Fear of the remedy

Text 1: The Vaccinator’s Visit, by Martha Greenhalgh

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

Dear Ann, You will think me very foolish, and perhaps I was. When the vaccinator came round the parish in March with his lancet and his little glass of matter, I would not let him near the baby. I had heard such things. Mrs Tull at the shop declared that a child in Bolton had grown a cow’s hair upon its arm after the operation, and another had been seized with fits and never spoke again. I knew it was very likely nonsense, but I could not put the pictures out of my head, and when the man came to the door with his bag I told him the baby was sleeping and shut it in his face.

Then the smallpox came to the Fawcetts’ house, two doors down. Their Billy, who used to sit on our step and count the carts, was taken ill on the Sunday and dead by the Friday, and they say his face was so changed that his own mother would not have known him. I stood at the window and watched the little coffin go by and I held our Jane so tight she screamed.

On the Monday I walked her to the vaccinator myself, three miles, and when he took up the lancet I shut my eyes like a coward. It was over in a moment. She cried less than she does for a bath. Her arm was sore for a week and is now as pretty as it ever was, and without a single hair. I tell you all this, Ann, because I know you have kept your boys back, as I did. Do not wait for a coffin to change your mind.

Text 2: The Church Hall Queue, by Brian Sallis

An original twentieth-century memoir.

The summer I was seven, polio closed the swimming baths. Nobody explained it to us properly, which made it worse. We knew only that a boy from the next street had gone into hospital with a sore neck and come home months later in leg irons, and that somewhere in the city there were children in machines called iron lungs, lying in metal tubes with only their heads sticking out. My mother would not let us drink from the park fountain. She checked our necks every morning as if she were feeling for a pulse.

So when the vaccine came, she was first in the queue. I remember the church hall, the smell of floor polish, a nurse in a starched white cap calling out names from a clipboard, and the line of children ahead of me disappearing one by one behind a screen and coming out crying. By the time it was my turn I had decided that the injection must be worse than the disease, and I made a run for the door. My mother caught me by the collar of my school shirt. I can still feel the buttons pressing into my throat.

The needle took perhaps two seconds. I howled all the way home, more from injured pride than pain, and was given a sherbet lemon to stop. Years later, my mother told me she had not slept properly for two summers before that injection. I had never known. To me the needle was the monster; to her the monster was invisible and everywhere, and the needle was the sword.

‘Both texts show that fear of the remedy was greater than fear of the disease.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about the fears described in each text
• explain how far you agree that fear of the remedy was greater than fear of the disease
• compare the ways the writers present fear of vaccination and fear of illness.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.