In order to discredit Rowley, it is thought fair policy to connect him with such nonsense, and to have it supposed that he rested his case upon “the cowpoxed ox-faced boy:” it was far otherwise. He diligently tracked the vaccinators, and accumulated 504 cases of smallpox and injury after vaccination with 75 deaths, particulars being accurately specified. Nor was he content merely to report what he had ascertained. “Come and see,” was his forcible argument. “I have lately had under my care,” he wrote, “some of the worst species of malignant smallpox in the Marylebone Infirmary, which many of the faculty have examined and know to have been vaccinated.” His trust in “Come and see,” he still more powerfully exemplified in an exhibition of the injuries inflicted by vaccination in his Lecture Room in Savile Row in October, 1805. “Knowing,” he said, “the caviling character of the Cowpoxers, I determined to leave them no hole for retreat”; and therefore he brought together Joules, “the ox-faced boy, who also had a terribly diseased elbow-joint”; Marianne Lewis, the mangey girl, “who was covered with blotches like a leopard”; “a load of children in a cart from the south of London,” and others accompanied by their parents, and displaying their various maladies, said, “Behold the effects of the new disease that has been taken from the cow and implanted in humanity!” This painful exposition was continued over two days, and as he records, “the scene was truly affecting and distressing to all who witnessed it.” An antagonist like Rowley is a serious factor in any controversy, and we may estimate the havoc he wrought by the extreme anxiety of the Jennerites to have him estimated by the supposed absurdity of the ox-faced boy.
To a man of practical temper like Rowley, the enthusiasm with which vaccination was at first advocated appeared akin to delirium—
I have been in some vaccination storms, and have had the buttons torn off my coat, cloth and all, to convince me of the great and infallible excellence of Cowpox. I have seen some of the vehement vaccinators redden like a flame with fury, their lips quivering, their eyes starting out of their heads, their mouths foaming, their tongues dropping hard words, and their fists clenched like pugilists, ready to accompany their violent wrath with other knock-down arguments. In such circumstances, mild, investigating Philosophy quits the scene and leaves the field of battle to the Bedlamites.
The fury had subsided in 1805, and Rowley held that many medical men were deeply ashamed of the extravagance into which they had been committed, but lacked courage to make frank confession.
Rowley died in 1806, and the regard in which he was held was manifest in the crowds who flocked to his funeral. In the Roll of Physicians, Dr. Munk observes—
Dr. Rowley was a determined opponent of Vaccination, and obtained an unenviable notoriety by his association with Dr. Moseley in opposing every conceivable obstacle to the reception and progress of that invaluable discovery.
The obstacles interposed were matters-of-fact, and as matters-of-fact were recognised and prevailed.
The controversy that followed the introduction of Vaccination “gave birth,” says the Edinburgh reviewer, “to an infinite number of publications of all descriptions” from which he could only select the most characteristic. Among these we find Dr. Squirrel, whose book is described “as the most entertaining of the whole”—
We will venture to say, though we know it to be a bold assertion, that there never was anything so ill-written, or so vulgar and absurd, produced before by a person entitling himself a Doctor of Medicine. There is a certain nimbleness and agility about him, however, which keeps us in good humour, and he whisks about with such a self-satisfied springiness and activity, that it is really enlivening to look on him.
Turning up Squirrel’s pamphlet[178] I find little or nothing to warrant this description. It is not ill-written, if judged by the standard of medical literature, and the “springiness” is a conceit of the reviewer’s to sport with the Doctor’s name. My own impression is that Squirrel was a dull fellow, jealous of cowpox as injurious to the trade in smallpox inoculation, and that he availed himself of the depression in the vaccination business to assert its superiority. He admits, indeed, that he kept silent during the Jennerian furore, “but the overwhelming torrent being gradually reduced to a feeble current,” he reckoned that he “might now promulgate his opinion with a reasonable hope of success.” He cites Jenner’s account of the origin of cowpox in the greasy heels of horses, and proceeds to argue that the disease is scrofula, which its inoculation is certain to diffuse, whilst affording no protection from smallpox. He then adduces a number of cases in proof that inoculated cowpox had not averted smallpox, and had in several instances brought on serious and fatal ailments.