When the plague won: a history of vaccine hesitancy In Montreal in 1885, disease and vaccine resistance mixed with devastating results, not unfamiliar to today April 7, 2021 An illustration from Harper’s Weekly, Nov. 28, 1885: “An incident of the smallpox epidemic in Montreal,” by Robert Harris (Courtesy of The New York Public Library) In the spring of 1885 at Montreal’s Natural History Society, Dr. J.B. McConnell delivered a lecture on the history of epidemics and the cutting-edge science that was then posting rapid advances in understanding them. When McConnell finished speaking, he invited audience members to line up for a peek through his microscope at a cholera-causing bacterium, magnified 800 times, taken from an actual patient. It was only the previous year that a German researcher had pinpointed the microorganism that caused that fearsome disease.