Strangling Angel: Diphtheria and Childhood Immunization in Ireland

Reappraisals in Irish History

by Michael Dwyer

This book is the first comprehensive history of the anti-diphtheria campaign and the factors which facilitated or hindered the rollout of the national childhood immunization programme in Ireland. It is easy to forget the context in which Irish society opted to embrace mass childhood immunization. Dwyer shows us how we got where we are. He restores Diphtheria's reputation as one of the most prolific child-killers of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland and explores the factors which allowed the disease to take a heavy toll on child health and life-expectancy.

Public health officials in the fledgling Irish Free State set the eradication of diphtheria among their first national goals, and eschewing the reticence of their British counterparts, adopted anti-diphtheria immunization as their weapon of choice. An unofficial alliance between Irish medical officers and the British pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome placed Ireland on the European frontline of the bacteriological revolution, however, Wellcome sponsored vaccine trials in Ireland side-lined the human rights of Ireland's most vulnerable citizens: institutional children in state care. An immunization accident in County Waterford, and the death of a young girl, raised serious questions regarding the safety of the immunization process itself, resulting in a landmark High Court case and the Irish Medical Union's twelve-year long withdrawal of immunization services. As childhood immunization is increasingly considered a lifestyle choice, rather than a lifesaving intervention, this book brings historical context to bear on current debate.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2018

About the author

Michael Dwyer is an award winning historian and author. He holds a PhD in History and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Reviews

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Strangling Angel before the arrival of the Covid 19 pandemic. Dwyer's account of how health authorities in Ireland dealt with epidemic diphtheria in the first half of the twentieth century had eerie parallells with how the covid pandemic played out. Diphtheria was a major global child killer in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A new vaccine, introduced in the 1920s, looked set to eradicate diptheria but a number of vaccine disasters relating to the drug left parents with a difficult choice to make - to leave their children open to the ravages of a killer disease or to submit them to a potentially dangerous vaccine. Dwyer's account of a vaccine disaster in Ring, County Waterford, reads like a John Grisham pageturner - complete with a courtroom drama. The Ring case saw the first court case in the world where a pharmaceutical company stood trial for a vaccine related death. As has been stated by other reviewers, Strangling Angel is both scholarly and readable and was awarded a special commendation by the National University of Ireland in 2019.