
This cartoon satirises the 19th century fear of vaccination of the French public. It shows a diseased woman turning into a mermaid, a physician riding a cow and an apothecary wielding a syringe forming a grotesque procession that scares children...............................................................In Bodily Matters: The anti-vaccination movement in England, 1853–1907, Nadja Durbach argues that anti-vaccination protestors in the 19th century were largely working class, and that their protest was about feeling like second-class citizens without self-determination over their own bodies, as well as about a divide between an elite establishment and a community lacking trust in them.