7 - The 1902 Campaign to Amend the Compulsory Vaccination Laws

Summary

Early in 1902, Massachusetts antivaccinationists almost achieved one of their dearest objectives, a change in the state vaccination law to allow adults the same medical exemption privilege as that accorded to schoolchildren. Boston Board of Health Chairman Samuel H. Durgin had petitioned for a bill to strengthen the existing vaccination law by requiring that physicians personally examine the children for whom they provided exemption certificates. When the bill came to the senate floor for debate in 1902, legislators sympathetic to antivaccination successfully proposed an amendment to include adults as candidates for medical exemptions, and the amended bill passed by a narrow margin. Nevertheless, provaccination senators managed to reopen the bill for consideration the next day. In another very close vote, this time the senate voted not to allow adults the exemption.

These votes present a unique opportunity to gauge the extent of sympathy for antivaccination in Massachusetts. Antivaccination bills to abolish or weaken the vaccination law simply never came up for floor votes—the legislature's Joint Public Health Committee always voted them down, serving as a very effective gatekeeper to preserve compulsory vaccination. Thus state legislators never got a chance to debate these abolition bills or vote on them, giving a false impression that they all overwhelmingly supported compulsory vaccination. But Durgin's bill passed easily through the committee, providing a rare opportunity for legislators sympathetic to antivaccination to debate and amend the existing law. The closeness of the back-and-forth votes on the amendments shows that antivaccinationists had gained substantial public sympathy for their position.

Looking at this contest closely can tell us a lot about where support for change was strongest in the state and helps explain how the Massachusetts vaccination statutes—among the strictest in the nation—would eventually soften to allow various exemptions to its requirements. Public interest in changing the vaccination law ran high in 1902. Hearings on petitions for vaccination bills were packed to overflowing with supporters from towns and villages all over the state. They demonstrated enthusiastically for witnesses who disparaged vaccination and booed those who supported it.