[285] Memorial presented to the President of the Board of Health, by the President and Council of the Epidemiological Society, on a proper State Provision for the Prevention of Smallpox and the Extension of Vaccination. Ordered to be printed by the House of Commons, 1st March, 1855.
[CHAPTER XXXIX.]
JOHN GIBBS’S LETTER—1855.
As we have said, there was little living confidence in vaccination. Jenner’s undertaking, “that the person inoculated with cowpox is rendered perfectly secure from the infection of smallpox,” had been everywhere conspicuously belied. But latterly a new faith had come into existence as to the preventibility of disease and the possibility of its suppression; and, thus persuaded, the public were less disposed to be sceptical toward new or revived prophylactic impostures. Favoured by this disposition of the public mind, a clique of vaccinators, operating under cover of the Epidemiological Society, were able to obtain concessions from Parliament which, prior to the sanitary evangel, were unattainable. It was only when too audacious, they proposed to set up a Vaccination Office, endowed from the Exchequer, with inquisitorial and punitive functions, that they suffered check.
To resist doctrine it is necessary to possess doctrine. People might distrust or dislike vaccination, but they were at a great disadvantage against aggressors until prepared to justify their distrust and dislike in definite and scientific form, setting evidence against assertion, and veracious against factitious statistics. Unfortunately the mischief of coercive legislation was consummated ere opposition was organised. The first to frame a comprehensive indictment against vaccination was John Gibbs, an Irish gentleman. It took the form of a letter addressed to Sir Benjamin Hall, dated from Maze Hill Cottage, St. Leonards-on-Sea, 30th June, 1855. On the motion of Joseph Brotherton, M.P. for Salford, the letter was ordered to be printed by the House of Commons, 31st March, 1856.[286]
Mr. Gibbs opened his letter with drawing attention to the fact that whilst the Compulsory Act of 1853 was the first direct attack upon personal liberty in medical matters, there was “no subject upon which so many otherwise well-informed persons betrayed such ignorance and credulity as upon vaccination.” Indeed, upon nothing were the legislators who enacted compulsion so frank as in their confession of ignorance and submission to medical instruction. What was there to justify legislation on terms thus abject against their fellow-countrymen?—
Why is Vaccination held in abhorrence by so many? Have those who reject it no weighty reasons to justify their rejection? They do not believe that it affords an efficient and assured protection against the invasion of Smallpox; they have a natural disgust to the transfer of a loathsome virus from a diseased brute, through they know not how many unhealthy human mediums, to the veins of their children; they have a dread, a conviction, that other filthy diseases, tending to embitter and shorten life, are frequently transmitted through the vaccine virus; they cannot bring themselves to believe that the true way to health can be to corrupt the blood and lower the vital energies by the infusion of a poison and its consequent train of morbid influences; and further, they have a conscientious conviction that voluntarily to propagate disease is to set at naught the Divine Providence and violate the Divine Will.
Are such scruples and objections entitled to no respect? Should they be permitted to have no force? Are they capable of no justification? Should the sole answer to them be a Coercion Act? Such is not the best way to disarm hostility, and to ensure conviction. Who would put faith in the professions of a philanthropist who should threaten the objects of his beneficence with fine or imprisonment if they did not accept his proffered boon? Or who could receive with cordiality and respect the doctor of physic who should thunder at the door, armed with scab and lancet, threatening to assault the inmates if they did not accept his services? If Vaccination be indeed a blessing which must needs be showered upon the land, would it not be more becoming in a wise Government and a free people to trust to the dissemination of information rather than attempt to make unconverted converts by force?
Had smallpox been preventible by vaccination, such contention would have been useless. The virtue of the rite, manifest in its efficacy, would have secured its observance. The bitterness of compulsion lay in the attempt to enforce imposture, and to suppress the convictions of those whose perceptions were sharper, and whose loyalty to right was more determined than in the mass of the nation. Mr. Gibbs had no difficulty in adducing evidence in proof that vaccination did not prevent smallpox. The reports of the Registrar-General and the hospitals furnished testimony in such profusion, that his difficulty lay in the selection of examples likely to be most convincing. From the Lancet, of 21st May, 1853, he took the following confession—
In the public mind extensively, and to a more limited extent in the medical profession itself, doubts are known to exist as to the efficacy and eligibility of Vaccination. The failures of the operation have been numerous and discouraging.