[110] On Vaccine Inoculation. By Robert Willan, M.D. London, 1806.
[CHAPTER VI.]
JENNER’S FURTHER OBSERVATIONS.[111]
This pamphlet appears to have been produced with many pains and extraordinary apprehensions. Jenner wrote to Gardner, 7th March, 1799—
Every sentence must be again revised and weighed in the nicest balance that human intellect can invent. The eyes of the philosophic and medical critic, prejudiced most bitterly against the hypothesis, will penetrate its inmost recesses, and discover the minutest flaw were it suffered to be present. Language I put out of the question: it is the matter I refer to.[112]
These words betray excitement for which there was no warrant; and when we turn to the treatise that was to be weighed sentence by sentence in the nicest of balances, it is clearly seen that its author was a weak-minded creature. It is little more than a gossip about Cowpox without advance upon the statements of the Inquiry. Indeed, he sets out with the admission—
Although it has not been in my power to extend the Inquiry into the causes and effects of the Variolæ Vaccinæ much beyond its original limits, yet, perceiving that it is beginning to excite a general spirit of investigation, I think it is of importance, without delay, to communicate such facts as have since occurred, and to point out the fallacious sources from whence a disease resembling the true Variolæ Vaccinæ might arise, with the view of preventing those who may inoculate from producing a spurious disease; and further, to enforce the precaution suggested in the former Treatise on the subject, of subduing the inoculated pustule as soon as it has sufficiently produced its influence on the constitution. (P. 69.)
Sometimes when it is objected that the evidence adduced in the Inquiry was hastily collected, meagre and inconclusive, it is replied, “Yes, but recollect, it was merely a selection, if a poor one, from the author’s stores”—a reply which Jenner thus renders nugatory in recording—
My late publication contains a relation of most of the facts which had come under my own inspection at the time it was written, interspersed with some conjectural observations—(P. 70)—