Self-deception after this pattern is far from uncommon, and is proof against evidence and death itself; but Jenner was not quite so crazy as his words imply. From his first opinion about vaccination, and its absolute efficacy against smallpox (unlike anything hitherto known in medical experience) he had retreated considerably. Even so early as 1804 he had reduced his claim for vaccination to equality with variolation. In that year he observed—
What I have said on Vaccination is true. If properly conducted, it secures the constitution as much as Variolous Inoculation possibly can. It is the Smallpox in a purer form than that which has been current among us for twelve centuries past.[214]
And again Baron cites him as saying—
Duly and efficiently performed, Vaccination will protect the constitution from subsequent attacks of Smallpox, as much as that disease itself will. I never expected that it would do more, and it will not, I believe, do less.[215]
Jenner presumed freely on the forgetfulness of those he addressed. In a document so well known as his petition to the House of Commons in 1802, he expressly claimed that a person inoculated with cowpox was thereby “rendered perfectly secure from the infection of smallpox through life”; nor would the furore which attended the introduction of the practice have been possible had it been set forth as no more than a milder form of variolation. That cowpox was equivalent to smallpox for inoculation was laughed at by the variolators; but that a vaccinated person was as safe from smallpox as one who had passed through the disease, was true in no other sense than that Jenner wished it to be true, and prophesied accordingly. It was by such contrivances that he broke his own fall, and alleviated the disenchantment of the credulous.
Oddly enough Jenner’s fiction, that vaccination was as good against smallpox as smallpox itself, was revived in the innocence of ignorance by Sir William Gull before a committee of the House of Commons in 1871. “Vaccination is as protective against smallpox as smallpox itself,” said the fashionable physician. Confutation was, however, at hand. Mr. Marson (for thirty-five years resident surgeon of the Highgate Smallpox Hospital) attested that cases of smallpox after smallpox were comparatively rare—not 1 per cent.; whilst 84 per cent. of those admitted to the Hospital in 1864 were vaccinated. An instructive contrast between the logic of fancy and matter of fact!
Baron, with unscrupulous disregard of evidence, complains that vaccination should ever have been represented as an infallible preventive of smallpox; so that as pointed out in the Report of the Royal College of Physicians in 1807, “the fate of the new practice was made to hang on the occurrence of a single case of smallpox”; and goes on to observe—
This, I am sorry to say, was a great misapprehension; the opposers of Vaccination endeavoured to place the fate of Vaccination on such an issue; but if Jenner’s principles be duly considered, he never at any time sanctioned such an idea; and long before the practice of Vaccination became general, he anticipated failures, and explained the circumstances under which they were most likely to occur.[216]
The summary answer to this statement is, that it is untrue. Jenner anticipated no failures. On the contrary, he vehemently denied them; and when denial could no longer avail, he invented a variety of excuses, such as spurious cowpox and omnipresent herpes, to account for their occurrence; though always ready (as we have seen) to hark back to his original assertion that vaccination was “an infallible preventive of smallpox.” Baron did not like the word “infallibility.” He writes—
I am not sure that the expression was ever used by Dr. Jenner himself. If he did use it, he certainly very soon accompanied it with the necessary qualification. He may perhaps at the outset have stated his opinion somewhat too decidedly; but no one qualified to judge can doubt that from the very beginning he was possessed of the gauge by which to measure the virtues of Vaccination.[217]