FOOTNOTES:
[3] Dr. Hambleton calculates the pecuniary loss from waste of life in the army from preventable disease, chiefly of the lungs, as at least half a million a year—a waste of life which adds materially to the number of recruits required. Whilst stating the hygienic measures in relation to clothing, special exercises, air, and bathing, which have been shown to restore the inferior physique of recruits, he places as the crowning necessity ‘explaining to the men the effects of good and bad habits upon their health, so as to insure their co-operation.’
[4] Sir Walter Scott, a connoisseur in dogs, writing about popular belief in 1832, remarks: ‘The powers of this talisman have of late been chiefly restricted to the cure of persons bitten by mad dogs, and as the disease in such cases frequently arises from imagination, there can be no reason to doubt that water which has been poured on the Lee penny furnishes a congenial cure.’
[5] An English gentleman, Captain Frank Fairbanks, was detained for a fortnight in quarantine (says a Boston telegram) because he refused to be vaccinated. A younger brother of his had lost his life through vaccination.
[6] See Crookshank’s History and Pathology of Vaccination.
[7] Dr. Adametz states that ‘one gramme of Gruyère cheese contains 90,000 microbes; after seventy days they had increased to 800,000. A gramme of another kind of cheese contained about two million microbes, whilst a piece of the rind contained about five million!’
[8] This is virtually accepted by one of the foremost advocates of inoculation, who, acknowledging that preventive inoculation ought to be strictly limited, adds: ‘Inoculation is only a palliative measure, for the first object to be aimed at is the stamping out of infectious disease, and I cannot help thinking that the day will come when preventive inoculation will be a thing of the past.’
[9] The greatest injury which is now being done to medicine and the advancement of hygiene is the abuse of the word ‘research’ and the degradation of this noble exercise of human intellect by methods of application not suited to the subject of investigation.
APPENDIX (Page 56)
On the Humane Prevention of Rabies
In the course of a discussion on the subject of rabies, a suggestion was made that a resolution should be passed by the Section and sent to Government, recommending measures for the prevention of hydrophobia.
As two opposite methods of dealing with rabies had been ably supported by Professors Roux and Fleming, I called attention to the fact that nothing had been said in the discussion of the sufferings necessarily inflicted upon animals where the Pasteur method advocated by Professor Roux was adopted, and I stated that in a Pasteur Institute dogs were kept in a state of madness. I therefore recommended that Municipal and County Regulations, with their excellent results, as shown by Professor Fleming of London, and Professor Ostertag of Berlin, should be adopted rather than Pasteurian methods.
In illustration of the sufferings of dogs when made mad, I referred to my visit to the Rue Dutôt on June 2, 1889, where, after inspecting the Hall of rabbits, guinea-pigs, and pigeons used in experiments for rabies, anthrax, etc., I went to the cages of three dogs also used for experiments in rabies, who were in various stages of madness, one dying after its ten days’ agony; a second in the full fury of madness; a third in frantic terror clinging to the bars of his cage, imploring to be let out.
Professor Roux’s statement in opposition to my recommendation of the humaner methods of dealing with rabies seemed to infer that dogs were not rendered mad in a Pasteur Institute or in dealing with rabies. But when I stated to the Professor that I had myself seen this series of three dogs being made mad, he replied: ‘Oh, you might have seen a great many more, but they are not to inoculate people.’
Now, it is well known from experience that it is too dangerous to inoculate direct from the dog to the human being. But the fact that dogs are constantly made mad for experiment in the Pasteur Institute, or in any institute that adopts Pasteurian methods, should be honestly acknowledged, not evaded. The fact that this frightful disease of rabies is kept up for purposes of experiment, although the virus be transmitted in changed form through other animals for the inoculation of human beings, is in itself a grave fact, and it bears directly on the point which I dwelt on at the Congress—viz., that in choosing the method of protecting humanity from a rare but frightful disease, the method that does not involve sufferings to animals should be adopted by a Christian nation.