“LEAVES OF HEALING!”
The late issue of “Leaves of Healing,” published by the Dowieites at Zion City, near Chicago, has been sent broadcast among physicians. This sheet is an antivaccination propaganda, and is profusely illustrated by horrible pictures of supposed diseased states caused by vaccination. The text is, as is all others of its ilk, full of misinformation, garbled extracts from known and unknown writers and speakers, and tirades against all who believe in vaccination.
If these sheets would present a fair and broad view of the evils of vaccination they might find more adherents to antivaccination doctrines among medical men; but, as it contains so many misstatements and is so overbearingly one-sided in its efforts, the effect is nil, except when it is circulated among those unbalanced in mind and judgment. Physicians in general freely acknowledge that vaccination, or the introduction of a serum, may produce, in some people, unexpected and sometimes disastrous results. Most physicians hesitate to vaccinate people with active syphilis, or even those in whom the syphilis has been seemingly inactive for years, or those who have hereditary syphilis. These persons are quite apt to have an accentuation of their old blood disorder under slight infections or injuries; but that should not militate against vaccination when an epidemic is probable. Some of the pictures in “Leaves of Healing” were undoubtedly pictures of syphilis, and should have been so labeled; but that could not have been expected in a partisan publication.
Physicians also know that people who have chronic eczema should not be vaccinated until the eczema clears up; and doubtless in hurried or extensive vaccinations that are deemed necessary to prevent the spread of smallpox in a community cases of eczema are overlooked. Children who are the victims of chronic digestive disorders, or who react to mild febrile or diarrheal conditions more than the average child, are commonly exempted from vaccination. On the whole, there are but few conditions that are made worse by careful vaccinations with proper dressings and after-care.
When one considers what wonders in the way of control of smallpox have been recorded in medical history, the few mishaps that occur among the vaccinated, the proportion of illness due to vaccination is so infinitesimal that they cannot be classed among the “fearful” results of vaccination.
“Leaves of Healing” leaves out of its vaporings the fact that Zion City had a smallpox epidemic not long ago, and was quarantined by the health authorities, and that the people submitted to vaccination with gratifying results. Nor does the above-mentioned magazine record the fact that the president and secretary of a local branch of antivaccinationists in Minneapolis, who were fighting a compulsory vaccination law before the Minnesota Legislature a few years ago, died of virulent smallpox during that meeting of the Legislature.
The antivaccinationist usually has at his command a set form of speech that contains more vituperant adjectives, and less reason and judgment, than the average self-constituted reformer. Smallpox and other preventable diseases will continue to exist while the uneducated and ill-balanced minds are permitted their volley of wind-laden speech. Some day the people will wake up, cast the “reformer” aside, and climb on to the band-wagon of health and happiness.
It will take our educators and sanitarians some time to harness the team to the wagon, but when it starts it will go on merrily to its destination.