In almost every case where Smallpox has succeeded Vaccination, the disease has varied much from its ordinary course; it has neither been the same in violence, nor in the duration of its symptoms, but has, with very few exceptions, been remarkably mild, as if the Smallpox had been deprived, by the previous vaccine disease, of all its usual malignity.
It goes without saying, that such a statement was quackish romance. How could a physician know that any case of Smallpox had been made milder by Vaccination? for how could he know how severe the disease would have been without Vaccination? Any ground of comparison was wanting. Smallpox is an eruptive fever of wide degrees of intensity—slight as to be a trivial ailment, severe as to be inevitably fatal. “So true,” wrote Dr. Wagstaffe in 1722, “is that common observation, that there is one sort in which a nurse cannot kill, and another which even a physician cannot cure.” Yet every case of mild Smallpox after Cowpox came into fashion was placed to the credit of Vaccination!
Some writers [the Report continues] have greatly undervalued the security Vaccination affords, while others have considered it to be of a temporary nature only; but if any reliance is to be placed on the statements laid before the College, its power of protecting the human body from Smallpox, though not perfect indeed, is abundantly sufficient to recommend it to the prudent and dispassionate. The opinion that Vaccination affords but a temporary security is supported by no analogy in Nature, nor by the facts which have hitherto occurred.
The analogy of Nature was a treacherous support, whilst the Physicians did not foresee the time when their successors would plead the fact of the temporary security of Vaccination as a reason for systematic Re-Vaccination.
It is not difficult to discern between the lines of the Report a spirit of doubt and hesitation. Those who framed it had gone too far to turn back; there was Jenner on their hands; and a public ready to hoot if there was any open apostasy. The outlook at home was not encouraging, but there was the Continent, yea more, the wide world itself wherein to cover the reproach of failure—
They could not be insensible [said the Physicians] to the confirmation they receive not only from the introduction of Vaccination into every part of Europe, but throughout the vast Continents of Asia and America.
The vast Continents of Asia and America! A fine phrase—a very fine phrase, with more comfort in it than scoffers might imagine.
In the Report we detect one good service, namely, the explosion of Jenner’s fiction about Spurious Cowpox. When Vaccination was first brought forward, cases were adduced of Smallpox after Cowpox. Jenner at once asserted that the Cowpox in such instances must have been spurious, for Smallpox after genuine Cowpox was impossible; and Spurious Cowpox was thenceforward freely used to baffle inquirers and to account for failures. Spurious Cowpox served the ends of the Vaccinators magnificently, but by and by it began to have awkward consequences. Genuine Cowpox was said to be harmless—it was the Spurious that was ineffective or worked mischief; and the Inoculators plied the terror of Spurious Pox against Vaccination. It therefore became necessary to clear Spurious Cowpox out of the way, and Jenner, before the College of Physicians, pressed upon the point, “owned up,” as Americans say, and authorised the following explanation—
Some deviations from the usual course have occasionally occurred in Vaccination, which the Author of the practice has called Spurious Cowpox, by which the public have been misled, as if there were a true and a false Cowpox; but it appears that nothing more was meant than to express irregularity or difference from that common form and progress of the vaccine pustule from which its efficacy is inferred.