Charles Pearce

Charles Thomas Pearce (1815 - 1883) was an English physician and early opponent of mandatory vaccination. A member of the Royal College of Surgeons, he was a homeopath with an interest in medical astrology, and opposed to vivisection. He was the father of the medical astrologer and popular almanacist Alfred James Pearce (1840–1923), who worked in collaboration as his assistant in the early 1870s.

In 1849, as a medical student, he was acquitted of a charge of manslaughter brought by the reformer Thomas Wakley, (an appointed coroner) after his brother David Richard Pearce's death from cholera. The prosecution dropped the case during trial after a judge concluded the death was unrelated to Pearce's attempt, authorised by another physician, to treat it by homeopathy. The homeopathic community raised two hundred pounds for Pearce's defense, and Pearce's barristers argued that the "indictment was merely an attack on the homeopathic system".

He published his arguments against smallpox vaccination in several books including Essay on Vaccination (1868).

Publications

 * 1853, Diarrhœa and Cholera: their homœopathic treatment and prevention briefly described, Northampton.
 * 1868, Essay on Vaccination
 * 1881, Small-pox & vaccination in London, 1880-81, London: E.W. Allen
 * 1882, Vital Statistics: Small Pox Vaccination in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Continental Countries and Cities, London: Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination