The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective and Heading South to Teach: The World of Susan Nye Hutchison, 1815-1845. She currently serves as managing editor of History of Education Quarterly, published by Cambridge University Press.
Tolley applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Vaccine Wars: The Two-Hundred-Year Fight for School Vaccinations, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book is from Chapter 3, “Taking Schools to Court: The Legal Battles.” If you open to this page, you’ll find the following passage:Learn more about Vaccine Wars at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.In 1908, the public school district in Edgewood, Pennsylvania, refused to accept an altered certificate of vaccination presented by eight-year-old Dorothy M. Lee. Dr. W. R. Stephens, a homeopathic physician who served on the Wilkinsburg board of health, had given Dorothy an oral dose of vaccine matter. Pennsylvania’s official vaccination certificates required doctors to inoculate patients on an arm and confirm that they had observed a “resulting sore” on that arm several days after the procedure. The sore, which eventually turned into a small scar, indicated the vaccination had been effective. But oral doses produced no external sores or other visible signs on the body. Seeking to circumvent the requirement, when he signed Dorothy’s certificate, Stephens crossed out the words “I find a resultant sore” so the certificate simply stated, “I find a result, which in my opinion means a successful vaccination.” However, school authorities refused to accept the altered certificate, and when they excluded Dorothy from school, her father sued.The Page 99 Test works well for my book, because this passage illustrates one of the many controversies over school vaccination laws that have persisted over time. Protests and lawsuits over school vaccination are nothing new in US history. Dorothy Lee’s doctor opposed traditional vaccination because he believed in alternative medicine. Others opposed vaccines for religious reasons. Some people believed vaccines were ineffective and unsafe. And school leaders sometimes opposed vaccine policies for fear of sparking parent protests, or because they feared the policies would lead parents to pull their children out of school.
My book focuses on three overarching questions: Throughout history, how have Americans understood the role of schools in the transmission and prevention of contagious disease? How have schools balanced their duty to educate with their responsibility to protect children from illness? Why does opposition to vaccination persist?
Vaccine Wars tells the history of efforts to achieve and maintain immunity in schools through vaccination. The story begins in 1800, with the introduction of the smallpox vaccine and an era of widespread public support for vaccination. It ends with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, a year that saw a dramatic decline in the routine childhood vaccinations required for school and a growing partisan divide over public health mandates to protect against the coronavirus. The book’s chapters are divided into two parts to reflect changing trends in vaccine opposition. Those in part I analyze a long shift, from broad support of vaccination against smallpox in the early nineteenth century to organized opposition in the early twentieth century. With the polio era serving as the pivot point, the chapters in part II analyze a similar shift from broad acceptance of school vaccination policy in the mid-twentieth century to increasing criticism of vaccines in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a new era of organized opposition in the 1990s. The book’s conclusion outlines the ways America’s response to the campaign against COVID-19 has been shaped by this history.
--Marshal Zeringue
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