It was thus that Vaccination was introduced to the English people, not by men accounted quacks, but by leaders of the medical profession; and whatever the illusions and mischiefs of the new practice, we must allow it the credit of discouraging and ultimately superseding the grosser practice of inoculation with smallpox. As for the various items in the bill, we have had, and shall have them before us, and I would only now recall attention to the initial statement that “Smallpox destroys a tenth part of mankind.” The summary answer to the statement is that the number of mankind was unknown, likewise their diseases, and the proportion in which they were fatal. It was a repetition of Dr. Lettsom’s unwarrantable extension of a bad year of London smallpox to the whole earth. Even in an occasional year when upwards of 3000 died in London of smallpox, the total average mortality was not seriously affected thereby. The deaths, as we have observed, were merely taken out in smallpox instead of in some other form of fever. That nothing can permanently reduce the death-rate of any community save improved sanitary conditions and personal habits was unrevealed in 1802.
Notwithstanding the exultation over Jenner, “the saviour of the world from smallpox,” and over “the greatest discovery since the creation of man,” the suspicion is unavoidable that it was largely factitious—“from the teeth outwards,” as Carlyle would have said. The vote of £10,000 to the miraculous benefactor of the human race was carried by a majority of three in a Parliament to which no more than 115 members could be whipped up, and neither Pitt or Fox thought it worth while to be present. Nor was Jenner treated as if his asserted services to mankind were soberly credited. “Yes,” it may be said, “the world never recognises its true benefactors;” but the observation does not apply, for Jenner was profusely recognised, and received praise from his contemporaries which posterity hesitates to repeat. Nevertheless the praise, though profuse, was little more than verbal. Some expressed indignation at the paltry award of £10,000, and proposed to start a national subscription, but no one took the initiative, and the national gratitude was not put to the test. Even the £10,000 was paid tardily. Writing to a friend on 3rd June, 1804, Jenner had to relate that—
The Treasury still withholds the payment of what was voted to me two years ago; and now there are new officers, and it may yet be very long before a guinea reaches me from that quarter.
When at last the money was paid, nearly £1000 was deducted for fees, etc.; and, having the repute of the money, he was considered public property. As Dr. Baron records—
The people of England seemed to think that the fee-simple of his body and mind had been purchased by the TEN THOUSAND POUNDS; and many an unjust and ungenerous intimation of this feeling was conveyed to him. To a mind like his, this was no small annoyance. He was called upon for explanations and opinions by every person who thought a direct communication with the Author of Vaccination an honour worth seeking, while they might have obtained all the information they wanted in his published writings.
So much was matter of course, but Jenner had worse to encounter. He took the fine talk of his medical and political friends au sérieux, bade farewell to Berkeley, and set up as London physician in Hertford Street, May Fair. The result we have in his own words—
Elated and allured by the speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, I took a house in London for ten years, at a high rent, and furnished it; but my first year’s practice convinced me of my own temerity and imprudence, and the falsity of the Minister’s prediction. My fees fell off both in number and value; for, extraordinary to tell, some of those families in which I had been before employed, now sent to their own domestic surgeons or apothecaries to inoculate their children, alleging that they could not think of troubling Dr. Jenner about a thing executed so easily as vaccine inoculation. Others, who gave me such fees as I thought myself entitled to at the first inoculation, reduced them at the second, and sank them still lower at the third.
His fees did not amount to £350 a year, and he presently found himself nothing the better for the parliamentary grant, and involved in grave financial difficulties. He wrote to a friend, 2nd November, 1804—
The London smoke is apt to cloud our best faculties. I do not intend to risk the injury of mine in this way, unless occasionally for the transaction of business. The public has not the smallest right to require such a sacrifice of me. I have received no reward for showing them how to remove one of the greatest obstacles to human happiness; but, on the contrary, am loaded with a tax of more than £400 a year!
And to another correspondent—