A portrait of Dr. Samuel G. Dixon (1851-1918), Pennsylvania Commissioner of Health during the period of intense pressure to get all school children vaccinated for smallpox, just after the turn of the century. Dixon set about to enforce the mandatory vaccination law of 1895 and ran into difficulty with anti-vaccine individuals and groups. The controversy, which had been festering in the Lykens Valley area, exploded in December1905 when the school directors of Jackson Township, Dauphin County, questioned the law and ordered all teachers to accept unvaccinated students. The State responded with criminal conspiracy charges against the directors and some community members who were most vocal in defying the mandate. They also threatened to bring charges against the teachers who allowed un-vaccinated students to attend their schools. A trial took place in Dauphin County Court in March 1906, and the landmark decision became precedent for other cases in the State.
Today’s post looks at some of the efforts of Commissioner Dixon in late 1905 and early 1906 to convince the public to support the vaccination law of 1895 and not allow unvaccinated students to attend the public schools. These efforts were coordinated with the Pennsylvania Attorney General, who was also outspoken on the matter and who vowed to prosecute those school directors and teachers who refused to follow the law.
___________________________________________________
Dr. Samuel G. Dixon, State Commissioner of Health gave an address before the Pennsylvania State Federation of Women’s Clubs, at Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, on October 20, 1905. In the speech, Dixon focused on the value of getting the smallpox vaccination and decried those who were fighting against the vaccination. From the Harrisburg Daily Independent, October 20, 1905:
DIXON URGES NEED OF VACCINATION
Simple Remedy Bars Smallpox From Civilized Communities
“Welcoming you as co-laborers in the great field of sanitary reform, which promises so rich a harvest of benefits to mankind. I call your attention for a few minutes to certain matters to which the newly created Department of Health is just now especially addressing itself. The first problem which I wish to bring before you is the prevention of smallpox.
“Why is it that smallpox, being so deadly, painful and loathsome a disease, while on the other hand, vaccination is so trifling an operation, resultant disturbance so slight, there prevails among the public not simply carelessness and indifference as to its performance, but even direct antagonism, obstinate resistance to the advice of the medical profession and the requirements of the law? Manifestly because the public are ignorant what a terrible scourge smallpox would be if not held in check by the almost universal practice of vaccination throughout civilized countries.
“And yet in spite of incontrovertible evidence there are those, and not a few, nor those always of defective education, who declare themselves as dis-believers in the efficiency of vaccination, and opposed to its enforcement. If there are any such among this intelligent audience, let me earnestly beg them to study this matter in the light of scientific investigation, and not of partisan mis-representation.
_______________________________________________
Dr. Dixon, in a speech to teachers, gave a brief history of the anti-vaccination movement and the demonization of the proponents of vaccination. The failure to start to enforce the compulsory vaccination laws of 1895, according to Dixon, resulted in an increase of cases to the level of an epidemic. From the Harrisburg Daily Independent, November 3, 1905:
VIOLATION OF LAW CAUSED EPIDEMICS
Health Commissioner Dixon Urges Importance of Vaccination
ARE MANY USELESS DEATHS
Because of Slackness In Applying Legal Smallpox Preventative Measures
In an address before the Dauphin County Teachers’ Institute this morning at the Court House, Health Commissioner Samuel G. Dixon discussed the health laws which especially interest the public schools and emphasized the importance of observing them.
Broke Laws Mean Epidemic
Dr. Dixon said that if the law of 1895 requiring school authorities to refuse admission to unvaccinated children and imposing penalties had been enforced at once, “the widespread epidemic of smallpox which has prevailed in our State for several years past and which still lingers, and which has cost thousands of lives, and hundreds of thousand dollars and has interfered most seriously with education whenever it has appeared, would never have taken place.”
Dr. Dixon emphasized the necessity for principals of schools and teachers to strictly enforce the law requiring sanitary conditions in about school buildings. In this regard he said among other very pertinent things:
“The school building and all its accessories should be in all respects an object lesson the children in the teaching of hygiene, of propriety and of sound morals.”
He also in an interesting way sketched the method of preparing in a thoroughly scientific and sanitary manner the antitoxins used in vaccinating to prevent smallpox and diphtheria. He gave the following explanation of the reason why the unreasoning prejudice exists against smallpox vaccination and is not directed against inoculation for the prevention of diphtheria..
“First, when the discovery of vaccination was first announced our ancestors were living in an age of superstition and credulity. Nothing was too absurd to be greedily devoured by the public. Charms, necromancy, witch-craft were all a part of the universal belief. The opponents of the new preventative of smallpox naturally introduced this element of superstition into then attacks upon it, and its truly great inventor.
“Candor compels me to confess that the ranks of those detractors were largely recruited from that portion of the medical profession larger then, it is to be hoped, than now, which are always ready to sacrifice the public good to their private greed, and who naturally did not relish the prospect of having two-thirds of their professional revenue revenue, which was about the proportion which their fees from smallpox bore to those from all other diseases, cut off.
“Such people filled the printing presses with their diatribes, stuffing the minds of the gullible public with the most astonishing descriptions of the awful effects of vaccination.
How Jenner Was Lied About
“As attested by a copy of a caricature directed against Jenner, which now hangs on the wall of the Department of Health, the people were taught to believe not only that horns sprouted from the brows of the vaccinated, but that miniature cows were developed in the systems of the unfortunate which forced themselves out of every possible aperture.
“Nothing is harder to eradicate than superstition, and so the opposition to vaccination thus implanted has been handed down, robbed of course of its grosser features, from generation to generation and still retains its hold on many minds.
“The discovery of antitoxin, however, came at a more auspicious time when scientific investigation was taking the place of chance discovery and crude methods were giving way before those of exact science. So many astonishing discoveries had of recent years been announced and proven true by medical investigations that the average public mind was quite prepared to receive any announcement, however startling, which had received the endorsement of science.
In the Old Anti-Jenner Days
“The second reason which occurs to me is that the people of the present day have absolutely no conception of what the horrors of smallpox were in the centuries just preceding the introduction of vaccination and of the terrible destruction which would be unchanged were vaccination to be abandoned all over the civilized world. On the other hand, all are familiar with the ravages of diphtheria at the present time and welcome as a precious boon the gift of science which promises to save so many lives and especially of their precious offspring. Let it be remembered, however, that science has spoken its decisive word in favor of the one as well as the other of these invaluable agents and let the word of science be accepted rather than the tradition of an age of superstition or the misrepresentation of fanaticism and prejudice.”
_______________________________________________
The plan was to seek the help of educators in enforcing the compulsory vaccination law. From the Harrisburg Daily Independent, December 6, 1905:
THE UNVACCINATED PUPILS
Law Requires They Must Be Kept Out
State Health Commissioner Dixon does not think that the recent ruling of the Attorney General that a teacher can refuse admission to the public schools of a child not holding a vaccination certificate will affect the efforts of the Health Department to have the vaccination law enforced.
“All we have asked the teachers to do,” said Dr. Dixon, “is to obey the law , and that brings up a point that I would like to make plain. The teachers in charge of schools in Pennsylvania are not required to refuse admission to children until they are vaccinated, because the Department of Health has so ordered. It is the law of the Commonwealth, a law passed for the protection of public health. The health of the people has been entrusted to this department. I propose to see to it that the health law is carried out.
“In this determination I have the cooperation of hundreds of local boards of health throughout the State, school directors and the teachers themselves. Of course, there has been opposition. This was to be expected. In some cases school directors themselves have opposed the enforcement of the law and have gone so far as to instruct their teachers to admit children regardless of whether they had been vaccinated. In despair the teachers have written to this department. I fully appreciate the difficult position that this places the teacher in. Parents, and school directors combine to influence such a teacher to become a law breaker. The only answer I could give has been to quote the law.”
_____________________________________________
A few days later, Dr. Dixon commended the educators of the state for upholding the law. His reference to the resisters probably pertained to Jackson Township, Dauphin County, where one teacher resigned after being threatened with bodily harm if she did not admit unvaccinated children. From the Harrisburg Telegraph, December 9, 1905:
PRAISES SCHOOL TEACHERS
Commissioner Dixon Pleased With Their Cooperation in Enforcing Vaccination Law
State Health Commissioner Dixon commends the school principals and teachers throughout Pennsylvania for the stand they are taking in upholding the law requiring teachers to refuse admission to school of unvaccinated children.
“Their action is really heroic in many cases,” Dr. Dixon said today. “Of course, they have the law behind them, but consider a young girl still in her teens being bullyragged by parents who force their way into the school room with their children whom they declare “We won’t have vaccinated, the public health and the law be hanged.”
“In some cases I regret to say the school directors not only stand by and refuse to assist such a teacher but openly threaten her for obeying the law. One young woman I know of stood up against such treatment until she was in immediate danger of bodily harm and then, rather than for the protection of the health of her pupils as well as the whole community, she sent in her resignation to the school board. That teacher is a heroine of the highest order.
“Let me tell you, however,” the Commissioner declares, “that public health shall not be put in such jeopardy by the driving out of any teacher who is brave enough to do right in the face of such opposition from those who would make her a lawbreaker. The vaccination law must be enforced and I am glad to say it is being enforced.”
Dr. Dixon is also pleased with the support he is receiving from the physicians throughout the state in the work of enforcing the law creating his department.
_______________________________________________
Part 1 of a 7-part series of posts on the Jackson Township anti-vaccination case of 1906.
News articles from Newspapers.com.
Corrections and additional information should be added as comments to this post.