, Edward Jenner, 56–57.

  6. 6.

    Carlos Franco-Paredes, Lorena Lammoglia, and José Ignacio Santos-Preciado, “The Spanish Royal Philanthropic Expedition to Bring Smallpox Vaccination to the New World and Asia in the 19th Century,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 41 (2005): 1285–1289.

  7. 7.

    Lydia Murdoch, “Carrying the Pox: The Use of Children and Ideals of Childhood in Early British and Imperial Campaigns Against Smallpox,” Journal of Social History 48 (2015): 511–535; Niels Brimnes, “Variolation, Vaccination and Popular Resistance in Early Colonial South India,” Medical History 48 (2004): 199–228; David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 120–121, 133–144; Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Mark Harrison, and Michael Worboys, Fractured States: Smallpox, Public Health and Vaccination Policy in British India, 1800–1947 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2005).

  8. 8.

    William Woodville, Reports of a Series of Inoculations for the Variolae Vaccinae or Cow-Pox; with Remarks and Observations on this Disease Considered as a Substitute for the Smallpox (London: James Phillips and Son, 1799); Idem., Observations on Cowpox (London: William Phillips, 1800). See also Thomas Paytherus, A Comparative Statement of Facts and Observations Relative to the Cow-Pox, Published by Doctors Jenner and Woodville (London: Sampson Low, 1800).

  9. 9.

    Benjamin Moseley, “Medical Observations: Cow-Pox,” A Treatise on Sugar. With Miscellaneous Medical Observations, 2nd ed. (London: John Nichols, 1800), 183.

  10. 10.

    John Baron, The Life of Edward Jenner, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1838), II, 63–64.

  11. 11.

    W. Rowley, Cow-Pox Inoculation, No Security against Small-Pox Infection (London: J. Harris, 1805).

  12. 12.

    Ibid., vii.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 25.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 27.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 8 and n.

  16. 16.

    Baron, Life, 63–64.

  17. 17.

    Genevieve Miller, Letters of Edward Jenner and Other Documents Concerning the Early History of Vaccination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 25–26.

  18. 18.

    “Aculeus” [Edward Jenner], Letters to Dr. Rowley, on His Late Pamphlet, Entitled “Cow-Pox Inoculation, No Security Against Small-Pox Infection” (London: Symonds: 1805). A review of the evidence was published on the Wellcome Library blog: Rob Boddice, “Edward Jenner: Pamphleteer,” http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2015/12/Edward-jenner-pamphleteer/. Accessed April 2, 2016. Ascribing the pamphlet to Jenner is based on intertextual readings between the pamphlet and Jenner’s correspondence in addition to the nature of the diction in Baron’s biography in describing Jenner’s MS, which is mirrored very closely in the pamphlet. The timing of the publication, its publisher, its format, and its contents all match the indications we have of what Jenner intended to publish anonymously.

  19. 19.

    “Aculeus,” Letters to Dr. Rowley, 60.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 30–31.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., 31.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., 3.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 36–37.

  24. 24.

    Critical Review 8 (1806), 438; Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 24 (1806), 326; J.J. Hawkins, “On Vaccination,” Philosophical Magazine 24 (1806), 205.

  25. 25.

    William Rowley, Cow-Pox Inoculation No Security against Small-pox Infection, 3rd ed. (London: J. Harris, 1806), n.p.

  26. 26.

    Edward Jenner to Mr. Phillips [founder of the Monthly Magazine], 16 January 1807. Royal College of Physicians, MS 735, f.22.

  27. 27.

    Williamson, Vaccination Controversy, 110.

  28. 28.

    J. Empson, “Little Honoured in His Own Country: Statues in Recognition of Edward Jenner MD FRS,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 89 (1996): 514–518; Baron, Life II, 319–320; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 10 May 1858, Third Series, vol. 150, col. 354.

  29. 29.

    Williamson, Vaccination Controversy, 204; S.L. Kotar and J.E. Gessler, “The Franco-Prussian War and the Smallpox Pandemic of 1870–1874,” Smallpox: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 173–183.

  30. 30.

    On Wallace’s anti-vaccine campaign see Martin Fichman, “Alfred Russel Wallace and Anti-vaccinationism in the Late Victorian Cultural Context, 1870–1907,” Natural Selection and Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace, ed. Charles H. Smith and George Beccaloni (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Martin Fichman and Jennifer E. Keelan, “Resister’s logic: The Anti-vaccination Arguments of Alfred Russel Wallace and Their Role in the Debates Over Compulsory Vaccination in England, 1870–1907,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38 (2007): 585–607. His own thoughts on the subject are summarized in Alfred Russel Wallace, To Members of Parliament and Others: Forty-five Years of Registration Statistics, Proving Vaccination to be Both Useless and Dangerous (London: E.W. Allen, 1885), Alfred Russel Wallace, Vaccination a Delusion, Its Enforcement a Crime: Proved by the Official Evidence in the Reports of the Royal Commission (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1898) and in his testimony before the Royal Commission: UK Parliament, Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Subject of Vaccination, Third Report, C. 6192 (1890), 13–25, 127–129.

  31. 31.

    Stuart M.F. Fraser, “Leicester and Smallpox: The Leicester Method,” Medical History 24 (1980): 315–332; Dale-L. Ross, “Leicester and the Anti-vaccination Movement, 1853–1889,” Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society 43 (1967–1968): 35–44; J.D. Swales, “The Leicester Anti-vaccination Movement,” The Lancet 340, no. 8826 (1992): 1019–1021.

  32. 32.

    See Rob Boddice, “The Manly Mind? Revisiting the Victorian “Sex in Brain” Debate,” Gender & History 23 (2011): 321–340. See also Rod Preece, Brute Souls, Happy Beasts and Evolution: The Historical Status of Animals (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 331–358; Rob Boddice, “The Moral Status of Animals and the Historical Human Cachet,” JAC 30 (2010): 457–489.

  33. 33.

    UK Parliament, Royal Commission to Inquire into Vaccination: Sixth Report, Minutes of Evidence, Appendices (1896), C.7993, p. 48.

  34. 34.

    UK Parliament, Final Report of the Royal Commission on Vaccination (1896), C.8270, p. 109.

  35. 35.

    Charles Creighton, The Natural History of Cow-Pox and Vaccinal Syphilis (London: Cassell & Company, 1887).

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 110.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 124–125, 157.

  38. 38.

    UK Parliament, Final Report of the Royal Commission on Vaccination (1896), C.8270, 114. Testimony of George Brown, house surgeon of the North Eastern Hospital for Children in Hackney Road in 1884.

  39. 39.

    136.

  40. 40.

    UK Parliament, Final Report of the Royal Commission on Vaccination (1896), C.8270, 109.

  41. 41.

    See the analysis by Durbach, Bodily Matters, 131–133.

  42. 42.

    UK Parliament, Final Report of the Royal Commission on Vaccination (1896), C.8270, 159, 163.

  43. 43.

    W. Scott Tebb, A Century of Vaccination and What It Teaches, 2nd ed. (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1899), 311. His section on vaccine-related syphilis covers, 293–324.

  44. 44.

    UK Parliament, Final Report of the Royal Commission on Vaccination (1896), C.8270, 112.

  45. 45.

    UK Parliament, Appendix IX to the Final Report of the Royal Commission on Vaccination (1897), C.8615, 64.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., 60.

  47. 47.

    UK Parliament, Final Report of the Royal Commission on Vaccination (1896), C.8270, 102.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 112.

  49. 49.

    See note 31.

  50. 50.

    See Rob Boddice, “Vaccination, Fear and Historical Relevance,” History Compass 14 (2016): 71–78.

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  1. Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Rob Boddice

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  1. North American Department, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Dominik Ohrem

  2. Department of Philosophy, California State University, Fullerton, CA, USA

    Matthew Calarco

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Boddice, R. (2018). Bestiality in a Time of Smallpox: Dr. Jenner and the “Modern Chimera”. In: Ohrem, D., Calarco, M. (eds) Exploring Animal Encounters. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92504-2_7

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