Opposition to the Smallpox Vaccine in Pennsylvania: A Familiar Story

In the spring of 1855, school officials in Pottsville gathered to debate a question that has echoed across centuries: how to protect their community from a deadly epidemic.

The editors of the Miners’ Journal, the region’s leading newspaper, applauded the move. “Parents will do well to see that their children are attended to at once,” they wrote, urging families to act quickly to ensure their children’s place in school. Public health, they reasoned, demanded collective action.

Yet even in 1855, resistance stirred. Some parents bristled at the intrusion into family life. Others questioned the safety and effectiveness of the smallpox vaccine, despite decades of evidence showing its power to prevent large-scale, fatal outbreaks of the disease. Rumors spread among immigrant communities, and religious objections were raised by those who saw vaccination as interference with divine will.

The tension between science and skepticism, public health and personal choice, remains strikingly familiar. Anti-vaccination ideology, so present in recent debates over Covid, polio, or measles, is nothing new. Its roots run deep in American history, and Pennsylvania was often at the center of those struggles.

When vaccination was first introduced in the 18th century, it was hailed as a miracle. Smallpox had been one of humanity’s most terrifying diseases, killing an estimated three out of every ten people infected. Edward Jenner’s discovery that cowpox inoculation protected against smallpox was revolutionary. Yet as vaccination spread, so did opposition.

Four decades after Pottsville first imposed its school vaccination rule, the issue resurfaced in Lycoming County. In 1894, a Williamsport father, Andrew J. Duffield, challenged his local school board’s policy requiring students to be vaccinated against smallpox before entering the classroom.

The case reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which on July 11, 1894, issued a unanimous decision in Duffield v. School District of the City of Williamsport. The justices upheld the school board’s authority to exclude unvaccinated children during an outbreak, setting a powerful precedent for public health in education. Justice Henry W. Williams, writing for the court, made clear that the question was not whether vaccination was scientifically sound, but whether school officials had acted within their discretion to protect students. Courts, he wrote, should only intervene if that discretion was abused – not simply because some citizens disputed the science. His words distilled the heart of the matter: how far may a school board “exclude one for the good of many?” So long as that power was exercised honestly, the court said, it would stand.

Just over a decade later, the same principle reached the highest court in the land. In 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Jacobson v. Massachusetts that states possessed the authority to enforce compulsory vaccination.

Writing at the height of another smallpox scare, the justices declared that individual liberty was not absolute when its exercise threatened the health of others. Together, the Pennsylvania ruling in Duffield and the national precedent of Jacobson laid the legal foundation for vaccination mandates that continue to shape American public health policy today.

But the ink on the decision was barely dry before continued opposition mounted. In Pennsylvania, resistance often carried a religious voice. The idea of compulsory vaccination struck many as a violation of conscience, even of divine order.

That December, Reverend D.A. Brown of Elizabethville sent a letter to the Pottsville Republican criticizing the paper’s support for mandates and its publishing essays to that effect. His words captured the religious intensity of anti-vaccination sentiment: “May the good Lord … save our dear boys and girls from having their pure, healthy blood poisoned,” he opined.

For Brown, vaccination was not a scientific measure but a spiritual danger – a poisoning of God’s creation.

Such views were not confined to isolated preachers or small-town letters to the editor. By the early 20th century, opposition to vaccination had become an organized national movement. Industrialist John Pitcairn, Jr. of Pittsburgh poured money into anti-vaccination causes, calling compulsory vaccination “medical tyranny.”

In 1908, Philadelphia hosted the founding of the Anti-Vaccination League of America, which spread pamphlets warning of “contamination” and government overreach.

The rhetoric mixed themes of religious purity, bodily integrity, and deep suspicion of political and medical elites. The categories were the same ones evident half a century earlier in Pottsville –and the same ones that surface today whenever vaccination becomes a flashpoint.

Reverend Brown’s 1905 plea reads strikingly like the social media posts of the 2020s – fear of “poisoned blood,” distrust of institutions and the medical community, and appeals to divine protection. His letter reminds us that opposition to vaccination has always drawn on powerful moral and religious language.

Yet history also shows the other side of the ledger. Smallpox was eradicated by 1980. Polio, once a summer terror in Pennsylvania’s coal towns, has been driven to the edge of extinction. Measles, once a childhood rite of passage, became rare in just a few years after the vaccine’s introduction. Each advance required mandates, public health campaigns, and, inspired bitter debates.

The story of opposition to Pottsville’s vaccination mandate in 1855, Reverend Brown in 1905, and countless parents in between makes clear: vaccine resistance is not new.

It is a familiar current in American life. But so, too, is the determination of communities to protect themselves, even when opposition runs loud. History shows that resistance may delay progress – but it has never stopped the power of vaccines to save lives.

Jake Wynn is a public historian and communicator. He is currently working as a tourism marketing professional in Frederick, MD. Follow his website: wynninghistory.com.