100216426

Alfred Russel Wallaces Medical
Libertarianism: State Medicine, Human

Progress, and Evolutionary Purpose
M IC H A E L A. FL A N N E R Y
Historical Collections, UAB, 1720 Second Avenue S., LHL 301-UAB, Birmingham,
Alabama 35294-0013. Email: flanney@uab.edu
A bstract . Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), naturalist and explorer of
South America and the Malay Archipelago, secured his place in history by
independently discovering the theory o f natural selection. His letter outlin
ing the theory was sent from Ternate in eastern Indonesia and received at
Down House, according to Charles Darwin (1809-82), on June 18, 1858,
prompting the now-famed evolutionist to rush his languishing manuscript
to press. Wallaces contributions to evolutionary biology, biogeography,
and anthropology are well known, but his medical views have received far
less attention. W ithin the context o f a strident populist antivaccination
movement and an ominous elitist eugenics campaign, Wallace took his
stand, which revealed itself in a libertarianism that defended traditional
socialist constituencies (the working poor, the lumpenproletariat, and fem
inist reformers) against state-mandated medical interventions. Rather than
viewing Wallace as a heterodox contrarian, this article argues that his posi
tions were logical outgrowths o f his medical libertarianism and evolutionary
and social theories. K e y w o r d s : vaccination, antivaccination movement,
eugenics, evolution, Darwinism, libertarianism, socialism, Alfred Russel
Wallace.
Volume 70, Number I

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journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences,
[ 74 ]
Flannery
Wallaces Medical Libertarianism
75
Alfred Russel Wallace passed away on November 7,

1913, England lost the last of its first-generation modern
evolutionary theorists.1 It was Wallace who fifty-five years
earlier sent a letter to Charles Darwin from Ternate in the Spice
Islands outlining the theory o f natural selection. It was a letter that
would forever change the biological sciences, for it prompted its
shocked recipient to unveil to the world their idea quite indepen
dently arrived at of common descent with modification by means
of natural selection. W ith this revolutionary theory presented at the
Linnean Society on July 1, 1858, sixteen months later Darwin would
publish On the Origin of Species. Nevertheless, Wallace would remain a
significant figure thereafter.
Wallaces renown was more than just Darwins coattail effect; his
contributions were (and remain) impressive. In 1869, he published his
most popular and financially rewarding book, The Malay Archipelago,
a magnificent and unparalleled scientific travel narrative that saw ten
editions through 1890 and influenced novelists Joseph Conrad and
Somerset Maugham. His Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876) is
regarded as the seminal text in biogeography, and his sequel Island Life
(1880), a detailed examination of island ecosystems, was considered
by Darwin to be Wallaces best book. Darwinism (1889) remains one
of the clearest discussions of natural selection in print. By the time
Wallace departed for his rousingly successful tour of America and
Canada four years after Darwins death, he was by all accounts
Englands elder statesman of evolutionary biology.2 In fact, no one
questioned or complained when his publicist billed him as the most
distinguished living naturalist in the world.3
But this native of an obscure EngHsh/Welsh border town, surveyor,
and self-taught naturalist-turned-world traveler was also fiercely in
dependent. After reading George Combes The Constitution of Man
(1824), Wallace became a defender of phrenology and a seance he
attended on July 22, 1865, would forever convert him to spiritualism.
hen
1. Besides Wallace and Darwin, those seminal figures were Thomas H enry Huxley and
Joseph Dalton Hooker. For an engaging and thoughtful discussion o f them all, see Iain
McCalman, Darwins Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory o f Evolution
(New York: W W N orton, 2009).
2. Martin Fichman, Alfred Russel Wallaces N o rth American Tour: Transatlantic Evolu
tionism, Endeavour, 2001, 25, 74 -7 8 , 74.
3. Ross A. Slotten, The Heretic in Darwins Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 382.
76
Journal of the History of Medicine
Vol. 70, Jan uary 2015
More significantly, he wound up articulating the implications of mod

ern evolutionary theory very differently from Darwin. In the April
issue of the 1869 Quarterly Review, Wallace broke with his senior col
league over natural selections power to explain the special faculties of
Homo sapiens our moral attributes, our mathematical ability, our love
of art and music, our abstract reasoningwere all due to an Overrul
ing Intelligence.4 Wallaces version of intelligent evolution (directed,
detectably designed, and purposeful common descent) distanced him
from many of his scientific peers and made him something of an out
cast from Darwins inner circle.5 The implications of teleological evo
lution were anathema to the purveyors of a new scientific view of
nature. Darwin saw no guidance behind natures riches, for he admit
ted that he was inclined to look at everything as resulting from
designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the work
ing out of what we may call chance.6 Darwin rejected the old design
argument o f William Paley only to find it resurrected by the man he
would have least expected the co-discoverer of natural selection.
Thus, Wallace has left a conflicted legacy. O n the one hand,
Wallace was a noteworthy explorer and naturalist who made significant
contributions to biology; on the other hand, he was often branded a
heterodox contrarian who defended phrenology, spiritualism, and an
intelligently guided evolution working toward the progressive perfec
tion of humankind. Wallaces forays into phrenology and spiritualism
are dismissed only with presentist hindsight. In its day phrenology
held considerable influence, and while the speculations of Franz Joseph
Gall contained much error, most today generally acknowledge that it is
upon the solid parts of Galls labours modern neurology is founded.7
4. Alfred Russel Wallace, Sir Charles Lyell on Geological Climates and the O rigin o f
Species, Quart. Rev., 1869,126, 359-94, 393.
5. For details o f Wallaces teleological views, see Darwinism: A n Exposition o f the Theory o f
Natural Selection until Some o f Its Applications (especially chapter XV Darwinism Applied to
M an) (London: Macmillan, 1889); M a n s Place in the Universe: A Study o f the R esult o f Scien
tific Research Relating to the U nity and Plurality o f Worlds (New York: McClure, Philips & Co.,
1903); and The World o fL fe : A Manifestation o f Creative Power, Directive M in d and Ultimate Pur
pose (London: Chapman and Hall, 1910).
6. Letter to Asa Gray, May 22, i860, The Life and Letters o f Charles Darwin, ed. Francis
Darwin, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1897), 2: 105.
7. William Cecil Dampier, A History o f Science and Its Relations with Philosophy & R eli
g io n 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 275. Donald Simpson argues that Gall and
Spurzhiem made real contributions to the emergence o f m odern neuroscience at the end
o f the nineteenth century even if they were right for the wrong reasons. See his
Flannery
77
Similarly, spiritualism was an important part of the scientific and cul

tural milieu of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century society on
both sides of the Atlantic. Rather than a menagerie of hobbyists, gull
ible dupes, and misty-eyed mystics, spiritualists claimed the allegiance
of some of the scientific communitys best and brightest. Harvard psy
chologist William Janies, Columbia philosopher James Hervey Hyslop,
noted physicists William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge, and Nobel
laureates Lord Rayleigh and Charles Richet all took the claims and
phenomena of spiritualism very seriously. As such, Wallaces interests
in phrenology and spiritualism were very much a part of what consti
tuted important aspects of scientific inquiry contending for legitimacy
among his generation.s As for his teleological evolution, about which
more will be said later, Wallace was not alone in seeing purpose and
design in nature.9
It is beyond the scope here to examine all aspects of this paradoxi
cal career, but it was in Wallaces stances regarding public healths
political agendas, as seen in the rise of state medicine, that his more
important philosophical commitments emerged. The medical jour
nal Lancet expressed the majority opinion on Wallace in his obituary:
Wallace was an individual and romantic thinker, but his intuition did
not always serve him as well in his attempts to solve other problems as
it had when he had jumped at the correct explanation of the processes
and changes in organic life. 10 Nearly fifty years later, the journal had
not advanced Wallaces position in the panoply of science very much
when physician Ffrangcon Roberts wrote that Wallaces critical
faculty often deserted him and he lacked a sense of proportion. 11
Phrenology and the Neurosciences: Contributions of E J. Gall and J. G. Spurzheim, A N Z

J. Surg., 2005, 75, 475-82, 481 8. On Wallace and phrenology, see his autobiography, My Life: A Record of Events and
Opinions (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1906), I, 234; on his conversion and subsequent spiritual
ist views, see his Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, rev. ed. (London: George Redway, 1895).
Wallace gives a detailed account of his spiritual epiphany on pages 132-35. Placing spiritual
ism in larger context is Peter Lamont, Spiritualism and a Mid-Victorian Crisis in Confi
dence, Hist.]., 2004, 47, 897-920; and Logie Barrow, Socialism in Eternity: The Ideology
ofPlebian Spiritualists, Hist. Workshop, Spring 1980, 9, 37-69.
9. In Wallaces day among the most prominent were St. George Mivart, On the Genesis of
Species (London: Macmillan, 1871); Oliver Lodge, Life and Matter, 2nd ed. (London:
Williams & Norgate, 1905); and Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell
(New York: H. Holt, 1911).
10. Anon., obit., Alfred Russel Wallace, The Lancet, 1913,182, 1410.
11. Ffrangcon Roberts, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Lancet, 1958,272, 580-81, 581.
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Vol. yo, January 2015
While the medical profession was busy dismissing Wallace as a wideeyed crank, others, like Loren Eiseley, saw him differendy. Critical of
Darwin s reductionist approach to mankind, Eiseley saw in Wallace a man
who understood anthropology somewhat in advance o f his confreres,
and made undisputed contributions to our common scientific knowl
edge.12 Wallace provided a counter to Darwins reductionist animal/man
continuity in nature, seeing instead something special in the human con
dition and intellect and unique in the world o f biological life. Accord
ing to Eiseley, Darwinians, unlike Wallace, tended to erroneously
de-em phasize the fully hum an capacities for both cooperation
and destruction, and the fully hum an ability to choose. 13
Others would pick up on Eiseley s critique with greater bluntness.
William Irwin Thompson, for example, saw in the emergent Darwinian
paradigm more snobbery than science. Although Wallace wondered
why, if survival o f the fittest was the mechanism o f natural selection,
man ever evolved a brain a hundred times more complex than that
needed for survival, British elites embraced a biological theory that
explained their empire as the pinnacle o f progress in which the darker
races are but bestial prefigurings o f the Englishman and suggested
that laissezfaire and survival o f the fittest are part o f nature s way. 14
But Wallace would reinterpret natures way and, unlike his privi
leged colleague at Down House, become a vocal critic o f the indus
trial, free-trade capitalism that he believed fostered oppression for the
vulnerable working class and w om en at hom e and exploitative imperi
alism and racism abroad. Though it had been brewing for some time,
Wallace publicly declared himself a socialist in 1889. But he cast it
within a libertarian context. W hile the term libertarian may seem an
anachronism applied to a Victorian naturalist, there are two things that
compel its usage in connection with Wallace. First, he kept close intel
lectual company with individuals like Herbert Spencer, Henry
George, and Peter Kropotkin (all o f w hom he knew and admired) that
scholars have associated with the roots o f left-libertarianism.15 Second,
12. Loren Eiseley, Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It (1958;
reprinted, with a foreword by Stephen Bertman, New York: Barnes & Noble, 2009), 257.
13. Ibid., 154.
14. William Irwin Thompson, A t the Edge of History (New York: Harper & Row, 1971),
ua-
is. Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, eds. The Origins of Left-Libertarianism : An Anthol
ogy of Historical Writings (New York: Palgrave, 2007). Peter Kropotkin is an interesting case.
Kropotkins theory of mutual aid is meant to provide an evolutionary explanation for moral
Flannery
79
his association with left-libertarianism is already well established in Wal

laces historiography. 16 W hat has not been well covered is how Wallaces
unique blend o f socialism and libertarianism (i.e., his left-libertarian
ism), forged in a crucible o f science and politics, produced specific
responses to the particular manifestations o f state medicine in his day
this was Wallaces medical libertarianism.
T he purpose here, then, is not to retrace the familiar ground of
Wallaces life, his interactions with colleagues, or his contributions to the
formative years o f modern evolutionary theory, 17 but to examine
Wallaces medical libertarianism as seen through his active opposition to
compulsory vaccination and his vocal outrage at the growing eugenics
movement. Far from being the expressions o f a reactionary, Wallaces
positions were logical outgrowths o f a coherent synthesis o f evolutionary
and social theory that provided a nuanced response to the increasing
role o f state medicine in the health and healthcare o f British citizens.
This essay examines that synthesis and its response to public health
measures im plem ented by a cadre o f medical experts empowered by
government authority. As such, it begins w ithin the larger context o f
establishing state medicine in Britain.
STATE M E D IC IN E IN B R IT A IN
In terms o f medicine and healthcare, there was probably no greater

transformation in Wallaces lifetime than the rise o f state medicine.
Even early on, the term itself was broad and included a grab bag of
behavior, not to justify a particular moral view, but to establish the natural basis o f ah moral
ity in R obert Graham, ed., Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Volume
One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 C E to 1939) (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 184.
Martin Fichman has referred to the left-libertarian Kropotkin as Wallaces soul mate in A n
Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace (Chicago: The University o f Chicago
Press, 2004), 280.
16. Leading Wallace scholar, Charles H. Smith, has long used socialist libertarian in
association with his hfelong subject o f interest, see his Alfred Russel Wallace: A n Anthology of
His Shorter Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 164; and Alfred Russel
Wallace, Societal Planning and Environmental Agenda, Env. Conserv., 2003, 30, 215-18.
See also Diane B. Paul, w ho calls Wallace an ardent libertarian, in Wallace, Women, and
Eugenics, in Natural Selection and Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace, ed.
Charles H. Smith and George Beccaloni (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2 6 3 78, 274.
17. O n Wallaces life, see Peter Raby, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life (London: Chatto &
Windus, 2001); Michael Shermer, In DaruHns Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel
Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Slotten, The Heretic in Damans Courtand Martin Fichman, A n Elusive Victorian.
80
Vol. 70, January 2015
public services that comprised medical care to the destitute, inmates of

asylums and prisons, military personnel, police and civil servants, foren
sic analysis through coroners, and as already mentioned, compulsory
vaccination. Historians of state medicine have tended to write triumphalist accounts of the movement and typically leave out of consider
ation the most controversial component of all, eugenics.18 But if state
medicine may be broadly defined as medical policy and programs under
the aegis of governmental authority then certainly eugenic measures
(whether positive or negative) deserve inclusion insofar as they typically
involved codification in law for their sanctions and/or procedures.
State medicine itself may be traced to the sanitary reform movement
led by Edwin Chadwick, a Benthamite Royal Commissioner charged
with investigating the operations of the Poor Laws. His report on the
Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842) is
regarded as a seminal work on the relationship of poverty, substandard
living conditions, and poor health in the slums of urban England and
Scotland. The Chadwick Report had a sobering effect on the British
public and especially policy-makers, highlighting in Jeanne L. Brands
words the confusion of sanitary administration (where it existed at all)
of the masses living in the squalor produced by Englands untrammeled
industrial explosion. '9
The appointment of a Royal Sanitary Commission in 1868 culmi
nated in three significant acts: the Local Government Act of 1871 and
the Public Health Acts of 1872 and 1875. It is important to note that
these early initiatives came from outside the medical profession itself.
John Lambert, Permanent Secretary of the Local Government Board,
considered sanitation a nonmedical function. Thus, surgeon John
Simon, Chief Medical Officer to the Privy Council, was forced to
play a secondary role because he could only respond to those health
issues that Lambert referred to him. It did not help that Simons call for
a larger role for the medical profession was opposed by the powerful
Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale, who herself had a large
public following. Indeed the Medical Department of the Local Gov
ernment Board was barred from any systematic role in the supervision
18. The classic history is Jeanne L. Brand, Doctors and the State: T h e British M edical Profession
and G overnm ent A ction, 1 8 7 0 -1 9 1 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965). W E Bynum, Science
and the Practice o f M edicine in the N in eteen th C en tu ry (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1994), also gives considerable coverage to state medicine in England but is similarly triumphalist.
19. Brand, 8.
Flannery
81
of local sanitary efforts. When Simon resigned in 1876, he was replaced

by the ineffectual Edward Cator Seaton who left after only three years
due to ill health.-0 George Buchanan followed with twelve years of a
difficult but able administration, bringing the reestablishment of some
independence from the lay Secretariat.21
The movement toward an increasing role for the government in
medical affairs was inexorable as could be seen in the growing num
bers of health officers, from 825 in 1876 to more than 1,300 by
1899.22 While private physicians themselves were distracted by the
responsibilities of daily practice, it was the British Medical Associa
tion that led a consistent call for more active involvement of the pro
fession and, in general, a more active development of state medicine.
Indeed, when the central authorities merged their health functions
with the Local Government Board in 1872, The Lancet insisted that
the Government must exercise for the people a paternal function
in the prevention of disease.23 Indeed, it was Richard Thorne
Thorne, assuming the duties of Chief Medical Officer in 1892, who
took this mandate and developed a stronger, more integrated scien
tific sanitary policy until his sudden and untimely death in 1899.24
But this slow, steady progress masked deep divisions. The march
toward state medicine grated against the individualist traditions of
British society. As David McLean observes, reformists holding
Benthamite images of a safer society inherently saw a betterment
of communal health as a great cause which overrode the identity of
the individual and the family.25 For others, however, the call for such
communal solutions only opened a door for the expansion of
centralized state authority and even for a descent into tyranny.26 Yet
the proponents of state medicine were captivated by the promise of
professional expertise and technical proficiency applied to intractable
public health issues.
20. Sally Sheard and Liam Donaldson, The N a tio n s Doctor: The Role o f the C h ie f Medical
Officer, 1855-11)98 (Oxford: Radcliffe Publishing, 2006), 19-20.
21. Ibid.
22. Brand, 109.
23. Ibid., 156.
24. Sheard and Donaldson, 22. O n the rise o f scientific sanitarianism, see Charles
Webster, ed., Caring for Health: History and Diversity, 3rd ed. (Buckingham, UK: O pen U n i
versity Press, 2001), 110-1 l.
2$. David McLean, Public Health and Politics in the A ge o f Reform: Cholera, the State and the
Royal N a v y in Victorian Britain (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 4 -5 .
26. Ibid., 6.
82
The problem was that the profession was having a hard time providing
demonstrable proof o f its expertise in achieving the goals and objectives
o f state medicine. The British Association for the Advancement o f Sci
ence noted in 1874 that the Medical Department was better at inquiring
into the causes o f disease than it was at actually preventing it.27 While it
is true that life expectancy had risen noticeably from the 1870s to 1900,
how much was attributable to direct medical intervention as opposed to
improved sanitation through better housing, cleaner water, better drain
age, etc. was an open question. Was Lambert correct that most o f these
things were achievable without the medical professions involvement?
Sitting from the comfortable position o f hindsight, the obvious
answer is both medical intervention and sanitation were needed. But this
was hardly obvious to Wallaces generation. In fact, the stridency of the
antivaccination debate was animated in no small measure by issues of
medical expertise and authority. The importance o f vaccination in the
cause o f enhanced professional status was in its value as an actual procedure
implemented on behalf o f disease prevention. A better flowing drain or
cleaner water could be attributed to the official vigilance o f nonmedical
civil servants, but not vaccination. The intervention o f vaccination was
the exclusive purview o f medical expertise. Hence, Wallaces argument
that more could be done by allocating resources to cleaning up the slums
versus what, for him, was an unsubstantiated vaccination procedure was a
direct challenge to the medical professions authority itself. Wallace
agreed when Ernest M cCormick chided the profession for having the
mental tendency engendered by their occupation to love brilliant and
ingenious antidotes, and esteem disease a normal condition.28 Similarly,
as we will see, eugenics was viewed by many o f the medical professions
most progressive leaders as a real opportunity at enhancing the profes
sions social and political prestige. Wallaces challenge here was not simply
that it treated people as means to ends but that (as in the case o f vaccina
tion) its premises were scientifically unsound.
WALLACE O N V A C C I N A T I O N
Dating from the passage o f the Vaccination Act o f 1853, the gradual
codification o f compulsory vaccination, masterfully outlined by Nadja
27. Brand, 72.
28. Ernest McCormick, Is Vaccination a Dangerous Delusion? (Reprinted from The
Westminster Review, 1909; London: The Anti-Vaccination League, 1913), 29.
Flannery
83
Durbach, had by the 1880s and 1890s helped to establish antivaccina

tion as a national movement, with areas such as Leicestershire reporting
80 percent of new births unvaccinated and others, such as Northamp
tonshire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire with nearly 50 percent or
more noncompliant.2y The compulsory vaccination laws particularly
impacted the poor working classes and especially women with young
children, who felt the brunt of compulsory vaccination. The issue
o f vaccination itself was universally seen as a m others question,30
and the antivaccination movement quickly caught the attention of
feminist activists like Jessie Craigen, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Eliza
beth Wolstenholme Elmy, and Ursula Bright. Casting her objections
in strident libertarian terms, Mary Hume Rothery, who along with
her husband William established the National Anti-Compulsory Vac
cination League in 1874, considered the vaccination law an intrusion by
the state into the sanctity of hearth and home and an affront to married
womens most inviolable property righttheir children.31 In fact, as
Lucinda McCray Beier has pointed out, vaccination was just one of sev
eral initiatives on the part of physicians and government policy-makers to
systematically remove working-class women as the established infor
mal health authorities midwives skilled by reputation, neighbor
hood nurses, and local healers in their communities.32
It was within this highly charged atmosphere o f contention that
Wallace was introduced to the antivaccination movement by a mer
chant and fellow spiritualist, William Tebb, in the early 1880s.33 By
now the antivaccination movement was at high tide. Tebb had estab
lished the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vacci
nation in 1880, and he was one of the most outspoken leaders of a
popular campaign that could draw ten thousand protestors so pro
voked by the issue that they mauled the effigy of a vaccination offi
cer at Dewsbury. Later, between eighty thousand to hundred
thousand demonstrators converged on Leicester in March 1885.34
29. Nadja Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-11)07
(Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005), 10.
30. Ibid., 60.
31. Ibid., 72.
32. Lucinda McCray Beier, For Their Oum Good: The Transformation o f English WorkingClass Health Culture, 18801970 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 3587.
33. Alfred Russel Wallace, M y Life, II, 368.
34. For these and other statistics, see Durbach, Bodily Matters, 38, 50-51.
84
By the time Wallace got actively involved, antivaccination was in

every sense a national movement.
Just as public protest was rising to an unprecedented crescendo,
Wallace, at Tebb s prompting, issued a pamphlet dedicated to members
of Parliament and others titled, Forty-Five Years of Registration Statistics,
Proving Vaccination to Be Both Useless and Dangerous. Marshaling a large
body of statistical evidence, Wallace set out to demonstrate that small
pox mortality only slightly diminished during the course of manda
tory registration and there was no evidence whatsoever to ascribe
this modest decline to vaccination. Wallace compared the much greater
decrease in typhus and typhoid mortality rates, noting that this was due
to better sanitation and more rational treatment. Why, he asked, had
smallpox not witnessed a similar decline? There must be some coun
teracting cause and that cause may, possibly, be vaccination itself.35
Wallace cast his challenge to compulsory vaccination in overtly libertar
ian terms: The question is one which affects our personal liberty as
well as the health and even the lives of thousands; it therefore becomes
a duty to endeavour to make the truth known to all, and especially to
those who, on the faith of false and misleading statements, have
enforced the practice of vaccination by penal laws.3
Despite opposition from the medical establishment, Wallace stood
his ground. In 1898, he released another pamphlet, Vaccination a
Delusion Its Penal Enforcement a Crime in which he again reiterated
his libertarian stance to oppose this gross interference with personal
liberty and the sanctity of the home by a medical and political estab
lishment he felt was abrogating its social responsibility to alleviate the
conditions of filth and squalor in the poor districts of urban England
that caused disease in the first place.37
The Lancet was unimpressed, calling it a reiteration of all his old fal
lacies, and, be it added, all his old sins of omission.38 More interest
ingly, The Lancet considered Wallace an interloper for not consulting
35. Alfred Russel Wallace, Forty-Five Years o f Registration Statistics, Proving Vaccination to Be
Both Useless and Dangerous (London: E.W Allen, 1885), 6 -7 .
36. Ibid., 3.
37. Alfred Russel Wallace, Vaccination a Delusion Its Penal Enforcement a Crime: Proved by
the Official Reports o f the Royal Commission (London: Swan Sohnnenschein, 1898), 92. This
was reprinted as chapter XVIII in Wallaces The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Its Failures
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1899), 213-315.
38. Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace and the Medical Profession, T he Lancet, 1898, 131, 7 3 4 35 , 734 -
Flannery
85
physicians. Retorting to Wallaces charge that the profession had a

pecuniary interest in promoting vaccination, the editor indignantly
replied, Would nothing accrue to it [the medical profession] if vacci
nation were abolished and smallpox substituted? After all, suggested
the editor, three weeks treatment would more than counterbalance a
simple vaccination procedure. Despite the self-evident commonsense
of this argument, The Lancet was ignoring the persuasive pull of uniting
a government-enforced mandate with medical practice. The overarch
ing benefits to professional power and autonomy made any argument
in favor of compulsory vaccination alluring. For vaccination, a tech
nology of orthodox medicine, observes Durbach, was the first medi
cal intervention to be enforced by British law. The Compulsory
Vaccination Act was thus crucial to the development of the field of
state medicine, and thus to the rise of medical authority.39
All this wrangling eventually won the inclusion of a conscientious
objection clause in an amended vaccination act in 1898, and with a
clarification provision in 1907 taking the sting out of the law, opposi
tion and this particular movement itself died away. Wallace saw this as a
pyrrhic victory, insisting Nothing is worth having but TOTAL ABO
LITION!40 For Wallace, making the vaccination law benign simply
left the door open for such authoritarian interventions in the future
since the principle was left intact.
While Wallace may have failed in his ultimate goal of checking
what he saw as the intrusions of state medicine on the individual,
Wallace s position was reasonable and neither unduly obstructionist nor
antiscience. In fact, Wallace believed that the pro-vaccination establish
ment was more interested in power than science and that their data
were flawed. The insistence that vaccination really was efficacious and a
valuable public health measure is a presentist assessment that was still
being debated by the contestants of Wallace s generation. Instead, his
position formed a coherent resisters logic based upon the available
science of the day.4' Public health biologist Thomas R Weber points
39. Durbach, Bodily Mailers, 17.
40. Wallaces message to the annual meeting o f the National Anti-Vaccination League,
published in The Vaccination Inquirer, April 1, 1908.
41. Martin Fichman and Jennifer E. Keelan, Resisters Logic: The Anti-Vaccination
Arguments o f Alfred Russel Wallace and Their R ole in the Debates over Compulsory Vacci
nation in England, 1870-1907, Stud. Hist. Phil. Bio. Biomed. Sci, 2007, 38, 585-607. See
also Giacomo Scarpelli, N othing in Nature That Is N o t Useful: The Anti-Vaccination
Crusade o f Alfred Russel Wallace, Nuncius, 1992, 7, 109-30.
86
out that the evidence marshaled by both sides was based upon actuarial
statistics rather than inferential statistics that would have been more
definitive had they existed.42 Lacking a strong evidentiary basis for
mandating what he saw as an intrusive invasion of the bodyindeed
an invasion of the body politic by the state and seeing that the law
itself unfairly targeted the poor working classes, Wallace defended lib
erty over the pleadings of technocrats interested in flexing their profes
sional muscles.
WALLACE O N EU G EN ICS
Just as the tumult over vaccination was dying down, a new challenge
from the medical profession was mounting, and Wallace turned to
meet it. This affront to liberty under the guise o f science was eugen
ics. This had been brewing for some time, at least since 1869 in
Francis Galtons Hereditary Genius, and then emerging by name in
his Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development in 1883. Galton
admitted the profound effect that his cousins Origin of Species had
upon him, how it iconoclastically smashed all o f the old religious
dogmas of the past and replaced them with a new modern scien
tific outlook.43 N o longer would mankind look to ancient and
superstitious moral precepts for improvement, Galton reasoned;
now with modern Darwinism the application of those principles of
survival of the fittest by means of natural selection could be applied
toward the improvement of all mankind. Galton took the Greek
word eugenes (good in stock) and expanded its application in the
animal world to include humans.44
Eugenics caught on quickly throughout England. Dorothy Porter
believes that eugenics in England never had a large constituency
beyond a few isolated intellectuals and that full-blooded eugenics
never transcended its narrow basis of support.45 But Christine
Ferguson and others have demonstrated that eugenics had a more
diffused following that even included committed spiritualists like
42. Thomas R Weber, Alfred Russel Wallace and the Antivaccination Movement in
Victorian England, Emerg. Inf. Dis., 2010, 16, 664-68, 667.
43. Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (New York: E.R Dutton, 1909), 287.
44. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan,
1883), 24-25.
45. Dorothy Porter, Enemies of the Race: Biologism, Environmentalism, and Public
Health in Edwardian England, Victorian Stud., Winter 1991,34, 159-78, 164.
Flannery
87
Madam Blavatsky.46 Furthermore, the medical profession, eager to

again assert professional influence by garnering state support for such
measures, saw opportunity in eugenics. Physician James Alexander
Lindsay spoke for the so-called progressive elements of his profession
when he delivered Darwinism and Medicine as the prestigious
Bradshaw Lecture on November 2, 1909. In the future, Lindsay
proclaimed, one may predict with confidence that the preservation
of the purity of the race will be regarded as one of the essential tasks
of the art of medicine. The whole question . . . will certainly force
itself increasingly upon our attention. It will do so, he added,
with the greater insistence if we realize that the future physical
well-being of the race will be determined more by natural selection
than by attention to environment, important though this latter factor
may be.47
Lindsay was right in the short-term. In 1913 at the eighty-first
meeting of the British Medical Association, the section on medical
sociology saw three major papers presented on the topic of eugenics.
Dr. R. J. Ryle, who opened the section, noted the social problems
addressed by eugenics were placing the work of the medical profes
sion more and more in demand. For many physicians, the future lay
in a new age of racial hygiene. Harry Campbell, physician at West
End Hospital, noted the key role of the medical profession in imple
menting eugenic measures. Campbell believed the physician can do
most good eugenically by the prevention of unfit marriages, and
then proceeded to give a long list of ailments that should be a suffi
cient bar to marriage diseases such as phthisis, organic heart disease,
epilepsy, insanity, chronic Brights disease, most cases of acute Bright s
disease, and rheumatic fever. Campbell added that strangulated her
nia, fulminating appendicitis, and ovarian cyst were not currently
considered bars to marriage but should be!48
46. See her Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American
Spiritualist Writing, 1848-1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). O n
Blavatsky s association with eugenics and its later perm utation as Nazi racial hygiene, see
Jeffrey A. Goldstein, O n Racism and Anti-Semitism in Occultism and Nazism, in The
N azi Holocaust. Part 2: Hie Origins of the Holocaust, ed. Michael R . Morris (Westport, C on
necticut: Meckler, 1989), 59-78, 63-65.
47. James Alexander Lindsay, Darwinism and Medicine, Br. Med. J., 1909, 1325-31,
I331'
48. Eugenics as a Branch ofM edical Sociology, Eugenia Rev., 1913, 270-73, 271-72.
88
Physicians easily succumbed to the lure of eugenics for several rea

sons. For one thing, August Weismanns dramatic but conclusive
experiments removing successive generations of mouse tails seemed
to confirm Gabons rejection of Lamarckianism, settling the question
of inheritance of acquired characteristics in favor of hard heredity.
There were a number of ways to formulate Weismanns work on here
dity, however. Wallace was one of the first to appreciate the impor
tance of Weismanns work in separating the germ plasm from
the bodys phenotype, laying the groundwork for an evolutionary
synthesis under a new Mendelian model of genetics.49 Yet nothing in
Weismann dictated the eugenic application of his ideas. The point is
Donald MacKenzie is right in saying that eugenics was based upon
no major change in available scientific evidence.50 Rather, eugenics
rode on the crest of mounting social concerns. By the 1890s, poverty
stood at nearly 30 percent, and rather than casting it in terms of defi
cient opportunity and education, many considered it a reflection of
biological fitness. Efforts to guide and direct a set of vague notions
about the fit caused a growing number professionals not the least
of whom came from medicine to adopt social Darwinism as the
best means of leading the nation toward evolutionary progress.51
Superficially, it might seem reasonable that Wallace would embrace
an idea derived from the evolutionary theory he helped spawn. But
Wallaces critique of eugenics remained rooted in the same sources as
his critique of compulsory vaccination its scientific claims, its pro
fessional proponents, and its social consequences for the liberties of
49. Slotten, The Heretic in Darwin's Court, 411.

50. Donald MacKenzie, Eugenics in Britain, Soc. Stud. Sci., 1976, 6, 499-532, 502.
51. To clarify this contentious term, social Darwinism in the context here is used in the
sense o f a worldview of scientific determinism promoted by Darwin that came to incorpo
rate (among other things) eugenics as one of its prominent progressive projects. This view
accords with Mike Hawkinss more expansive thesis in Social Darwinism in European and
American Thought, 1860-1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (New York: Palgrave,
1997). Whether this worldview originated with Darwin or not, Henrika Kuklick agrees
with Hawkins that scholars have wasted their time trying to exonerate Darwin of responsi
bility for Social Darwinism, for he was a Social Darwinist. See her review of Hawkins, Social
Darwinism, in J. Hist. Bio., 1999, 52, 39798, 397. George Claeys sees social Darwinism as
the mapping of a quasi-ontological racial discourse onto a redefinition o f fitness as intelli
gence and an identification o f intelligence with the white races, all of which Darwin did
in his Descent of Man (1871). His The Survival of the Fittest and the Origins o f Social Dar
winism, J. Hist. Ideas, 2000, 61, 22340, 240, thus confirms the strong links of social Dar
winism with eugenics as outlined by R. J. Halliday, Social Darwinism: A Definition,
Victorian Stud., 1971, 14, 389-405.
Flannery
89
the people. Diane B. Paul draws some interesting conclusions from

the critique. She believes that Wallace generally supported Gabons
idea of the inheritance of mental and moral attributes and only dis
agreed over the operations o f natural selection and what improve
ments were needed. She cites as support for this view Wallaces
review o f Gabons Hereditary Genius. Paul considers this a favorable
review and asks How do we square Wallaces positive assessment of
Gabons work in 1870 (a judgment he never repudiated) with his
fierce denunciation in the 1912 interview and in other conversations
and several publications?52
The answer is that from the beginning the divisions between Gabon
and Wallace ran deeper than Paul suggests. Wallace does seem to sup
port Gabons idea that mental attributes are inherited, but three things
are striking here. First, nowhere does Wallace indicate what action (if
any) should be taken even if they are inherited. Second, he actually
rejects Gabon's notion that those who marry early (the unwashed mas
ses as opposed to the more prudent class) have any advantage in
enhancing their overall numbers; Wallaces impHcit reply is to leave
marriage alone. Third, Wallaces overall movement with regard to the
development of human attributes was away from hereditary determin
ism and toward environmental conditioning as a more important fac
tor. Paul thinks that the main theme of Wallaces 1864 paper on The
Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the
Theory of Natural Selection was that intellect was essentially heritable
and that the Europeans were racially superior,53 but actually it was
written to demonstrate that natural selection was limited in humans.
Focusing only upon the race issue, Paul insists that Wallaces views did
not change even after his 1869 defection from Darwin over the teleo
logical question. If Wallace had changed his views on the heritability
and race question, why then, she asks, did Wallace choose to reprint
the 1864 article in a retrospective collection of essays published in
1870? The answer is Wallace made significant changes in the reprinted
version. Wallace admitted that the new version included a few impor
tant alterations and additions in order to correct a few ill-considered
52. Paul, Wallace, Women, and Eugenics, 264.

53. Alfred Russel Wallace, O n the O rigin o f Human Races and the Antiquity o f Man
Deduced from the Theory o f Natural Selection, Anth. Rev. J. A nth. Soc. London, 1864, 2,
clviii-xxxvii.
90
passages which never fully expressed my meaning. . . . As it now

stands, he concluded, I believe it contains the enunciation of an
important truth.54 That important truth not mentioned in the 1864
essay was that mans extraordinary mental development was not due to
natural or environmental factors but rather to some unknown cause
(i.e., an Overruling Intelligence) and there was an inherent progres
sive power, having nothing to do with natural selection, which super
sedes the efforts of any civilized nations . . . to secure the permanent
advancement of morality and intelligence by means of natural, self
acting evolutionary processes.55
This Intelligence distinguished by a Divine influx, a borrowing
from Emanuel Swedenborg whom Wallace admiredis what imbued
men and women with those mental and moral attributes unique to
humans. More importantly, these could be seen in all cultures
whether in an Englishmans drawing room or a native Amazonian or
Dyak headhunters hut. Having lived with Indians in the Uaupes
River Valley in South America and Dyak headhunters in Borneo,
indeed with indigenous peoples in two hemispheres for nearly thir
teen years, he came to have a high regard for the innate abilities and
moral capacities of all races. For Wallace, the so-called savage races all
possess human qualities of the same kind as our own, and in meet
ing various peoples from all parts of the world he could find no
marked superiority in any race or country.56 This was not the stuff of
which social Darwinism was made.
More germane in gauging his response to Galton is Wallaces essay
Human Selection (1890). Paul claims that even here Wallace
treated Galtons views as worthy of thoughtful consideration.57
But this contradicts Wallaces own stated purposes in his paper,
which were twofold: first and foremost, to show that Galtons ef
fort to direct improvement of the human race by forms of artificial
elimination and selection, are both unscientific and unnecessary, and
second, to reply to Malthusian reactionaries that the great bug
bear of the opponents o f social reform too rapid increase o f the
54.
(New
55.
56.
57.
Alfred Russel Wallace, Contributions to the Theory o f Natural Selection. A Series o f Essays
York: Macmillan, 1871), viii.
Ibid., 321, 330-31.
Wallace, Social Environment and Moral Progress (New York: Cassell, 1913), 41,43.
Paul, Wallace, Women, and Eugenics, 264.
Flannery
91
population is entirely imaginary.58 Social action and political

reform, Wallace answered, will allow the best in the community to
rise, and the increase in the population to unhealthy levels will be
checked naturally without interference or manipulation. Wallace
regarded Human Selection as his most important contribution to
the sociology o f human progress.59
Although Paul suggests that Wallace and Galton shared a similar
concern for the hereditary quality of the population, Wallace, in
fact, diverged sharply from Galton on the larger implications of
heredity for human evolution.60 James Marchant, Wallaces friend
and biographer, once recalled a conversation in which Wallace
declared, Leave heredity alone until we have made the environment
of every child from conception to death the best possible for its full
and free development, and then we can begin to think about the
influences of heredity, which may be small. Noting that between
nature and nurture that latters influence on development was para
mount, Wallace told Marchant that it was unmitigated humbug to
talk about hereditary class distinctions being rooted in Nature.
Wallace concluded, An individual is, of course, a product of nature
and nurture, but it is one-tenth the former and nine-tenths the
latter.61 Considering Galtons eugenics useless jargon, he once
caustically retorted to an interviewer Segregation of the unfit is a
mere excuse for establishing a medical tyranny. And we have enough
o f this kind of tyranny already . . . the world does not want the
eugenist to set it straight. . . . Eugenics is simply the meddlesome
interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft. 2
Wallace had reason to be concerned for there were increasing efforts
to pass legislation implementing eugenic laws in England, most nota
bly achieved with the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913. Wallace could
see it coming and he warned his readers, I trust that all my readers
will oppose any legislation on this subject by a chance body of elected
persons who are totally unfitted to deal with far less complex problems
than this one, and as to which they are sure to bungle disastrously.63
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
Wallace, M y Life, II, 209.

Ibid.
Paul, Wallace, Women, and Eugenics, 275.
James Marchant, Birth-Rate and Empire (London: Williams and Norgate, 1917), 101.
James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace, 467.
Alfred Russel Wallace, Social Environment, 141 -4 4 .
92
Wallace died likely feeling that he had lost on both issues related to
state medicine versus the freedom and self-determination of the British
citizens body. Antivaccination won an exclusion clause in conscien
tious objection, but the principle of coerced public health measures at
the hands of state medical authorities had not been definitively chal
lenged. The faddish enthusiasms of eugenics won the day with the pas
sage into law of the Mental Deficiency Act the year of his death. He
had warned against it but few seemed to listen. Nonetheless, these vocal
and marginalizing opinions were not the mark of a mere contrarian
nature; they were intimately bound up with his idea of evolutionary
purpose that translated into a theory of social progress.64
Wa l l a c e s
e v o l u t io n a r y a n d s o c ia l t h e o r ie s
O n the face of it, the positions taken by Wallace on eugenics and vac
cination contradicted the implications of modern evolutionary the
ory. The Malthusianism that Darwin and Wallace both admitted as
the intellectual spark igniting their theories of natural selection (pop
ulation tends to rise exponentially while food supply increases arith
metically) suggested an attitude toward limiting population growth
and especially population growth of the unfit. In fact, physician
Charles Robert Drysdale founded the Malthusian League in 1877
precisely on this platform. N ot surprisingly when Galton proposed
eugenics, Charles and his son C. V Drysdale embraced this version of
Social Darwinism from the beginning. Campbells careful delineation
of diseases worthy of barring marriage mentioned earlier was pre
cisely the kind of policy the League argued should be instituted
even mandated across England. We neo-Malthusians, declared
C. V Drysdale, are negative eugenists to the core.65 Vaccination was
a different issue but in many ways bound up with similar concerns.
64. On Wallaces views regarding evolution and its linkages to his social and political
thought, see Roger Smith, Alfred Russel Wallace: Philosophy of Nature and Man,
Br. J. Hist. Sci., 1972, 6, 177-99; Frank Miller Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reac
tion to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale Univer
sity Press, 1974), 68103; John R. Durant, Scientific Naturalism and Social Reform in the
Thought of Alfred Russel Wallace, Br. J. Hist. Sci., 1979, 12, 31-58; Greta Jones, Alfred
Russel Wallace, Robert Owen and the Theory of Natural Selection, Br. J. Hist. Sci., 2002,
35, 73-96; and David A. Stack, Out of the Limbo o f Unpractical Politics: The Origins
and Essence of Wallaces Advocacy of Land Nationalization, in Natural Selection and Beyond,
279 - 304 -
65. Rosanna Ledbetter, A History of the Malthusian League, 18771927 (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 1976), 204.
Flannery
93
Darwin himself worried about the social implications of vaccination.

He believed the practice artificially preserved thousands who might
otherwise have perished.66 But as he often did, he hedged his con
cerns by adding a vague and hopeful statement about an instinct of
sympathy outweighing this consideration. In the end, Darwin himself
was an assiduous vaccinator of his own children.
In truth, Wallaces positions contradicted only Darwinian evolu
tion, a fact that has been obscured by his close association with it.
Oddly, it was a confusion promoted by Wallace himself. When he
published his book-length study of natural selection, he chose to title
it Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection with Some
of Its Applications (1889). W hen Herbert Spencer received his copy of
the book, he wrote back in dismay, I regret that you have used the
title Darwinism, for notwithstanding your qualification of its mean
ing you will, by using it, tend greatly to confirm the erroneous con
ception almost universally current.67 That erroneous conception
of course was that they were indeed one in the same.
While the notion that the two evolutionary theories were identical
has died hard, current scholarship acknowledges significant differ
ences.6'' An understanding of some of those differences is important
in placing Wallaces views in context. Darwins construction of an
explanation for the diversity of life without reliance upon design
required some natural law to function as a creative force that law, for
Darwin, was natural selection. With a fully naturalistic mechanism in
place, the need for a special creator was gone. Darwins theory did
not reject God; it rendered him superfluous. Not so for Wallace.
While Wallace agreed with Darwin that natural selection was a self
acting and necessary, law-like process, he did not see it in the same
way. For one thing, Charles H. Smith has conclusively demonstrated
66. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871; reprinted,
New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004), I, 113.
67. Letter to Wallace, May 18, 1889, in Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace, 301.
68. Jean Gayon, Darwinism's Strugglefor Survival: Heredity and the Hypothesis of Natural Selec
tion, trails. Matthew Cobb (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Slotten, The Her
etic in Darudns Court, 159-60; Fichman, An Elusive Victorian, 104; U. Kutschera, A
Comparative Analysis of the Darwin-Wallace Papers and the Development of the Concept
of Natural Selection, Theory Biosci., 2003, 122, 343-59; Michael Bulmer, The Theory of
Natural Selection of Alfred Russel Wallace FRS, Notes Rec. Roy. Soc. London, 2005, 59,
125-36; Melinda B. Fagan, Wallace, Darwin, and the Practice of Natural History / Hist,
Bio., 2007, 40, 601-35; and Charles H. Smith, Natural Selection: A Concept in Need of
Some Evolution?, Complexity, 2011,17, 8-17.
94
that Wallace saw natural selection not as a creative force but rather as a
natural law acting in the elimination of the unfit.69 For another,
Wallace felt that natural selection was an improper term for the pro
cess, and on July 2, 1866, he sent Darwin a long letter pointing out
(among other things) that natural selection really did not select any
thing and that to avoid such a misleading anthropomorphism Herbert
Spencers survival of the fittest should be adopted.70 Darwin agreed
and used the term for the first time in the fifth edition of Origin (1869).
An important component here is how natural selection operated and
contributed to the historical and biological unfolding of the species in
a social context. Peter Bowler has pointed out that Darwins Descent of
Man promoted a progressionist model of human mental and cultural
development with Europeans at the apex and nonwhite races follow
ing in varying degrees behind.7' When Galton applied his biometry to
the question, Victorian and Edwardian society now felt science was on
their side in establishing an improved world through various techno
cratic means. Here natural selection was not an objective description
of a stochastic process but a tool to be implemented by a new privi
leged caste of social Darwinists. What made it all the more alluring was
that litde intrinsic change needed to be made to the socioeconomic
system. Malthusian doctrine suggested a laissez-faire approach to the
classes. Malthus rejected the idea of government assistance to the poor
since it would, in his view, only encourage indolence. No wonder
then that when Oswald Spengler read Origin of Species he thought it
reeked of the atmosphere of the English factory.72
Wallaces evolutionary theory entailed none of these notions, and in
burrowing more deeply into their respective ideas three other signifi
cant differences emerge. First was Darwins reliance upon domestic
breeding examples as evidence of natural selection in action. Wallace
thought this was erroneous; all domestic breeding examples gave were
instances of unnatural selection, consciously chosen and selectively bred
and protected from natural forces that otherwise would have eliminated
69. Charles H. Smith, Alfred Russel Wallace and the Elimination o f the Unfit,J. Biosd.,
2012,57, 203-5.
70. Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace, 140-4.3.
71. Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003), 211.
72. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darunn and the Darwinian Revolution (1962; reprinted,
Chicago: Elephant Paperback, 1996), 418.
Flannery
95
the offspring from the beginning, Wallace insisted that domesticated

breeds will either revert to their former type or perish. Second was
Darwins reliance upon sexual selection. Darwin believed that certain
features of male animals male coloration, the peacocks tail, antlers,
etc. had been formed by the agency of female selection in breeding,
but Wallace dismissed this notion. Butterflies exhibit similar coloration
to birds, but in what sense, as dozens of male suitors fly around her,
does a female butterfly exercise choice in the matter? Wallace felt
Darwins idea was taking unwarranted anthropomorphic license. Per
haps the most profound difference, however, was their views on how
evolution related to H. sapiens. Darwin considered humans different
from animals in degree not kind; after 1869, Wallace objected to this
view and insisted that there is a fundamental difference in the intellec
tual and moral character of humanity compared with the rest of the
animal kingdom. For Wallace, the human body was undoubtedly
developed by the continuous modification of some ancestral animal
form, but he added, some different agency, analogous to that which
first produced organic life, and then originated consciousness, came into
play in order to develop the higher intellectual and spiritual nature of
man.73 This affected other aspects of their respective theories. For
example, while Wallace rejected Darwins sexual selection in the ani
mal kingdom, he regarded it as operative in human evolution.
For one thing, Darwins view of women was profoundly different.
Darwin believed that men were more courageous, pugnacious, and
energetic, demonstrating more inventive genius with an absolutely
larger brain than women. After offering womens keen intuition and
sense of perception as consolation prizes, he noted, The chief distinc
tion in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by mans
attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can
womanwhether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or
merely the use of the senses and hands.74 Wallace considered such talk
nonsense. In a society that offered women few opportunities for a liberal
education equal with men and fewer still opportunities of expression,
what else would one expect? The superior attainments of men were not
demonstrations of superior ability, they were merely symptomatic of
73. Wallace, M y Life, II, 17.

74. Darwin, The Descent o f M an, 505, 511.
g6
Vol. jo, January 2015
existing social inequities, inequities artificially imposed rather than bio

logically determined.
The economic system was also problematic. For Wallace, the capital
istic system based upon wealth was an artificial measure o f worth and an
impediment to the natural progression o f the human species. Thus, he
embraced plans that he believed emphasized mutual benefit and coop
eration like land nationalization. Later in life he openly committed to
socialism, which he defined as The use, by every one o f his faculties
for the common good, and the voluntary organization o f labour for the
equal benefit o f all. 75 The word voluntary is key here. This was not
the coercive and militant brand o f socialism espoused by his contempo
rary Karl Marx. Indeed, by definition socialism for Wallace implied that
individualism and personal liberty were always important counterbal
ances to the collective good. He was drawn to utopian visions; first
those o f R obert Owen, who he first learned o f as a young man in the
more radical working class districts o f London, and later to those cast by
Edward Bellamy. Greta Jones points out that, like Darwin, Wallace was
drawn to Malthusian theory (what he called philosophical biology)
but that he read him quite differently from his more socially privileged
counterpart .76 She believes Wallace read Malthus through O w ens eyes.
While Darwin saw Malthusian economics in stark individualistic liveor-die competitive terms, Wallace saw it more as group demographic
struggles for sustainable food supplies. As such better organization of
labor and more equitable distribution o f wealth would better exploit
those available resources. For Wallace, Malthus was a malleable descrip
tion o f natural conditions not an ineluctable determinant o f outcomes.
While Jones makes a reasonable case, it seems more likely that
Edward Bellamy formed for Wallace a more immediate sociopolitical
dynamic than the distant memories o f Owen. More than Looking Back
ward, Wallace was captivated by Bellamys book, Equality, calling it the
most complete and thoroughly reasoned exposition, both o f the phi
losophy and the constructive methods o f socialism. 77 Here Bellamy
presents two themes that echo Wallace: first a detailed exposition o f
Malthusian doctrine that shows that while the basic principle may hold
75.
76.
tion,
77.

Greta Jones, Alfred Russel Wallace, R obert Owen and the T heory o f Natural Selec
96.
Flannery
97
some truth, its Cassandra-like warnings are an unfounded excuse for

the m aintenance o f existing social inequities. Second, is the centrality
o f w om en to Bellamys new social order, w hich he outlined in a chap
ter titled, W hat the R evolution M eant for W om en . 78 In fact, in
m any ways, Wallaces H um an Selection anticipated Equality.
Wallace believed that a teleologically progressive evolution one that
moved toward hum anitys improvement was im peded by a capitalistic
system that placed artificial barriers based upon the wealth and inherited
privilege o f a few instead o f allowing individual m erit to find its place in
society at large. Moreover, it was a plutocracy sustained through legal
inequities enforced by the government. Thus, lasting remedies were not
to be found in the largesse o f such a government. Instead, the com m itted
socialist called for the cessation o f State interference and concluded:
I am myself convinced that the society of the future will be some form
o f socialism, which may be briefly defined as the organization of labourfor
the good of all. . . . The majority of our people dislike the very idea of
socialism, because they think it can only be founded on compulsion. If
that were the case it would be equally repulsive to myself. I believe only
in voluntary organization for the common good, and I think it quite pos
sible that we require a period of true individualismof competition
under strictly equal conditions to develop all the forces and all the best
qualities of humanity, in order to prepare us for that voluntary organiza
tion which will be adopted when we are ready for it, but which cannot
be profitably forced on us before we are thus prepared. In our present
society the bulk of the people have no opportunity for the full develop
ment of all their powers and capacities, while others who have the
opportunity have no sufficient inducement to do so.79
Eugenic plans o f alleged social im provem ent under such an in h er
ently flawed system were b o u n d to earn Wallaces disdain. W h at a
m ockery to still further w hiten the sepulchre o f m o d ern society, he
wailed, in w hich is hidden all m anner o f corruption, w ith schemes
for the m oral and physical advancem ent o f the race ! 80 N ow here
were these inequities m ore in evidence than am ong w om en, and for
78. Edward Bellamy, Equality (1897; reprinted, N ew York: Cosimo Classics, 2007),
i43-64> 4 I I - H 79. Alfred Russel Wallace, Limitation o f State Functions in the Administration o f Jus
tice and True Individualism The Essential Preliminary o f a Real Social Advance, in
Studies Scientific & Social (London: Macmillan, 1900), 2: 159, 512-13.
80. Alfred Russel Wallace, Human Selection, in Studies Scientific and Social, 1: 517.
98
Wallace women held the key to evolutionary progress. In the extant

system, women were constrained by an economic subservience that
limited their choices in marriage. Absolutely dependent upon men
for their means of subsistence, women often made decisions based
upon immediate necessities and were thus consigned to a domestic ser
vitude that prevented them from making any larger contribution to
society other than childbearing and rearing. Instead, a new system of
cooperation was needed in which women were all pecuniarily inde
pendent, were all fully occupied with public duties and intellectual or
social enjoyments, and had nothing to gain by marriage as regards
material well-being.8' In such a system, a more rational employment
of sexual selection would be put in place that would allow evolution to
progress unimpeded. In effect, Wallace was calling upon women to
guide a purposeful sexual selection for the betterment of humanity.
This was behind his persistent call for free choice in marriage and a
rational social organization adapted to secure the equal well-being of
all . . . [where] we may safely leave the far greater and deeper problem
of the improvement of the race to the cultivated minds and pure
instincts of the men, and especially of the Women of the Future.82
In other words, Wallace found in women the creative engine for his
intelligent evolution that Darwins natural selection lacked. This would
best be accomplished by social and political reform that liberated
women from financial and class-bound impediments to true freedom
in marriage and granted them equality in all aspects of private and pub
lic life. Humanity would progress through a kind of teleological sexual
selection. What Wallace ultimately developed was a natural theology
stripped of dependence upon Christian exegesis that united individual
ism and social benevolence, and as such it enlisted a soft socialism on
behalf of libertarian goals. Wallace was clear, I shall not advocate any
of the less complete and more or less objectionable forms of Socialism
usually propounded in this country.83 Still, reform was necessary.
Vaccination and eugenics piqued Wallaces interest and ire not just
because he thought they were based upon bad science, but because
both of these issues particularly impacted women who were in many
81. Ibid., 523.

82. Ibid., 526.
83. Alfred Russel Wallace, Letter Responding to The Star on His Support o f Land
Nationalisation and Socialism, Land and Labour, November 1889, 1, 8.
Flannery
99
ways the centerpiece of his teleological progress for humankind.

Instead of letting natural processes to lead the way, Wallace was
aghast at what he believed to be the interference of medical elites in
the natural relationship between mother and child through compulsory
vaccination. Eugenics was no better. The organization of so-called
proper marriages and forced sterilizations based upon the analogy
between natural and artificial selection Wallace viewed as not only
flawed science but also as an egregious example of technocratic tam
pering with motherhood, womens free choice, and reproductive
rights. In an evolutionary world in which progress was contingent
upon womens liberties in sexual selection, childbearing, and childrear
ing, compulsory vaccination and eugenics were laws that, for Wallace,
went against the very laws of nature. Thus, Wallaces unique views on
the limits of natural selection, sexual selection, and discontinuities
between animals and humans represented not only divergent strands
from Darwins theory but moreover came together in Wallace to form
a tapestry of social thought that was at once libertarian in approach but
collectivist in application. The state sanctioned manipulations of mar
riage, reproduction, and the relationship between mother and child
ripped the very fabric of Wallaces teleological world.
In a broader sense, this coalesced into what could be called an alter
native biological narrative. As Wallace increasingly came to witness the
methodological naturalism intrinsic to Darwinian evolution and the
scientism that arguably emanated from it,84 he developed a teleological
version that cast evolution as a process leading toward the spiritual pro
gress of humanity. The issue was not common descent or even its
mechanism those facts were not in dispute rather the question was,
in what manner did evolution proceed? What kind of evolution best
explained the complexities of life, including and especially the human
mind. Weber, who has so accurately contextualized Wallaces opposi
tion to vaccination, also noted more broadly that Wallace was mod
ern, but he represented an alternative version of modernity. . . .85 In
84. Wallace has not been the only one to complain o f these associations. See, for example,
Jacques Barzun, Darwin, M arx, Wagner: Critique o f a Heritage, 2nd ed. (Phoenix ed., Chicago:
The University o f Chicago Press, 1981); R . P Baum, Doctors o f Modernity: Darwin, M arx & Freud
(Peru, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden, 1988); and more recently, John G. West, Darunn D ay in
America: H ow O ur Politics and Culture Have Been D ehumanized in the N am e o f Science (Wilmington,
Delaware: ISI Books, 2007); and Thomas Nagel, M ind and Cosmos: W h y the Neo-Darwinian
Conception o f Nature Is Alm ost Certainly False (New 'fork: Oxford University Press, 2012).
85. Weber, 667.
ioo
a very real sense, Wallace s medical libertarianism was his stand against
what he saw as the rise of a professionalized scientific establishment led
principally by men he considered to be dangerously reductionist and
deterministic.
W ALLACE A N D STATE M E D IC IN E
But Wallace was a socialist too. His support of socialistic proposals for
reform was based upon an intimate association with the working clas
ses as a young man in London. W hen he attended the evening ses
sions at the Mechanics Institute in London he was introduced to
Owenite ideas and gained an ideological framework that served as a
template through which he would view both nature and man, a tem
plate quite different from the one acquired by young Darwin at
Edinburgh.86 W hen Wallace worked as a surveyor in the rural districts
of Wales he was told to collect taxes from subsistence farming families
as a result of that survey incident to the enclosure acts. This imposi
tion of authority he regarded as a legalized robbery of the poor,87
an episode that made him wary of the government ever after. For
Wallace, the government had a tendency toward corruption because
the system it served was corrupt. He came to see socialism as the best
corrective to class-ridden capitalism, but individualism and perso
nal liberty remained esteemed values. Compulsory vaccination and
eugenics touched a nerve in Wallace that brought up all of these issues
and spoke to each of those constituencies he valued most the poor,
the working class, and women. Wallaces medical libertarianism was a
logical expression of his complex but internally consistent evolution
ary theory.
It would be wrong, however, to conclude that Wallace stood com
pletely opposed to state medicine. State medicine ultimately involved
one of the very constituencies that mattered most to Wallace the
working class. In 1885, fewer than 10 percent of the manual labor
force was organized into unions; by 1892, that figure had doubled,
and by 1905, two million workers were organized.88 Thus, the
86. O n Darwins early exposure to scientism, radical skepticism, and materialism, see
Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life o f a Tormented Evolutionist (New York:
W W N orton, 1991), 31-44.
87. Wallace, M y Life, 1: 150.
88. Vicente Navarro, Class Struggle, the State and Medicine: A n Historical and Contemporary
A nalysis o f the Medical Sector in Great Britain (New York: Prodist, 1978), 9.
Flannery
io i
culmination of state medicine in Wallaces lifetime the passage of

the National Health Insurance Act (NHIA) of 1911 was driven not
by the aristocracy or even primarily by the medical profession itself,
but by the demands of a large unionized labor force pressing the gov
ernment for an array of benefits including improved access to health
care. As Vicente Navarro has pointed out, it was the social demands
of labor plus the needs of capitalists to coopt these demands that the
Liberal Party used to convince its members to vote for passage of the
NH IA .89
W hen it was suggested that Wallace had opposed the NHIA, he
quickly replied in a letter to the editor of The Daily Chronicle, it has
been very widely stated in the Press that I am an opponent of the
National Insurance Act. This is not only untrue, but the more I learn
about its provisions and mode of working the more inclined I am to
look upon this Act as perhaps the greatest and on the whole the most
beneficial of all the attempts yet made to grapple with the great prob
lem of poverty. Wallace dismissed the objections of some socialists
that the measure should be opposed because it was compulsory
and that the workers would wind up paying for it in the long run,
noting that all remedial legislation in social matters, to be effective,
must be enforced by law and that the lowest wage earners would pay
nothing at all with those immediately above them paying only about
one penny a week.90 One year later, Wallace was still supportive of
the NHIA, but cautioned, The Act is a very useful measure as a tem
porary palliative, and it is the best we could hope for from the present
Parliament; but since the money contributed by the employers is not
productive they will probably in the long run reimburse themselves
by lowering wages (or at any rate by not increasing them) or by raising
prices, and at the same time the old and least capable workers will
become unemployed.91
For Wallace, no remedy instituted under an inherently inequitable
system of capitalism could be considered final and definitive. Idealist
that he was, real solutions were to be found in sweeping and funda
mental changes to the system that caused the demands in the first
89. Ibid., 10.
90. Alfred Russel Wallace, letter to the editor, The Daily Chronicle (London), January 25,
1912, 4.
91. Alfred Russel Wallace, O ur Charter o f Health, The Daily Chronicle (London),
January 14, 1913, 7.
102
place: N o real and perm anent good will be done until a radical
measure enabling all unemployed workers to becom e permanently
self-supporting and to provide for their own sick and aged is found
practicable. This would inevitably result in a general rise in wages,
making compulsory insurance unnecessary . 92
Wallace was not unequivocally opposed to state medicine. He
could see in measures like the N H IA a centralized answer to problems
that was better than no answer at all. His favored responses to social
problems, however, were viewed in idealistic collectivist solutions.
Yet even here he cast those visions in libertarian tones. Long before
the N H IA , Wallace noted that the tyranny o f capital over labour
would not be solved by government action. H e declared in The Chris
tian Socialist:
I would particularly call attention to the fact that the results here indi
cated would all be brought about by carrying out the true system of
laissez-faire now so much abused as if it had failed, when really it has
never been tried. Labour, the sole source of all wealth and well-being,
has been fettered in all her limbs, and harassed in all her actions, and
then because she often stumbles or faints by the way, they cry, See, she
cannot do without help! But first unloose your bonds, and cease to
hamper her with your legal meshes, and then see if she will not achieve
a glorious success. Let Government do its duty, and no more.93
The source o f Wallaces interesting mixture o f socialism and libertarian
ism was derived from his biological theory itself. Because he saw evolu
tion more in terms o f competing demographic populations rather than
individualistic struggle, the success o f humanity was rooted in species
cooperation. But since the present system was based upon the diamet
rically opposed principle o f capitalistic competition, no government
solution itself could solve inequities that were intrinsic to the system
itself. Because Wallace saw evolution as purposeful and leading toward
an improved human race, he sought the fullest expression o f that pro
gress in libertarian terms. The oft-cited dictum that government is
best which governs least was not just a political nicety for Wallace, it
was a biological truism. H e once told his friend and fellow spiritualist
Arabella Buckley that he believed there was a teleology of
92. Ibid.
93. Alfred Russel Wallace, The Morality o f Interest The Tyranny o f Capital, The
Christian Socialist, 1884, 150-51, 151.
Flannery
103
fundamental laws and forces rendering development of the infinity of

life-forms possible (and certain) in place of the old teleology [of Wil
liam Paley] applied to the production of each species.94 Since those
fundamental laws were intelligent and purposeful, they demanded, as
much as possible, free and unfettered expression. State medicine in its
collective response to working class demands was useful and beneficial
as an immediate answer to pressing needs, but its applications had to be
selective and aimed at improving the general human condition, espe
cially those most vulnerable, not in procedures implemented in
unfounded mandates or in the technocratic manipulations of presump
tuous experts. Wallace was wary of government interventions but
even more wary of scientistic technocrats.
In the end, Wallaces medical libertarianism may be characterized
as a concern for the impositions of state medicine over the least eco
nomically and socially privileged, an interest in empowering women,
and a genuine belief in the equality of all humanity against speculative
schemes of racial improvement. This served as a positive counter to the
scientism of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Moreover, it was a
social sensibility that did not subsume the individual in its quest for
collective solutions. Wallaces evidence against vaccination prompted
both sides to seriously examine the proper role of biostatistics and his
refusal to accept eugenic measures at least served as a valuable and
important voice of dissent against such arbitrary and draconian mea
sures that privileged nature over nurture. State medicine could be dan
gerous. Nevertheless, Wallace acknowledged a place for state medicine,
especially in the provision of healthcare to the working poor.
These positions, drawn from his ideas of evolutionary purpose and
human progress, formed a coherent and logical response to the state
medicine of his day. The dismissive assertions of The Lancet that opened
this essay have seen significant revision in current scholarship. Far from
finding a wide-eyed, gullible contrarian, Martin Fichman observes that
Wallace could deploy his own formidable powers of exploring con
tentious issues with that rigor and independence that characterized his
entire career.95 Going a step further, Peter Raby has noted, there is
94. Letter to Mrs. Fisher (Arabella Buckley), March 6, 1909, in Marchant, Alfred Russel
Wallace, 337.
95. Fichman, An Elusive Victorian, 159. Ross A. Slotten agrees, calling him a great scien
tific thinker of the Victorian age, 9.
104
something heroic about a man who independently constructs a theory

of natural selection . . . and spends the rest of his life proclaiming the
ideals of co-operation and altruism as the way to hasten the perfecting
of the human . 96 Frank Miller Turner has said of Wallace, He was first
and foremost a student of men and morals for whom the ideas and
research of science constituted aids for the moral development of
human beings. 97 We may question Wallace on pragmatic grounds, but
his genuine sense of science in service of justice and equity should
earn our respect for this heroic road less traveled.
96. Raby, 294.

97. Turner, Between Science and Religion, 73.
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Alfred Russel Wallaces Medical

Libertarianism: State Medicine, Human

A bstract . Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), naturalist and explorer of

Volume 70, Number I

journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences,

Wallaces Medical Libertarianism

Alfred Russel Wallace passed away on November 7,

Journal of the History of Medicine

Vol. 70, Jan uary 2015

More significantly, he wound up articulating the implications of mod

Wallaces Medical Libertarianism

Similarly, spiritualism was an important part of the scientific and cul

Phrenology and the Neurosciences: Contributions of E J. Gall and J. G. Spurzheim, A N Z

Journal of the History of Medicine

Vol. yo, January 2015

Wallaces Medical Libertarianism

his association with left-libertarianism is already well established in Wal

In terms o f medicine and healthcare, there was probably no greater

Journal of the History of Medicine

Vol. 70, January 2015

public services that comprised medical care to the destitute, inmates of

Wallaces Medical Libertarianism

of local sanitary efforts. When Simon resigned in 1876, he was replaced

Journal of the History of Medicine

Vol. yo, January 2015

Wallaces Medical Libertarianism

Durbach, had by the 1880s and 1890s helped to establish antivaccina

Journal of the History of Medicine

Vol. 70, January 2015

By the time Wallace got actively involved, antivaccination was in

Wallaces Medical Libertarianism

physicians. Retorting to Wallaces charge that the profession had a

Journal of the History of Medicine

Vol. yo, January 2015

Wallaces Medical Libertarianism

Madam Blavatsky.46 Furthermore, the medical profession, eager to

Journal of the History of Medicine

Vol. 70, January 2015

Physicians easily succumbed to the lure of eugenics for several rea

49. Slotten, The Heretic in Darwin's Court, 411.

Wallaces Medical Libertarianism

the people. Diane B. Paul draws some interesting conclusions from

52. Paul, Wallace, Women, and Eugenics, 264.

Journal of the History of Medicine

Vol. 70, January 2015

passages which never fully expressed my meaning. . . . As it now

Wallaces Medical Libertarianism

population is entirely imaginary.58 Social action and political

Wallace, M y Life, II, 209.

Journal of the History of Medicine

Vol. 70, January 2015

Wallaces Medical Libertarianism

Darwin himself worried about the social implications of vaccination.

Journal of the History of Medicine

Vol. 70, January 2015

Wallaces Medical Libertarianism

the offspring from the beginning, Wallace insisted that domesticated

73. Wallace, M y Life, II, 17.

Journal of the History of Medicine

Vol. jo, January 2015

existing social inequities, inequities artificially imposed rather than bio

Wallace, M y Life, II, 292.

Wallaces Medical Libertarianism

some truth, its Cassandra-like warnings are an unfounded excuse for