Eminent doctors: Their lives and their work; Vol. 1 of 2

by G. T. Bettany

Dr. Jenner has often been reproached for encouraging unprofessional persons to practise vaccination: but it should be noted that he never did so unless the person concerned had carefully studied the subject, and could be relied on to follow his directions implicitly. In fact, some of the non-professional vaccinators were more efficient than many professional ones, for these frequently disdained to be instructed by him, and by no means followed the rules he laid down. Thus discredit came to vaccination to a great extent by the mistakes of its professional advocates.

The most extraordinary attacks were made upon vaccination and its promoters, including, of course, most virulent denunciations of its supposed anti-religious tendencies. Opposing doctors detected resemblances to ox-faces, produced in children, as they alleged, by vaccination. A lady complained that since her daughter was vaccinated she coughed like a cow, and had grown hairy all over her body; and in one country district it was stated that vaccination had been discontinued there, because those who had been inoculated in that manner bellowed like bulls.

One mode in which some doctors suffered at the time of the introduction of smallpox is not often remembered. Inoculation with smallpox was largely practised, and some medical men derived a considerable proportion of their income from this branch of their profession. It was stated on good authority that Dr. Woodville, at one time Physician to the Smallpox Hospital, having given up inoculation and largely practised vaccination, his income sank in one year from £1000 to £100; and others who refused to discontinue inoculation and advocate vaccination were more than suspected of interested motives.

The antagonism of vaccination to the so-called designs of Providence was loudly asserted. One Dr. Squirrel on this head maintained that “Providence never intended that the vaccine disease should affect the human race, else why had it not, before this time, visited the inhabitants of the globe? Notwithstanding this, the vaccine virus has been forced into the blood by the manufacturing hand of man, and supported not by science or reason, but by conjecture and folly only, with a pretence of its exterminating the smallpox from the face of the earth.” Again, he denounces “the puerility and the impropriety of such a conduct, viz., of introducing vaccination with a boasted intention not only to supplant, but also to change and alter, and, in short, to prevent the established law of nature. The law of God prohibits the practice; the law of man, and the law of nature, loudly exclaim against it.” Inoculation had been just as bitterly denounced as “dangerous,” “sinful,” “diabolical,” in numerous sermons and medical treatises, when it was introduced, less than a century before this.

No more striking evidence of the beneficial results which attended vaccination, even in Jenner’s lifetime, could be given than those which attended its introduction into Vienna, where smallpox had prevailed severely for centuries. The average number of persons who died at Vienna in each of the first five years of this century was about 14,600: of these eight hundred and thirty-five died of smallpox in the year 1800. Vaccination being introduced and extensively adopted, the number of deaths from smallpox fell to one hundred and sixty-four in 1801, to sixty-one in 1802, to twenty-seven in 1803, while in 1804 only two persons died, and these deaths were not occasioned in Vienna, one being that of a boatman’s child who caught the disease on the Danube, and the other a child sent to Vienna from a distant part of the empire already infected. Yet so long was the practice of vaccination before it spread to an equal extent in England, that nine hundred and fifty deaths occurred from smallpox in London in the last three months only of 1805.

Wherever he might happen to be, Jenner offered to vaccinate gratuitously all poor persons who applied to him at fixed times. The people of one parish, in the neighbourhood of Cheltenham, held back, while the adjacent parishes accepted the new practice to a large extent. But in one particular year the people of the reluctant parish arrived in large numbers to claim vaccination for their children. On inquiry it appeared that smallpox had been among them, causing many deaths, while those of their neighbours who had been vaccinated escaped. Yet it was not this potent argument which had been most influential, but the fact that the cost of coffins and burial for those who had died of smallpox became alarming to the parish officials, and they were moved to urge the people authoritatively to be vaccinated, and so save the parish expenses.

From this time forward for a number of years Jenner paid annual visits to London, remaining there a great part of the season, incessantly occupied in vaccinating, in giving information and instruction on the subject verbally to many medical men, in writing to a vast number of persons who corresponded with him from all parts of the world, for every one who heard of the discovery and wanted to know more about it applied to the discoverer, and in social intercourse with people of note, whom he never failed to impress by his eloquence and perspicuity. We cannot follow here the many incidents which marked these years, his intercourse with royal personages, the addresses of congratulation and gratitude which he received from all kinds of localities and bodies of people, the foundation of the Royal Jennerian Society, and the like. A few, however, must find a place.

A Dr. Pearson, to whom we shall have to refer again, distinguished himself at first as an ardent vaccinator, but subsequently he seems to have imagined himself entitled to much of the distinction which belonged to Dr. Jenner, and in order to secure this, set about forming a public “vaccine board,” in which the chief official status was assigned to himself. He succeeded in obtaining the patronage of the Duke of York and other notable persons. Addressing Jenner on the subject, in December 1799, Pearson says: “It occurs to me that it might not be disagreeable to you to be an extra-corresponding physician.... No expense is to be attached to your situation except a guinea a year as a subscriber, and indeed I think you ought to be exempt from that, as you cannot send any patients.” This was pretty well, one might think, to be addressed to Jenner: in one year after the full publication of his discovery, he was to be shunted off as an “extra-corresponding physician.” Jenner’s answer showed the sense in which he regarded it. “It appears to me somewhat extraordinary that, an institution formed upon so large a scale, and that has for its object the inoculation of the cowpox, should have been set on foot and almost completely organized without my receiving the most distant intimation of it.... For the present I must beg leave to decline the honour intended me.” After some discussion, most of the royal and influential personages who had promised to support Dr. Pearson’s institution withdrew their names from it.

At Brunn in Moravia, where Count Francis de Salm introduced and widely diffused vaccination, the people erected a temple dedicated to Jenner, and annually held a festival on his birthday.

The Dowager Empress of Russia first promoted vaccination in that empire, gave the name Vaccinoff to the first child vaccinated, had the child taken to St. Petersburg in one of her own coaches, placed in the Foundling Hospital, with a provision settled on her for life. In 1802 the Empress sent Dr. Jenner a letter signed with her own hand, with a valuable diamond ring. In fact in all foreign countries vaccination was accepted with more enthusiasm than in England. The proof of this may readily be seen in Dr. Baron’s Life of Jenner.