At the conclusion of the Medical Society’s meeting, Beatty offered—half-jokingly—to pay the Deseret News to publish its minutes, since the newspaper “‘reached a class of readers that no other paper did.’”50 He also encouraged journalists to reproduce its peer-reviewed studies, with the hope of persuading Mormon critics of vaccination to reconsider their medical stances. Yet society members, nearly all of whom were gentiles and professionally trained doctors, thought that these efforts would likely be futile. Penrose, through the platform of the newspaper and his leadership position in the church, had already molded public opinion to inflict “‘more harm to the vaccination idea than all the doctors could atone for in a thousand years.’”51 Mormons were widely spreading the virus wherever they travelled. The British Medical Journal reported five cases of the disease at missionary headquarters in Nottingham, England, apparently contracted after missionaries received contaminated letters from Salt 48 Ibid. 49 Morrell, Utah’s Health and You, 95. 50 Deseret News, January 11, 1900. 51 Ibid.; California and Western Medicine, Vol. XXIII (November 1925): 1471; Ward B. Studt, M.D., Medicine in the Intermountain West: A History of Health Care in the Rural Areas of the West (Salt Lake City: Olympus Publishing Co., 1976), 49.
52 P. Boobbyer, “Small-pox in Nottingham,” British Medical Journal 1 (1901): 1054. 53 Jean Bickmore Smith, ed., Church, State, and Politics: The Diaries of John Henry Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1990), 472. 54 Lu Ann Faylor Snyder and Phillip A. Snyder, eds., PostManifesto Polygamy: The 1899–1904 Correspondence of Helen, Owen, and Avery Woodruff (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009), 36–37. 55 Ibid., 72. 56 Kate B. Carter, Our Pioneer Heritage, vol. 12 (1969): 265. 57 Sherilyn Cox Bennion, “The Salt Lake Sanitarian: Medical Adviser to the Saints,” Utah Historical Quarterly
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Even still, as Medical Society members would realize, by January 1900 opposition to vaccination was directed neither exclusively nor officially by Penrose or any other church leader. If some Mormons like the Woodruffs interpreted vaccination as evidence of weak faith, and anti-vaccination as a testament to Mormon fidelity, some room still existed for churchgoers to negotiate different responses. In addition to Martha Hughes Cannon, Mormon physicians like Ellis Reynolds Shipp, Romania Pratt, Seymour Young (Brigham Young’s nephew), and Joseph S. Richards all advocated vaccination and regular medicine. Although their support appeared infrequently in the Deseret News and more commonly in the Mormon-owned Salt Lake Sanitarian (1888–91), its influence was discernable in the smallpox vaccination controversy. Some church members experimented by combining vaccines with herbs popular with Mormons to produce an eclectic religious and cultural health regimen.57 Others, like En-
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Lake City.52 In Scandinavia, Mormon apostle John Henry Smith stated that “some Elders . . . having the small pox [sic]” were spreading the illness.53 An outbreak occurred in New Zealand where health authorities traced the virus to missionaries recently arrived from Utah, while on the other side of the globe, in Juarez, Mexico, Helen and Owen Woodruff succumbed to a “virulent form of smallpox” after refusing to be vaccinated, since, they believed, they were “on the Lord’s errand and God would protect them.”54 Closer to home, in Logan, Utah, Avery Woodruff observed that “few of the students have been vaccinated and they do not seem to inforce [sic] it.”55 Meanwhile, Englishman Duckworth Grimshaw and his family avoided vaccination only to ride out the disease in home isolation.56
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Rather than focus on the alleged chicanery and material motivation of doctors, Behle argued, critics should examine the scientific evidence that verified vaccination’s utility and safety. Citing a handful of peer-reviewed studies, he demonstrated that vaccination diminished the scarring effects of variola, as well as its morbidity and mortality rates. Among children “up to ten years of age,” it also produced “almost absolute immunity from smallpox” without requiring a booster.48 Moreover, vaccine delivery was much safer than in years past, as pharmaceutical companies concentrated on developing purer strains and the American Medical Association encouraged public health departments to carefully screen pharmaceuticals. This would only improve in the coming years; in 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act helped to ensure the quality and veracity of drugs and their advertising on the federal level, and in 1911 Utah and other western states began to employ bacteriologists to enforce the 1906 legislation.49
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