Revisiting the History of Religious Resistance to Vaccination in the Netherlands

This article provides a new framework for the history of religious objections to vaccination in the Netherlands. In public opinion and scholarly literature, these are often associated with the contemporary group of conservative Reformed people or inhabitants of the Dutch Bible Belt and projected back onto the past in a static way. In early modern times, however, reluctance to perform any preventive medical act on the human body was embedded in a general perception of the divine governance of daily life. During the eighteenth century, the innovation of inoculation was gradually accepted by medi... Mehr ...