PhD Thesis - ResearchSpace@Auckland - The University of Auckland

Department asking them to risk vaccine side-effects for the public good was
unacceptable when levels of disease were low. Others accepted the Health
Department’s argument, seeing it as their social responsibility to have their children
immunised and thus protect themselves and others. 28
The influence of alternative forms of medicine
Public good and a social conscience were some of the reasons why parents chose to
immunise their children though others refused, believing that the risk was too high.
This argument became much more prominent in the 1970s and 1980s as some parents
(and indeed some medical practitioners) began to question whether the risk from side-
effects outweighed the benefits from the vaccine. The decline in infectious diseases
and the lack of exposure to their effects meant the risks of immunisation took on a
much greater significance. The 1980s in particular began to see the growth in
popularity of alternative forms of medicine such as homeopathy, which dated back to
the mid-nineteenth century in New Zealand. 29 Rejection of the medical establishment
and its use of antibiotic drugs and chemicals to stimulate the immune system led some
parents to advocate homeopathy and consult alternative practitioners. Good diet and a
‘healthy lifestyle’ were the preventative against infections for those parents who did
not wish to immunise their children, and who preferred to use natural remedies rather
than the allopathic ones. One mother of two, who had her first child partially
immunised and her second not at all, found a doctor who was ‘alternative
sympathetic’ and never questioned her immunisation decision as he knew she had
made an informed choice. 30
Other mothers, who were selective about immunisation or did not immunise, tended
to seek out GPs who were sympathetic or at least tolerant of their views. One mother
28 Interview with C. Geddes, 21 March 2002, parent of two children born 1975 and 1982.
29 Homeopathy had been founded by Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician and scholar (1755-
1843) and operated on the premise that a ‘substance that will produce symptoms when tested by a
healthy person will cure a sick person displaying similar symptoms’. By the 1800s homeopathy had
spread across Europe and into America. In New Zealand the first recorded homeopath was William
Purdie M.D. who came to Dunedin in 1849. Homeopathy was placed on an official footing with the
establishment of the New Zealand Homoeopathic Society in 1951 by Alfred. L. Grove.
http://www.homoeopathica.org.nz/history.html, http://www.backtohealth.co.nz/homeopathy/
http://farmsupport.co.nz/about_homoeopathy.htm
30 Interview with C. L’Estrange, 24 April 2002, parent in the 1980s.
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