Alfredo Helsby Hazell’s antivaccine view. Controversies and debates at the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century in Chile

Abstract

This article reconstructs the main arguments against vaccination that circulated in Chile during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For this purpose, we will study the figure of Alfredo Helsby Hazell, who was the primary opponent of vaccination in Chile and published several writings in which he developed and disseminated his ideas. We observe that Helsby argued his rejection of vaccination from the defence of hygienism and distrust of the scientific explanations that began to spread from the germ theory. This was articulated with the defence of health as a private sphere of action, criticizing the intervention of the State in such matters.