© 2004 by Society for the Social History of Medicine
Compliance with Infant Smallpox Vaccination Legislation in Nineteenth-century Rural England: Hollingbourne, 1876–88
1 Domineys, 4 Dorchester Road, Sydling St Nicholas, Dorset DT2 9NU, UKE-mail: annclarksydling{at}aol.com
Compulsory vaccination legislation came late to England and Wales in 1853 and its deficiencies continued to be addressed until 1874, when compulsory birth registration closed the last loophole in the system. The nuances of legislation and central and local machinery for its implementation are discussed, and three aspects of compliance are explored. First, correspondence between Hollingbourne Board of Guardians and the Local Government Board is used to assess administrative compliance with vaccination responsibilities. Secondly, the practice of local public officials is appraised, using evidence from vaccination registers and returns of central government inspectors. Lastly, children’s ages at vaccination are linked with social class and occupational data to determine whether these factors influenced parental compliance with the legal time limit for vaccination. This article highlights institutionalized collusion with non-compliance in the central collection of statistics, failure of those statistics to give a true representation of vaccination practice in any place, and failure, both centrally and locally, to deal with poor rural practice. Nevertheless, considerable parental compliance is found and, in cases of default, most infants were vaccinated before their first birthday. Finally, family migration is shown to impact negatively on compliance, a contention that can be deduced only through detailed study of local records.
Keywords: vaccination registers, legislation, parental compliance, central/local administration, birth registration, migration