Article ID: CBB001201818

Materia Medica: Technology, Vaccination, and Antivivisection in Jazz Age Philadelphia (2013)

unapi

During the 1920s, the Philadelphia-based American Antivivisection Society turned to racialized metaphors in its circulating periodical, the Starry Cross, to excoriate the expanding practice of vaccination. Since vaccines were then made from animal-derived serums, the involvement of antivivisectionists in antivaccine arguments is not surprising. However, the Philadelphia society's strange combination of vaccination, jazz, and vivisection reveals that its motivations to protect animals were deeply bound to broader cultural anxieties about the threat to purity posed by science, race, and sex, and that the stakes of succumbing to vaccination amounted to no less than medical miscegenation. By turning to racialized, speciesist arguments in asking for mercy toward animals against scientifically minded torture, the antivivisectionists' use of the sound and image of the tortured animal was meant more to protect the human body and keep it white.

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Authors & Contributors
Fretwell, Erica
Stob, Paul
Ray, Angela G.
Robertson, Beth A.
Isaenko, Oleksandr
Wallach, Jennifer Jensen
Concepts
Science and gender
Science and culture
Science and race
Science and technology, relationships
Science and politics
Hydroelectric power
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
20th century, late
20th century
18th century
17th century
Places
United States
Canada
Germany
Philadelphia, PA
Atlantic world
Pacific Northwest (North America)
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