Vaccination not Scientific.—But Professor Crookshank, in his exhaustive work lately published on vaccination, has conclusively proved the unscientific character of the evidence on which this practice is based, our ignorance of the sources of the virus commonly used and its mode of action, and also the uncertainty of its prophylactic power.[6] That the generally mild disorder of vaccination, although arbitrarily and even tyrannically enforced on every child born in our country, does not prove the prevention of small-pox which it is claimed to be, is shown by the recurrence of epidemics of small-pox amongst us, by the occurrence of the disease in vaccinated persons, and also by the demand now made by the French Academy of Medicine (which recognises the failure of our system of vaccination) for legislative powers to compel repeated revaccination. This demand for power of indefinite revaccination is a logical demand. For, proceeding on the assumed premiss that vaccination prevents small-pox, but being met by the inexorable fact that epidemics of small-pox do occur and spread amongst vaccinated people, the cause of this contradiction is assumed to be that the supposed preventive power of vaccination has been thrown out of the system, and must therefore be again renewed. Logically, therefore, not only the infant must be subjected, but the child, the adolescent, and the adult. All must be compulsorily revaccinated, as the human system undergoes a change at each of those periods of growth.
The history of the struggle against compulsion in vaccination is very interesting, as a strong condemnation of that arrogance of false science which presumes to trample on human rights whilst neglecting hygienic conditions. As all intelligent persons should be able to form a practical judgment on the important question at issue, I should like to dwell a moment on the subject of immunity, a fact (though now misapplied) on which compulsory vaccination is based.
Immunity.—Observation has long shown us that when the human system is gradually exposed to injurious influences, a certain tolerance of those influences may be acquired, which often enables those exposed to them to escape immediate death, although with impaired health, whilst healthy persons suddenly exposed to the same injurious influences die. This is a well-known fact, capable of abundant verification. Thus, persons long resident in a badly-drained house, although frequently ailing in various ways, may never be laid up with typhoid fever; a certain immunity has been obtained by the slow adaptation of the system to bad air, but at the sacrifice of vigorous health. But if a new and healthy family move into the same house a deadly outbreak of typhoid or diphtheria may at once result.
In the malarious districts of the United States a large scattered population of what are called by the negroes ‘mean whites’ continue to live, with clay-coloured faces, enlarged spleens, and impaired vitality, yet for a stranger to sleep in those regions is deadly. The strong tendency to live, which we call vitality, though it has enabled those born and brought up under injurious influences to struggle on through life, does not prove equal to resistance in many constitutions suddenly exposed to the injurious influences. The medical statistics of our army in India show that the newly-arrived is far more apt to suffer from enteric fever than one who has been long in the country.
‘The percentage of deaths from this cause is nearly fivefold greater in the first or second year of service than from the sixth to the tenth year. Medical officers are unable to trace out in any given instance a definite insanitary condition to which with certainty the outbreak can be attributed.’
There is, therefore, fact for theory to be built on—viz., the possible adaptation of the human constitution to injurious influences, an adaptation which, whilst impairing general vigour, often produces immunity from rapid death.
This fact, confirmed in the mind of the bacteriologist by the fallacious system of diseasing animals as ‘témoins’ or ‘controls,’ has given rise to the dangerous theory that all contagious diseases may be forestalled in their most deadly form by the inoculation of human beings with diluted virus produced by those diseases. This dangerous belief has been widely fostered by the unfortunate educational influence of the law of compulsory vaccination. But it must be observed that vaccination, unlike inoculation, does not introduce any products of the special disease—small-pox—into the system. The vaccine disease in the cow is not small-pox, nor can it ever be made to produce small-pox. The preservative power which is claimed for it, therefore, has not the dangers which are attached to inoculation, but neither can it claim the occasional immunity which may attend that dangerous practice of introducing small-pox virus into the blood. Pure air, cleanliness, and decent house-room secured to all our people, form the true prophylaxis of small-pox.
Exaggeration of Bacteriology.—We observe how neglect of the Law of Unity is misleading the intellect in relation to bacteriology. This subject, useful if pursued without cruelty and in subordination to higher facts, has become a mischievous exaggeration[7] both as to what it signifies and as to what it may lead to.
The majority of our active and intelligent medical investigators are now intensely engaged in the search for a microbe as the primary cause of every disease known to humanity. Cancer, leprosy, fevers, hydrophobia, diphtheria, tetanus, insanity, etc., are being largely studied by this imperfect method, in hope of finding a characteristic microbe which can be pronounced the essential cause of the disease. The great mental energy of biological investigators is diverted from sanitary investigation to the search for fresh bacilli. Admirable perseverance, acute ingenuity, unwearied energy are devoted to this search.
Advantage has been taken of the helplessness of the lower animals to carry on a system of experimentation upon them, the extent and ruthlessness of which has never before been attempted. Disease is studiously propagated. Myriads of healthy living creatures are filled with loathsome disease in order to furnish ‘material’ for experimentation. So many kilos of dog or rabbit (used for injecting disease, or noted as more or less slowly resisting the death thus gradually inflicted) is a common expression now used in experimentation, and supposed to give ‘scientific accuracy’ to experiments. It is a pitiful intellectual fallacy of short-sighted materialism that supposes it possible to obtain ‘scientific accuracy’ by regarding so many kilos of living dog as if they could be experimented on as so many kilos of dead matter, or as if they were the materials of a steam-engine, which can be taken apart, examined, cleaned, tested, and put together again in complete working order.