Mr. Snell, on rising, said that the meeting was, no doubt, acquainted with the account of Do-the-boys Hall, in one of the works of the late Charles Dickens, in which an amusing description is given of the weekly administration of brimstone and treacle. The boy had to open his mouth and nolens volens, receive therein and swallow the spoonful. Now, said the speaker, we Englishmen are in a somewhat similar position; it is true we are not commanded to open our mouths, but our veins, to receive the poison of a diseased brute. Now the celebrated John Hunter, the great Anatomist and Physiologist said, “Any extraneous substance introduced into the blood modifies the vitalized or living fluid. The introduction of animal products from another living body, be it a man, a cow, or even the ass, is infinitely more pernicious because allied to it, being vitalized.” He held, therefore, that government violated a natural law, besides one of the fundamental principles of the English constitution, when it enforced this odious compulsory vaccination, by depriving parents of their liberty—committing them to prison for refusing to contaminate their infants with the disease of a brute. The speaker then briefly called attention to the law of vicarious mortality, which had been so ably elucidated by Dr. Pearce, in his Essay on Vaccination, which proved that we had no control over the epidemic visitations of small-pox, or any other disease. With great pleasure, he moved the following resolution.
“That the enforcement of the practice of so-called Vaccination, is an interference with the liberty of the subject, and injurious to the community, and that therefore, this meeting is of opinion that the Vaccination Acts ought to be repealed.”
The resolution was seconded by Dr. McOubrey, who called the attention of the meeting to the unconstitutional character of the Acts which enforced the practice of vaccination; giving power to magistrates to consign to prison, men and women, without trial by jury. He adverted to the almost unexceptional practice of magistrates, of cruelly inflicting the utmost penalty of the law, and this in defiance of the clause in the Act, which provides that if a reasonable excuse be offered, the fine may not be inflicted. The loss of one or even two children by vaccination, was not held by any magistrate to be a sufficient or reasonable excuse. Moreover, said the speaker, there is no justification for the law, the whole thing is a delusion. Vaccination never did prevent small pox, and Jenner knew it—and therefore he invented a theory that the virus from the horses’ heel was the true source of the matter, and was alone protective. The disease which Jenner produced was not like small-pox. Phagædenic ulcers, with inflamed and swollen glands in the axilla, were the result of the process which he imposed upon the government, and on his unproved assertion, that his process would protect the subject for ever, obtained no less than thirty thousand pounds of British gold. And this was done against the protest of all the leading medical men of the time.
What are the facts regarding this professed protective power? Why, that of the patients admitted into the small-pox Hospital, no less than eighty-four of every hundred eases, were found vaccinated! call you this protection? The whole thing is a falsehood.
Take the fact that in Paris, in the Barracks of the 1st regiment of the Voltigeurs of the Guard, in 1867, the soldiers were vaccinated to the number of 457, when towards the end of 1868, a small-pox epidemic in a highly confluent form, broke out in this regiment. This epidemic made many victims where the hygienic conditions, as space, ventilation and food were excellent; while in the 2nd regiment, in a similar barrack in the same court-yard, but wherein no vaccination had been done, not a single case of small-pox occurred.
Take another case. In Bavaria every person is vaccinated, yet a short time ago small-pox broke out in Munich, and the Royal Pages were seized with small-pox. The Royal Court left the capital in alarm, not less than if a shell had burst in their midst. Since the passing of the Compulsory Act almost every constitutional disease that flesh was heir to had increased most alarmingly. In 1866, 122,222 persons died of chest disease, and of consumption alone 55,714. Now consumption was increasing by 2,000 cases a year. These facts should rouse the people to indignation against a government whose acts are despotic and which aimed at the destruction of the people’s liberty. He cordially seconded the resolution.
Before putting the resolution to the meeting the Chairman intimated to Dr. Routh who had sent up his card that if he wished to move an amendment he could now do so.
Dr. Routh said: It was not his intention to move a formal amendment to the resolution, but merely a negative vote. He was very much surprised at the two speeches he had heard. He had no doubt, both the gentlemen were perfectly convinced they were right, but he did not know how they could have come to that conclusion if they had taken statistics. They had been told that the mortality from every form of disease had increased, but it had not done so from small-pox. The population was increasing, and therefore there were more deaths than there used to be. The speakers on the other side were taking a time when the whole population of the kingdom was not more than 20,000,000, and comparing the gross number of deaths then with those that took place now; they ought, if they meant to deal fairly, to take the number of deaths to the million of population. It had been said that by the statistics of the Small-pox Hospital a greater number of persons were there who had been vaccinated than had not. What was the fact? The official return showed the following:—Number of deaths among the unvaccinated, 35 per cent.; vaccinated with one vaccine cicatrice, 7; with two cicatrices, 4; with three, 1; with four, 5–10ths. Well-marked, 2; badly-marked, 18; those who had previously had small-pox, 19. This last average showed that the vaccine was a better preventative than small-pox itself. Dr. Seaton, medical officer of the Privy Council, had published a return showing the annual death-rate in England and Wales. The death-rate per million of population during the 30 years previous to vaccination was 3,000. In ’38 and ’40, when vaccination was diffused, but before it was gratuitous, it was 770. The average for nine of the years when public vaccination was gratuitous but not obligatory was 304, and during the time it was both gratuitous and obligatory, the vaccination death-rate was 202 per million. Who, in the face of that, would maintain that vaccination was not a preventative of small-pox? Having referred to the ravages the disease used to commit, and the powerful nature of the small-pox virus, he proceeded to say that a great deal had been made of the fact that more people died of other diseases than usual, when deaths from small-pox were few in number. It stood to reason that if they saved a certain number of people from a certain disease, they must leave a greater number than if they had not saved them to die afterwards from some other disease. So, when a fearful epidemic had just left a place the number of deaths for some time afterwards was much smaller than at any other time during a long period of health. The reason of this was that nearly all the weak had been killed. It had been said that vaccine put into the system a great number of noxious diseases. That rested on the mere ipse dixit of a few persons. No doubt, in the crowded and unhealthy neighbourhoods of the poor, where no attention was paid to cleanliness, serious consequences might follow upon the mere scratch of the lancet or anything else, but that furnished no real argument against the system. He quite acknowledged they had no right to prevent Mr. Tomkins keeping any disease he liked in his own house, but if Tomkins came out amongst other people, and poisoned them, they had a right, and it was their duty to the nation, to take measures for preventing him.
Dr. Thompson was then called upon. He thought in such an important matter they ought to put aside feeling and look only to the facts themselves. In the first place, great credit was due to Dr. Jenner for pressing so forcibly upon public notice the system of vaccination, although no doubt he did not discover it. If vaccination did not preserve persons absolutely, neither did a previous attack of small-pox, for he knew a case of a woman who had it seven times, and died from the last attack. A strong point had been made by the other side on the statement that there had been a great increase in the number of deaths registered from chest diseases since the introduction of vaccination. He most unhesitatingly admitted that to be a fact, but why was it? It was not because of vaccination, but in consequence of the introduction of the use of that instrument (producing a stethoscope) for sounding the chest. Previously there were next to no means of discovering chest disease, and persons dying from it were registered as dying from other forms of disease. There had been no increase shown in the number of deaths from chest disease. More than 20,000 cases had been under his care during the last seven or eight years, and he had found that persons suffering from consumption had, in a very large proportion, suffered from small-pox also. He believed small-pox to be an exciting cause of consumption, rather than a preventative as had been asserted. Previous to vaccination, as many as 4,000 in 1,000,000 died from small-pox, and that number, since its introduction, had fallen to 158. He really, in his ignorance, had thought that the anti-vaccination movement would have ceased in face of the facts from St. Giles’s and Ireland.
The chairman: The sanitary habits of the people have something to do with the improvement in Ireland.