FOOTNOTES:
[126] Medical Journal, January, 1802.
[127] Ib. July, 1802.
[CHAPTER XI.]
PEARSON’S EXAMINATION.[128]
A few weeks after the award of £10,000 to Jenner by the House of Commons, Dr. Pearson published An Examination of the report of the committee. He did not contest Jenner’s claim to consideration, but the ground on which it was advanced, and on which it was conceded; drawing attention to the manner in which the claims set forth in Jenner’s petition had been reduced to “inoculation from one human being to another,” whilst a new claim was invented for him, “to wit, the mode of transferring, indefinitely, the vaccine matter without any diminution of its specific power.”
What Pearson held, and rightly held, was, that the public acceptance of the New Inoculation was due to Woodville and himself, and not to Jenner—
The Cowpock Inoculation (after Dr. Jenner’s book was published in June, 1798, which contained seven or eight cases, the whole result of his experience) was not practised by any person that I know of, till January, 1799, neither Dr. Jenner, nor any person that I could find being in possession of matter; but, in January, 1799, in consequence of a general inquiry, which I had instituted immediately after Jenner’s publication, information was given of the Cowpock Disease breaking out in two Cow-stables near London, and from these sources Dr. Woodville and myself collected matter, by which, in the course of three months, 300 persons (not fewer, I think) were inoculated for the Cowpock in addition to the seven or eight cases of Dr. Jenner, then the whole stock of facts of Inoculation before the public. Besides carrying on the Inoculation ourselves in this manner, we disseminated the matter throughout the country, in particular to Dr. Jenner himself; and especially, I within that time issued a printed letter, directed to upwards of two hundred practitioners in different parts of the kingdom, containing thread impregnated with the Cowpock matter.... By the close of 1799 about 4000 persons had been inoculated by Dr. Woodville, myself, and our correspondents.