William White

Little is firmly documented online about his personal life, but library records identify him as William White, born in 1831 or 1832 and dying in 1890. He is associated with several late-19th-century works preserved by the Wellcome Collection.

White is best known for The Story of a Great Delusion (1885), a substantial book on the history of vaccination written from an anti-vaccination viewpoint. He also wrote Sir Lyon Playfair Taken to Pieces and Disposed Of (1884), another polemical work aimed at public defenders of compulsory vaccination.

Today, his writing is most often read not as settled medical authority, but as evidence of how intensely vaccination was argued over in Victorian Britain. For modern listeners, his books can be approached as part political pamphlet, part social history, and part record of a long-running public controversy.