– by Wood Institute Travel Grantee Elena Jarmoskaite*
It was in the scorching heat of summer 2018 that I arrived in Philadelphia, having travelled some three and a half thousand miles separating the Historical Medical Library and my home in London. I came here for the sole purpose of learning more about the phenomenon most of us would happily never hear about again: the anti-vaccinationists, or, colloquially, the anti-vaxxers.
Not that long ago I would have seen vaccination opponents as a merely baffling movement, perhaps not all that distinctly removed from other fringe groups like the infamous flat-earthers or tin foil-hat-wearers; at the point of my visit, however, they had become central to my Master thesis. A lot has been said about the anti-vaccinationists, and it is an increasingly hot topic at the moment, with unfortunate and unignorable outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases happening all over the globe. Vaccination opposition, however, is a difficult subject, both because of its multi-layered nature, and because of the immense amount of emotion surrounding it.