Was Wallace really an anti-vaccinationist, and if so, why?
Wallace was indeed a full-blown anti-vaccinationist, coming to this position in the very late 1870s or early 1880s on the basis of his examination of reports involving both anecdotal and statistical evidence. It is important to note, however, that he never believed–as has been commonly reported–vaccination to have been wholly hurtful historically. Rather, his argument was that whatever the level of success it may have had in stemming the tide of smallpox in the first half of the nineteenth century, by the latter part of that century unsanitary vaccine production and administration techniques, wholesale vaccination efforts, and a general improvement in societal sanitation and hygiene were making its mandatory application no longer advisable. Thus, on page 160 of S509 (published in 1895) he says: “. . . This clearly means, not that ‘Vaccination may have caused more deaths than smallpox’ . . . but that at the present time, as the result of general Vaccination for about fifty years, it m
