“Allow me to present to your Lordship my friend Dr. Jenner, who has been the means of saving more lives than any other man.”
To which Jenner, being of a pious turn, sighed with meek effusion—
“Ah! would I, like you, could say souls.”[172]
So committed and so possessed, Hill naturally resented the growing distrust of vaccination. It cut him deeply to be supposed a quack; and in 1806 he issued a pamphlet[173] relating his experiences as a Jennerite, defending his practice, and denouncing those who treated it despitefully. Moseley especially was subjected to severe and contemptuous condemnation. Hill’s sanctimony and virulence, his vigour and venom compose a piquant mixture, and if we could tarry for amusement we might produce it abundantly from a variety of elegant extracts. Consider, for instance, this his adjuration, and its pitiful object—
Oh, the blessing of the Jennerian inoculation! Did ever man stand as Jenner so much like an Angel of God, an instrument in the hands of Divine Providence between the living and the dead till the plague was stayed!
Hill’s latent assumption throughout his discourse was—
First, that all must have smallpox; and
Second, that all the vaccinated who escaped smallpox, owed their salvation to their Jennerisation.
It never apparently occurred to him that before Jenner was heard of, many passed through life exempt from smallpox; nor, consequently, did he inquire how they escaped; nor why, when vaccination was introduced, escape should be placed to its credit.
The belief in the vicarious influence of vaccination comes out strongly, too, in Hill’s pamphlet. Of Londoners there were then over 1,000,000, and of these, he says, at least, 100,000 had been vaccinated, and with this effect—