POCK-MARKED FACES.
V.—Another favourite argument for vaccination is the disappearance of pock-marked faces. People say when they were young such faces were common, whilst now they are rare; and demand, What can have wrought the change if not vaccination?
A medical man at a public meeting tried to dispose of some statistics adverse to vaccination by saying that statistics could be made to prove anything; and presently went on to relate that when his mother was a girl every third person she met was pock-marked. She had told him so repeatedly, and there was no doubt about her accuracy. Thus statistics in general were untrustworthy, but his mother’s statistic was unquestionable.
We need not hesitate to allow that when smallpox was common and cultivated pock-marked faces were more numerous: but we must not forget that whether a patient is marked or not marked is very much a matter of treatment. Many at this day pass through smallpox, and severe smallpox, and escape unmarked, simply because those who have care of them observe certain precautions. It was different in former times. The treatment of smallpox was atrocious. The sick-room was made pestiferous by the exclusion of air and the maintenance of high temperature. The patient sweltered under bed-clothes. He was neither allowed to wash nor change his linen. He was drenched with physic and stimulants. In hospitals, patients were stuck two or three in a bed, and stewed together. If, under such circumstances, the sick were restored to life pock-marked, what wonder! Patients who were fortunate enough to be sufficiently let alone, stood the best chance of recovery.
Besides smallpox was not equally diffused. In some places it was endemic; in others it appeared at intervals; and in others it was hardly known. The smallpox death-rate of Glasgow was double that of London; and we may therefore infer that pock-marked faces were twice as numerous in Glasgow as in London. Hence when recollections are appealed to, they should be localised. What might be true of one population might be grossly untrue of another.
It has been observed that smallpox was falling off toward the close of last century, and the decline accelerated in the present century, irrespective of vaccination. An excellent illustration of this reduction of smallpox is furnished by the reports of the National Vaccine Establishment for 1822, 1825, and 1837, where the disappearance of pock-marked faces from London is triumphantly recorded and claimed as a result of vaccination. In 1831 Dr. Epps, director of the Royal Jennerian Society, made the like observation and the like claim, saying, “Seldom are persons now seen blind from smallpox. Seldom is the pitted and disfigured face now beheld;” adding, “but seldom do mankind inquire for the cause. It is vaccination. It is vaccination which preserves the soft and rounded cheek of innocence, and the still more captivating form of female loveliness.” Inasmuch as not ten per cent. of the population were vaccinated in 1831, the claim made for vaccination was absurd, whilst the disappearance of pock-marked faces was sufficiently explicable by the reduced prevalence of smallpox.
Where then is the argument for vaccination from the disappearance of pock-marked faces? When anyone under seventy proceeds to recite the legend, “There is no use in arguing against vaccination, for when I was young every third or fourth person was pock-marked,” etc., etc., the effect is droll. It shows how prone we are to fancy we have seen what we think we ought to have seen. Droller still it is when striplings of five-and-twenty and thirty profess the same experience—“When I was a lad,” and so forth and so forth. There is matter for reflection as well as for laughter in the hallucination.
Nevertheless, if pock-marked faces are not so common as they must have been a century ago, they are by no means rare; and if the argument for vaccination were valid, the pock-marked would be unvaccinated. But are they? Those who will take pains to inquire will find that almost invariably they have been vaccinated, and some of them repeatedly, the vaccination having as it were induced the smallpox.