Marylebone Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League

Active in 19th-century London, the Marylebone Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League was a local campaigning organization, not an individual author. It is best known today for publishing Compulsory Vaccination, a report of a public meeting held at Marylebone Vestry Hall on October 19, 1870.

That publication preserves speeches and resolutions from a moment when opposition to compulsory smallpox vaccination was becoming more organized in Britain. Read now, it offers a firsthand glimpse of how campaigners framed questions of public health, personal liberty, and state power during a period of recurring epidemic disease.

For modern listeners, the league's work is most valuable as a historical document. It helps place later anti-vaccination movements in context and shows how intensely these debates were already being argued in Victorian society.