Other medical professionals also relied on religious metaphors to describe opposition to vaccination. Azel Ames, a Wakefield, Massachusetts physician who directed the Marine Hospital Service vaccination program in Puerto Rico, referred to antivaccination as an “absurd and unwarranted heresy.”
Dr. John Henry Tilden said, “Vaccination against smallpox is perhaps one of the most thoroughly ingrained superstitions of the age. Today there does not appear to be any prospect of its growing less popular.”
Williams called inoculation “a Delusion of the Devil; and that there was never the like Delusion in New-England, since the Time of the Witchcraft at Salem, when so many innocent Persons lost their Lives … “