Brown

*1138 SUMMARY

In 1890, the California Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge to a "vaccination act" that required schools to exclude any child who had not been vaccinated against small-pox. ( Abeel v. Clark (1890) 84 Cal. 226 , 227-228, 230, 24 P. 383 ( Abeel ).) In dismissing the suggestion that the act was "not within the scope of a police regulation," the court observed that, "[w]hile vaccination may not be the best and safest preventive possible, experience and observation ... dating from the year 1796 ... have proved it to be the best method known to medical science to lessen the liability to infection with the disease." ( Id. at p. 230, 24 P. 383 .) That being so, "it was for the legislature to determine whether the scholars of the public schools should be subjected to it, and we think it was justified in deeming it a necessary and salutary burden to impose upon that general class." ( Ibid. )

More than 125 years have passed since Abeel , during which many federal and state cases, beginning with the high court's decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) 197 U.S. 11 , 25 S.Ct. 358 , 49 L.Ed. 643 ( Jacobson ), have upheld, against various constitutional…