The past, however, seems to encourage a more optimistic outlook. Medical progress has stirred religious and moral objections throughout history — objections that were overcome as the benefits of medical advances became overwhelmingly obvious. In the 11th century, European church leaders warned monks that treating illness with medicine showed such a lack of faith in God that it violated holy orders. When 19th-century doctors began using chloroform to alleviate the pain of childbirth, the Scottish Calvinist church declared it a “Satanic invention” intended to frustrate the Lord’s design.
An illuminating case study is the late 18th-century controversy over inoculation against smallpox. Condemned by clerics as both immoral and blasphemous, smallpox inoculation offers some surprising parallels to our current impasse over research using embryonic stem cells.
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The religious authorities of Jenner’s day viewed smallpox inoculation as an affront to God and man. A widely published British sermon was titled “The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation.” American clergy warned that inoculation usurped God’s power to decide the beginning and end of life. Only hypocrites would undergo the procedure and still pray to God, one theologian declared.
Jenner responded with a risky demonstration of his idea. In 1796, the doctor persuaded his own servant to allow the man’s 8-year-old son to be inoculated with cowpox material; two months later, Jenner exposed the child to smallpox.
The experiment was a success. Moreover, the child remained immune to smallpox even after the doctor exposed him to it a second time. The doctor himself, however, was reviled. Clerics denounced him as a tool of the devil. Newspapers ridiculed him as “a presumptuous man” overselling his results; one cartoonist portrayed him as a country bumpkin surrounded by patients sprouting cow parts.
Even some of his medical colleagues questioned whether he might have gone too far. In retrospect, one can easily imagine Jenner’s brilliant idea sinking under the combined weight of moral antipathy and scientific disdain.
Instead, the doctor persevered and triumphed. Not by hyping the potential of his ideas, as some stem cell supporters occasionally have done, but by doggedly gathering more evidence based on more inoculations. Fueled by his success, the practice spread, and smallpox rates plummeted. In time, the life-saving merits of inoculation eventually overwhelmed all doubt; the evidence, Jenner wrote, became “too manifest to admit of controversy.”
I hope we’re headed in a similarly pragmatic direction with regard to stem cell research. We still have not ventured much beyond the promising preliminaries; there is no multitude of saved lives to serve as a moral counterweight to the use of embryos, even unwanted ones.
John Gard, Mark Green and President Bush are carrying on a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in the name of pandering to ignorance.
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