[CHAPTER XXXV.]
THE NATIONAL VACCINE ESTABLISHMENT—1808-40.
We shall now return to the current of our Story, nor turn aside until it is brought to a conclusion in the enactment of Compulsory Vaccination.
With £3000 a-year the National Vaccine Establishment was constituted by the House of Commons, on 9th June, 1808; sixty members voting for the project, and five against.
The reasons for the institution were somewhat complicated. The Royal Jennerian Society had been wrecked by Jenner’s jealousy and intrigue. The working and subscribing members seceded with Dr. Walker, and set up the London Vaccine Institution; and a variety of ornamental and influential folk, who paid little and did less, found themselves with Jenner on their hands, exigent, impecunious, and helpless, and they publicly committed to the patronage and diffusion of vaccination.
It was an awkward situation, and two operations for relief became necessary: first, to dispose of Jenner; and second, to escape from the maintenance of vaccination.
The first was effected by inducing the House of Commons to vote Jenner £20,000, and the second by the institution of the National Vaccine Establishment. Thus dexterously, fashionable and medical London contrived to get rid of Jenner and vaccination on terms satisfactory to all concerned.
The early furore for vaccination had spent itself. Scepticism had thriven by experience. Many of the vaccinated had taken smallpox, and explanations and excuses were becoming exhausted. It was easy to claim the benefit of mistakes when the operators were amateurs; but when the failures were the work of Jenner and his certified associates, it was hard for faith to hold out. Spurious cowpox served to account for many disasters; but when Jenner, pressed to define spurious cowpox, was driven to confess its non-existence, and that, when he had spoken of it, he had only meant any irregular action of cowpox on the persons of the vaccinated, it is easy to imagine how people who had respect for themselves were pleased to drop out of the connection. They might not care to express all they suspected, nor to proclaim their credulity, but it was a welcome deliverance to be no longer responsible for a practice and a character grown so questionable. On John Bull’s broad back was laid the burden.
In the project of the National Vaccine Establishment there was an explicit concession to the scepticism of the time. One of its purposes was alleged to be Investigation. Lord Henry Petty, in recommending the measure in the House of Commons, observed—“The evidence as to the infallible efficacy of vaccination is confessedly incomplete; and it is highly desirable that the truth should be ascertained by public inquiry, rather than by societies whose conductors are liable to the imputation of mercenary motives.” Jenner bitterly resented the indignity implied in placing vaccination under investigation. He held, and in a sense justly, that it was too late to speak of investigation when the reality of his discovery had been attested in the public honours and rewards conferred upon him. “Alas!” he exclaimed, “poor Vaccinia, how art thou degraded!” He was still further outraged by his exclusion from the Board of the Establishment, on the ground that the public might have assurance of impartiality. How much sincerity there was in the profession, I do not pretend to divine; it is sufficient to point out that matters had come to such a pass with vaccination that it was considered expedient to conciliate the taxpayers with the promise of inquiry for their money. Plainly the enthusiastic certainty of 1802 had given place to a widely different sentiment in 1808.
There were, however, wheels within wheels. “You may take it for granted,” said a Radical of those days, “that every vote of public money has an object in excess of the ostensible one, and covers jobs big or jobs little.” And so it was in the case before us. The discomfited residue of the Royal Jennerian Society had influence with the Government to take over their smashed-up enterprise; but their solicitation might have been ineffectual, had not the Government seen a way of providing for a certain claimant in the course of the operation. Sir John Moore was serving his country in the Peninsula; he had friends at the sources of power; and he had a brother named James, surgeon to the Life Guards, for whom a comfortable berth was wanted. Let us make Moore, they said, Director of this new Establishment, with a salary of £200 a-year; and the thing was done. Investigation was promised, Cowpox was endowed, and Moore was provided for.
Jenner had actively promoted the formation of the Establishment, under the conviction that he should be its governor; but when the organisation was revealed, he was profoundly disgusted. The management was assigned to a Board of eight members, consisting of the president and four censors of the College of Physicians, and the master and two governors of the College of Surgeons, with salaries of £100 a-year apiece. From this Board, as stated, Jenner was deliberately excluded, “so as to ensure impartial investigation.” It was at first proposed to hold Jenner subordinate to the Board, giving him the title of Director, with Moore as his working deputy; for it was clearly recognised by those who had had experience of him during his London career, that for regular duty he was good for nothing; and that with his sickly family resident in Gloucestershire, he was never to be reckoned upon for a day. When, however, the Board disregarded his nominations, especially that of his bully, John Ring, as “Principal Vaccinator and Inspector of Stations,” he at once severed his connection with the Establishment; “since,” in his own words, “he found that he was to have nothing to do, and that his office was only a name.” “My not being a member of the British Vaccine Establishment will,” he wrote, “astonish the world; and no one in it can be more astonished than myself”; but so far as can be discerned, the astonishment was chiefly limited to himself. Evanescent and futile is the astonishment of the world under most circumstances, and had the public opinion of the time been consulted, there is little doubt that it would have gone with the Board against Jenner.