Let us not, my friends, vex ourselves too much at what we see here. Let us consider this country as but a speck when compared with the wide surface of our planet, over which, thank God! Vaccinia has everywhere shed her influence. From the potentate to the peasant, in every country but this, she is received with grateful and open arms. What an admirable arrangement is that made by the Marquis of Wellesley, the Governor-General of India, for the extermination of the Smallpox in that quarter of the globe! Contrasted with our efforts here, what pigmies we appear.[240]
Omne ignotum pro magnifico est. What inference worth a straw could Jenner or anyone else draw from the introduction of vaccination to India? The number of the various Indian peoples was unknown; and the periods and prevalence of smallpox among them; also the extent to which they practised variolation. In the absence of such elementary information, tales of the triumphs of vaccination in India were so much romance.
So far as vaccination displaced variolation, it might be taken as the substitution of a less evil for a greater; and much is accounted for in some of the early records of vaccination when it is remembered that the new practice was welcomed as a deliverance from the inconveniences and horrors of the old; and that the discredited practice was frequently abandoned without resort to its successor. A cessation of variolation was a cessation of the culture and diffusion of smallpox; and vaccination had often the credit of the reduction of smallpox when the credit was due to the abatement of variolation. As to the propagation of smallpox by variolation, no one was more emphatic than Jenner, as for example—
Where Variolous Inoculation is put in practice, Smallpox must necessarily spread.[241]
Smallpox will never be subdued so long as men can be hired to spread the contagion by Inoculation.[242]
If then it be taken as conceded that variolation spread smallpox wherever practised, can it be fair to omit the consideration of the consequences of its abatement when estimating the results of the introduction of vaccination? Yet scarcely an advocate of vaccination permits the fact to enter into his reckoning!
The gratitude of the English in India to Jenner did not evaporate without substantial expression. A subscription was started, and between 1806 and 1812 he received remittances to the amount of £7,383, the contributors being—
| Bengal, | £4,000 |
| Bombay, | 2,000 |
| Madras, | 1,383 |
An amusing instance of Jenner’s ignorance of India is found in a letter to Dunning, 14th March, 1807, wherein he ascribes his English money from India to the gratitude of Hindoo women—
You will be pleased to hear that the dingy Hindoo ladies are convincing me of their grateful remembrance, not merely in words, but by a tangible offering, while my fair Christian countrywomen pass me unheeded by.[243]