Anti-Vaccination Society of America
defunct public policy organization
Anti-Vaccination Society of America opposed compulsory smallpox vaccination from the final decades of the 19th century through the 1910s. It was founded in 1879 after a visit to the United States by William Tebb. It published a periodical called Vaccination.
Members
William Tebb (1830–1917) inspired the organization.
L.H. Piehn of Nora Springs, Iowa. He was a banker and his daughter died of sepsis after the smallpox vaccine in 1894.
Montague Leverson of New York City.
Weyprecht of New York City in 1895.
Frank D. Blue of Terre Haute, Indiana was secretary in 1899.
Porter F. Cope (1869–1950) was the secretary.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Anti-Vaccination Society of America” is defunct public policy organization. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Anti-Vaccination, Society and America, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “defunct public policy organization” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q21072733. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1879, 1830, 1917 and 1894.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Anti-Vaccination Society of America”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Anti-Vaccination Society of America primary sources, Anti-Vaccination Society of America archive and Anti-Vaccination research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Anti-Vaccination Society of America”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Anti-Vaccination Society of America” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.