CRUELTY OF MARKING.
Vaccination, in whatever form, is bad, but this faith in marks aggravates its cruelty. Mr. Claremont, vaccinator for St. Pancras, operates on infants by the thousand, and inflicts on each four marks. At a recent inquest on an infant, the victim of his handiwork, I heard him say, “The mothers nearly always protest.” Of course they do. What kind of mothers would they be if they did not protest! Apart from the venom, the shock to an infant’s life from such wounds is very serious. Mr. Young was called the other day to see a dying infant vaccinated by this Claremont. Previous to vaccination it was perfectly healthy, but never afterwards. From the time of the operation it fell under a blight. “In its coffin,” said Mr. Young, “it lay like a child’s doll—the poor babe had wasted away.”
I was glad to see in the Times about a year ago a letter from Dr. Allnatt of Cheltenham protesting against the cruelty of vaccination as practised upon the children of the poor. He recalled the days when he was a pupil of Dr. Walker, in 1825-26, and his instructions were to dip the point of the lancet into the fresh lymph, and insert it tenderly without drawing blood, under the cutis of the forearm, and protect the wound with a slight compress. “But the case is altered now,” he says. “Some of the vaccinators use real instruments of torture. Ivory points are driven into the flesh, and wounds ensue which become erysipelatous, and in the delicate constitutions of weakly children fatal.”
The case is altered now, says Dr. Allnatt; but why is the case altered now? Why, because, under the old terms vaccination was more and more seen to be no defence against smallpox; and to preserve the rite, and the gains from the rite, the marks doctrine was invented, or, rather, revived, and hailed as a sort of revelation from heaven.