Rebecca Onion: It seems like today’s anti-vaxxers have adopted a lot of the argumentation and rhetoric of past medical freedom movements and are now applying it to the question of vaccines. Is that fair to say—that this is the adoption of rhetoric around therapeutics for a new purpose?
Lewis Grossman: For a lot of people thinking about this today, the idea of medical freedom started with anti-vaccinationism: the demand for medical freedom as a resistance to [government] compulsion. One thing I think my book contributes is a longer historical context, showing how movements by people demanding access to drugs and doctors they wanted have a much longer history than resistance to compulsion does. The first mandatory vaccination was in the mid-19th century, and organized anti-vaccinationism didn’t arise in the United States until the 1880s and 1890s. There’s a centurylong tradition of medical freedom activism before that.
What’s interesting is that many of the same arguments that were invented in the context of demanding access to wanted treatments have been applied to compulsion. These include bodily autonomy and the extraordinary overlap in American thought between medical freedom and religious freedom. And they also include this longtime suspicion that medicine is either being denied to people or forced upon people by corrupt, greedy forces that are basically trying to monopolize the medical market and profit off the bodies of Americans. And you can see all of those strains of argument today in the middle of our pandemic, but you can also see them in 1820 with the Thomsonians.
I hadn’t even thought about the fact that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, “mistrust of mainstream medicine” also meant “mistrust of the government having any hand in deciding how medical science would go.” We sort of presume that this is the way things are—that the government will of course have a certain set of qualifications that they expect drugs to meet in order to be manufactured and sold. But at one point in time, the very idea that the government would be involved in that was seen as an imposition.
You can really see that in my chapter on the proposed National Department of Health in the early 20th century. It seems, from our perspective, like such an uncontroversial thing: Let’s gather all the health-related functions of the federal government and put them in one department. But the perceived alliance between orthodox medicine and the federal government was viewed as an unacceptable danger to Americans’ medical freedom.
And this extended, interestingly, even to one thing that you would think everyone would consider to be a good idea, which is government sponsorship of research into medical problems. People even objected to that, because they thought the direction of research would be driven by orthodoxy, and that alternative approaches would be ignored or suppressed. And you can see echoes of this now, too.