ABSTRACT
The practice of vaccination itself was often considered objectionable, particularly by parents who feared that the introduction of foreign material into their children’s bodies involved some kind of contamination: some parents were known to suck the lymph out of their children’s arms, once out of sight of the vaccinator. The passage of a week between vaccination and inspection apparently encouraged a view of lymph as melded with a child’s bodily fluids and thus perhaps as more or less inalienable without consent. Poor Law medicators in many localities from Lancashire to Cornwall to London were, from the 1840s, increasingly taking action along trade union lines: in 1856, a Poor Law Medical Reform Association was set up that soon seems to have represented more than half the publicly employed practitioners in England. The medical profession reacted to these complications with a profound ambivalence.
