Those who continued to believe that Vaccination was an easy and harmless operation, could see nothing but good management in the multiplication of Walker’s agencies, nor anything but meanness in Ring’s sneers at tradesmen. His assertion that the use of the title of the Royal Jennerian Society was fraudulent, had no justification, yet it was his persistent reproach—
Honesty is the best policy. I therefore sincerely advise Dr. Walker and his Board, to assume no more the title of the Royal Jennerian Society, to which they must know they have not the least claim, lest they should be brought before the Lord Mayor as swindlers, and be prosecuted for obtaining money under false pretences. I am informed that they have already been compelled to refund a legacy of £100; and it is to be hoped they will be compelled to refund the rest of their ill-gotten store.
Lastly, he appealed to the members of the Jennerian Society, demanding—
How long will they suffer their names to be prostituted, and the public to be deluded by a set of swindlers and imposters; by men who are neither dignified by their rank, nor distinguished by their talents; by a set of daring adventurers and despicable upstarts! It is a gross insult and indignity, to which no man of the least sense of honour, or of shame, would submit.
But they did submit, and why not? Enthusiasm for Vaccination had passed away. It had been found out; it was everywhere distrusted; and those who held by it had to see it pushed on the same terms as any other quack prescription. What then was there to object to in Walker s procedure? The reason for Ring’s libels lay in Jenner’s jealousy. Walker was Jenner’s abhorrence. He had joined in the conspiracy to oust Walker from the Jennerian Society in 1806, but the operation proved fatal to the Society, whilst Walker conveyed the confidence and subscriptions of the faithful to his new Institution. What wonder, then, that Jenner disliked the eccentric Quaker! Even worse; Walker accurately appraised Jenner’s share in “the vaccine discovery,” which came, he said, from Jenner as a hint, and was developed by Pearson and Woodville in practice—a fact that was as gall and wormwood to Jenner. Moreover, Walker had written a Jenneric Opera in which Jenner was represented as a country apothecary riding up to London on a cow, and going round a-begging among the nobility and gentry. Wherefore says Ring—
As to the calumny and detraction which Dr. Jenner and his friends have received at the hands of that desperate adventurer in his Jenneric Opera and elsewhere, they are content to bear it, provided he will not again use the language of flattery toward them; nor lavish his encomiums on them in that polluted channel, the Medical Journal. His resentment can do very little harm, which is more than can be said of his adulation.
“It is the slaver kills, and not the bite!”
Ring was an awkward champion. He sneered at Walker’s diplomas certifying fitness to act as vaccinator—
They will have the same authority [he said] and the same virtue as a diploma from the University of St. Andrews; and in all probability will in a short time be sold at the same price—