But let me ask you, Rowland, what could induce you to take up your pen to attack me on the subject of Physic, who never attacked you on the subject of Religion? Would it not have been more prudent in you to have continued to expose yourself in your own trade in your own shop?
As to my learned friend Dr. Lettsom (who is never out of the way when there is good to be done) being moved to instigate you, a Methodist parson, to enter into a medical controversy—that can only be accounted for by supposing he owes you a grudge, and put you into my hands for payment.
Paid he was with interest—gross and Rabelaisian; and Hill, when he had picked himself up and recovered his senses, discreetly retired from the combat.
Spite of his pomposity and buffoonery, there was good sense and humour in Moseley, and his resistance to the Jennerian mania was not ineffective. As he wrote in 1808—
It is ten years since I began this Trojan war against Vaccinia; and if it be not yet ended, I have at least the satisfaction to see that her original troops are no longer able to defend her throne; and that the mobled Queen with “a clout upon her head where late diadem stood,” has fallen to a new dynasty of mercenaries.[175]
In Dr. Munk’s Roll of the Royal College of Physicians we read, that Dr. Moseley was appointed physician to Chelsea Hospital in 1788, “an office which he filled with the highest éclat for more than thirty years”—until his death in 1819—
Though a shrewd practitioner, and undeniably a man of extensive mental capacity and very considerable attainments, Dr. Moseley was a violent opponent of Vaccination, on which his communications to the press were incessant. They did little credit to his medical penetration, or his qualifications as a dispassionate searcher after truth, and, happily for his reputation, are now well nigh forgotten.[176]
Are they? For what else is Dr. Moseley remembered? So that a man does his duty in the world, whether he be forgotten or remembered is not worth a thought; but Moseley’s early and steadfast resistance to the Cowpox Imposture will long constitute his title to grateful recollection.
Dr. William Rowley, Physician to the Marylebone Infirmary, also left his mark in medical history as a determined opponent of vaccination. He had seen the profession and the public go mad about so many absurd novelties, that it did not surprise him that they should go mad about cowpox: and after due experience and investigation he delivered judgment on the craze and its pernicious effects in a pamphlet entitled Cowpox Inoculation no Security against Smallpox,[177] containing two coloured engravings representing the Cowpoxed Ox-Faced Boy, and the Cowpoxed Mangey Girl. Much ridicule was expended on these pictures, and to this day whoever wishes to be funny and create giggle over the early resistance to vaccination tells how one Dr. Rowley maintained that Jenner’s benign virus induced the face of an ox on a boy; but like the majority of comic anecdotes, it is untrue. The engraving represents a comely lad with a swelling on the upper part of his left cheek, which was thought to give that side of his face an ox-like expression. Many a medical practitioner among the poor would at this day have little difficulty in presenting living examples of affliction answering to Rowley’s pictures—and worse. It was, moreover, the fear or fancy of many at the time that inoculation with cowpox might beget bovine characteristics in the human species, and the fear or fancy was turned to inevitable account in jest and earnest. The jest is visible in some of Rowlandson’s caricatures, and stories like this got into circulation—
A child at Peckham, after being inoculated with Cowpox, had its former natural disposition absolutely changed to the brutal, so that it ran upon all fours like a beast, bellowing like a cow, and butting like a bull.