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| From G1761 |
And this is the A40 replacement bridge being built.
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| From G2001 |
In the background of the 1970s pictures you can see buildings. It turns out that these are the Over Isolation Hospital where tuberculosis patients were sent. Looking up history of disease in Gloucester revealed smallpox and cholera were occasional hazards. Smallpox broke out every few decades and patients were sent to other hospitals.
So we come to Samuel Bland, the founder of the Gloucester newspaper "The Citizen". He was very influential and led a successful anti-vaccination campaign. By 1887 he had managed to stop compulsory vaccination. Everything was OK until 1895 when a smallpox epidemic swept Gloucester. At the height of the epidemic he hosted an anti-vaccination meeting with Dr Walter Robert Hadwen as the speaker. Hadwen believed that innoculation was harmful and that sanitation was the proper remedy. There was even a riot in quiet leafy little Oakridge against the use of the pest house for Smallpox victims. The judge in that case criticised the local authority for the failure to innoculate and so intensify the epidemic. The Dr Hadwen Trust website fails to mention his connection with smallpox. 435 people died and of these 280 were children because they had never been vaccinated. The compulsory vaccinations were resumed. Incompetence did not hurt Bland's career and he was elevated from J.P. to Mayor a few years later.
Fast forward to 2010 and Andrew Wakefield and the media frenzy about the MMR vaccine. Again children died although nowhere near as many. Add to that AIDs deniers and other conspiracy theories propagated by irresponsible mass media. As happened a century ago and again now, when the media reports science incorrectly or badly, lives are at risk.
