John Walker was born at Cockermouth in 1759, and was a school-fellow of Woodville, subsequently physician to the London Smallpox Hospital. After a rambling career as blacksmith, engraver, and school-master, he turned his attention to medicine, graduated at Leyden, associated with French revolutionists in the guise of a member of the Society of Friends; then accompanied Dr. Marshall in a vaccinating cruise to the Mediterranean, from whence, after a variety of adventures in war and weather, he appeared in London in 1802, habited as a Quaker with a long beard—an apparition in a clean shaven community. Joseph Fox, the dentist of Lombard Street, gave him the use of a part of his house, and there, in his own words, “I set up my Vaccinium for the glorious cause.” As soon as the Jennerian Society was initiated, Walker was put forward by Joseph Fox and other Friends as inoculator-in-chief, and Walker made application in the following terms—
To the Jennerian Society.
Friends,—Perhaps there is not any individual who has greater reason to be gratified with the interest ye are taking in the Vacciole Inoculation than myself.
Of late years, the practice of it has been the chief business of my life, and I am partly indebted, during some of the last months, to the zeal of individual members of your Society for being enabled to continue it. They have sent patients to me from remote and distant parts of this extensive City, when, for want of notoriety, I might otherwise have been unemployed.
May I offer to you my services in this way: during the infancy of your Institution, you cannot do me a greater pleasure than to increase my number of patients; for where I now vacciolate tens, I could easily do the same for hundreds.
After this declaration, I hope you will consider the present address as neither unseasonable nor intrusive, but rather as a mark of unwavering zeal in the happy cause in which ye are now embarking.
Respectfully,
John Walker.
54 Lombard Street, 29. xii., 1802.
When the day of election arrived, four, out of many, were selected as candidates, one of them being Dr. Domeier, a German, strongly recommended by the Queen and Prince of Wales; but the Friends stood by their man, and Dr. Walker was appointed Resident Inoculator at the Central House of the Society in Salisbury Square with a salary of £200 a year, coal and candles, and liberty to take fees for private “vacciolation.”