Horsegrease annoyed Pearson—it was like to damn the whole thing; and this treatment of the Cowpox pustule was scarcely less objectionable to him and to Woodville.[113] It gave the public, they thought, a sense of the virulence of Cowpox that was wholly unwarrantable; and they did not stay to consider whether what Jenner called Cowpox in Gloucestershire and what they called Cowpox in London were the same virus. Jenner’s virus was Horsegrease Cowpox; Pearson and Woodville’s was Cowpox; and such being the case, the diversity of symptoms might have been accounted for. Anyhow, the difference between Jenner and Pearson and Woodville, as to a detail so elementary, shows in what an unfinished condition the Cowpox prescription was shot upon the world, and affords a curious commentary on the Masterpiece of Medical Induction, the fruit of thirty years of incessant thought, observation and experiment. At the same time we have to do Jenner the justice of allowing that at this date, 1799, he made no pretence to a finished Masterpiece, but ingenuously ascribed the prevalent uncertainty to “the present early stage of the Cowpox Inquiry; for early,” he wrote, “it must be deemed.” (P. 115.) Early it was: not a point firmly determined: the reverse of what might have been expected after thirty years of incessant thought, observation and experiment.
FOOTNOTES:
[111] Further Observations on the Variolæ Vaccinæ. By Edward Jenner, M.D., F.R.S. London, 1799. 4to pp. 73. Reprinted with the third edition of the Inquiry in 1801, to which edition my references apply.
[112] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. i. p. 322.
[113] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. i. p. 315.
[CHAPTER VII.]
OPERATIONS IN LONDON, 1800.
Dr. Pearson was the chief actor in the formation of—
The Institution
for the Inoculation of the Vaccine Pock,
Warwick Street, Charing Cross.
Founded 2nd December, 1799.