The limited secondary literature on the antivaccination movement—that vigorous opposition to the compulsory vaccination of infants—reflects developments within the discipline of the history of medicine. In 1960, Ann Beck struggled with the concept that apparently “medical” debates could incorporate issues of religion and morals. In 1967, Roy Macleod's seminal article on antivaccination, which appeared in the journal Public Law, dealt with antivaccination as a political issue. He charted the campaign to have the law changed, seeing it as expression of a popular mistrust of “scientific medicine.” By 1988, fired by a renewed interest in the role of governments in medicine, Roy and Dorothy Porter portrayed antivaccination as a radical defense of individual liberties against state encroachment and part of a debate over competing strategies of disease control—immunization or containment through isolation and notification.

Surprisingly, Bodily Matters is the first modern, scholarly monograph on the subject. In this book, Nadia Durbach covers much the same ground as Macleod—exploring opposition from the advent of compulsory vaccination in 1853 to the introduction of conscientious objection in 1898—but provides a new angle on the topic. Reflecting a new interest among historians of medicine in how cultural history can enhance understanding of medicine, she focuses on the rhetoric of the movement, seeking to embed the concepts and arguments of the opponents of vaccination in a wider, nonmedical popular discourse. She seeks to bring antivaccination in from the “lunatic fringe” and restore it to a more central position among Victorian social movements. In reproducing some of the wilder clams of the opponents of vaccination, Durbach rather shoots herself in the foot. A parent's claim that he refused to have his child vaccinated because “it is well known that bulls go mad every seven years” and that children vaccinated with lymph harvested from the cows also went mad (125) will surely be seen by most readers as an argument drawn from the most lunatic reaches of the lunatic fringe. But it must be also said this sort of material makes for interesting reading.

Durbach convincingly demonstrates how arguments against vaccination linked into a whole range of Victorian fears. Vaccination was seen to threaten the purity of the blood—portrayed as the bedrock of good health—by polluting the bloodstream with vaccine lymph. Similar concerns informed the vegetarian and temperance movements. Compulsory vaccination threatened all infants with contamination from animals via vaccine lymph derived from calves and middle-class children with contamination through lymph taken from pauper children. Antivaccination also fitted into political debates about individual liberty, the responsibility of parents to protect their children, and the need to set limits on the expanding role of the state in public health matters. Durbach convincingly shows how antivaccination overlapped with fears of vampirism and the transformation of healthy infants into unhealthy monsters. Curiously, she spends relatively little time addressing the link between antivaccination and dissenting religion, a connection that has been stressed by several earlier authors. She is perhaps less convincing in her argument that compulsory vaccination, which was primarily aimed at the poor and working class, was a factor in the formation of class consciousness. (Durbach's contention that the working class were targeted by the machinery of compulsion seems circular, given that she admits that they were the group most likely to neglect vaccination.)

Durbach's focus on the language of the antivaccination movement means that she is not concerned to analyze it as an objective account of events. Bodily Matters essentially reproduces the nineteenth-century Manichean division between honest downtrodden opponents of vaccination, struggling to make their voices heard against the combined forces of government and a cruel and unbending medical profession that were desperate to vaccinate every infant who crossed their path. In fact, many medical practitioners were deeply concerned by the degree of opposition to vaccination, and while not sympathizing with their position, argued that government needed to address the antivaccinationists concerns. Similarly, while Durbach reproduces a picture drawn in the antivaccination literature of large numbers of honest parents facing fines far beyond their means and being hauled off to jail, parliamentary records show that relatively few opponents of vaccination went to jail, and most were fined small sums well below the maximum penalty of 20 s. Durbach's language gives an uneasy sense that she identifies dangerously closely with her subjects. Claims appearing in antivaccination literature are presented verbatim and without critical analysis, while statements from government or medical practitioners are hedged about with caveats. Thus Durbach cautions that a set of instructions to public vaccinators aimed at quietening the fears of opponents of vaccination may not always have been implemented, yet she presents hair-raising accounts of the side effects of vaccination without comment.

The final chapter of the book shifts the focus from antivaccination literature to the political events surrounding the implementation of “conscientious objector” clauses, which allowed parents to swear before magistrates of their genuine opposition to vaccination, and thus be excused from the duty. Durbach shows that parliament, previously portrayed as lofty and unfeeling, suddenly sat up, listened, and changed the law when the opponents of vaccination engineered the election of MPs sympathetic to their cause. In doing so, she raises a myriad of unaddressed questions. Up to this point, the antivaccination movement comes across as a vehicle for expression of individual discontent, not an effective political body with a focused campaign. Was the movement always concerned with lobbying? Why had it been so ineffectual up to this time? More important—why did some individuals oppose vaccination, and others calmly accept the procedure? Why was there so little antivaccination feeling in certain parts of the United Kingdom, notably Scotland and Ireland, and how does this relate to their distinctive vaccination legislation? Bodily Matters gives us a new insight into antivaccination but shows us that much remains to be discovered about this curious Victorian protest movement.