‘The Wright Way’: The Production and Standardization of Therapeutic Vaccines in Britain, 1902–13

Abstract

Vaccine therapy was the medical sensation of the 1900s in Britain.¹ Serum therapy, the breakthrough of the previous decade, was by then well established for diphtheria and tetanus, though bacteriologists had found few other obviously successful applications of the principle.² In contrast, the promoters of vaccine therapy promised specific cures for a range of infectious diseases and the details of their exploits were promoted and debated at medical meetings and in medical journals throughout the decade.³ The fluctuating fortunes of vaccine therapy were covered in the popular press and it was a central theme in George Bernard Shaw’s play The Doctor’s Dilemma.⁴ The treatment was pioneered by Almroth Wright and his colleagues at St Mary’s Hospital in London, but it was soon taken up by physicians, surgeons and general practitioners across the country and overseas, particularly in the US, who were supplied by laboratories producing vaccines on a commercial scale.⁵ The basis of vaccine therapy was to extend the principle of preventive vaccination to those already suffering from an infectious disease. It was based on the assumption that with many infections, especially chronic and localized ones, the full immune system had not been alerted to, and mobilized against, the pathogenic bacteria. Given that most infections were self-limiting because the powers of bodily immunity overcame those of infection, the aim of vaccine therapy was to accelerate this natural process by boosting immunity qualitatively and quantitatively.