The history of vaccination in nineteenth-century Britain is curiously fragmented. The first two decades are well-covered through biographies of Edward Jenner. These works, most of which cast Jenner as a hero, describe his discovery and his efforts to spread vaccination through an extensive correspondence with other practitioners and through charitable enterprises. Vaccination in the late nineteenth century is explored in a cluster of works on the antivaccination movement; these works analyze how strong, vocal opposition in the 1870s and 1880s forced the government to pass legislation allowing parents to declare their conscientious objection to the practice. The focus on antivaccination is justified by its wider significance as a measure of popular opposition to increasingly interventionist state medicine.

Vaccination in the intervening period—roughly between 1820 and 1870— is surprisingly underresearched, given that this period saw the introduction of vaccination legislation and the development of free vaccination services across the United Kingdom. We have Royston Lambert's 1962 article, which argues that public vaccination was one of the few public health initiatives of the 1850s, and a small but highly significant contribution to the nineteenth-century revolution in government. His 1963 biography of John Simon also contains a good deal of detailed material on the formulation and implementation of vaccination policy. Other works on smallpox prevention focus on particular towns or areas, such as Anne Hardy and Graham Mooney's works on smallpox in London and J. R. Smith's fascinating local study of Essex.