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“The Least Vaccinated of Any Civilized Country”: Personal Liberty and Public Health in the Progressive Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Michael Willrich
Michael Willrich
Affiliation:
Brandeis University
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Extract

Epidemic disease, like war, is the health of the state. Since the dawn of the American Republic, state and local governments have wielded powers both plenary and plentiful to defend the people against smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, and other pestilences. Individual liberty and property rights melted away before the state's power—indeed its inherent legal duty—to protect the population from peril. Under the broad authority of the police power, state and local governments in the nineteenth century confined suspected disease-carriers against their will, established armed quarantines on land and at sea, seized private homes for smallpox pest houses, and enacted, in the approving words of the U.S. Supreme Court, “health laws of every description.”

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 76 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2008

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References

Notes

1. Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1 (U.S., 1824); Tobey, James A., Public Health Law: A Manual of Law for Sanitarians (Baltimore, 1926)Google Scholar. See Novak, William J., The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1996), 191–233Google Scholar.

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4. The first appellate case was Abeel v. Clark, 84 Cal. 226 (1890).

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18. See, e.g., “2,000 Persons Vaccinated,” New York Times, 11 March 1901, 3.

19. Commonwealth v. Pear, 183 Mass., 242, 245 (1902).

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32. See, e.g., Morgan v. Stewart, 144 N.C. 424 (1907).

33. State v. Hay, 126 N.C. 999 (1900).

34. State Board of Health v. Trustees of Watsonville School District, 13 Cal. App. 514 (1910).

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40. Duffield v. Williamsport School District, 162 Pa. 476 (1894). Tiedeman's own libertarianism diminished when he contemplated police control of the working class, and he concluded that compulsory vaccination was defensible. Tiedeman, Limitations, 32.

41. Duffield v. Williamsport School District, 162 Pa. 476, 483, 484 (1894).

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43. See Mathews v. Kalamazoo Board of Education, 127 Mich. 530 (1901).

44. Potts v. Breen, 167 Ill. 67, 76 (1897). See also State ex rel. Adams v. Burdge, 95 Wis. 390 (1897); State ex rel. Freeman v. Zimmerman, 86 Minn. 353 (1902).

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48. State v. Hay, 126 N.C. 999, 1001, 1003, 1005 (1900).

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50. Commonwealth v. Pear, Ma. 242, 248 (emphasis mine).

51. “Virus Squad Out,” Boston Globe, 18 November 1901, 7, quoted in Albert et al., “Last Smallpox Epidemic,” 376. See Thirtieth Annual Report of the Health Department of the City of Boston For the Year 1901 (Boston, 1902), 45Google Scholar.

52. Parmet, Wendy E. et al. , “Individual Rights versus the Public's Health: 100 Years after Jacobson v. Massachusetts,” New England Journal of Medicine 352 (2005): 652–654CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Commonwealth v. Pear, 183 Mass. 242 (1902).

53. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 14–18 (1905).

54. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 27, 26 (1905).

55. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 39 (1905). Although Jacobson raised precisely this issue, the police court judge refused to let him enter that claim into evidence before the jury; so Harlan's language did not help him.

56. New York v. Ekerold, 211 N.Y. 386 (1914), 394.

57. See, e.g., Commonwealth v. Gillen, 65 Pa. Super. 31 (1916).

58. Holmes to Hand, 24 June 1918, in Gunther, Gerald, “Learned Hand and the Origins of Modern First Amendment Doctrine: Some Fragments of History,” Stanford Law Review 27 (1975): appendix, 757CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59. Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).

60. See Annas, George J., “Bioterrorism, Public Health, and Civil Liberties,” New England Journal of Medicine 346 (2002): 1337–1342Google Scholar; Gostin, Lawrence O., “Jacobson v. Massachusetts at 100 Years: Police Powers and Civil Liberties in Tension,” American Journal of Public Health 95 (2005): 576–581Google Scholar.