[CHAPTER XL.]
SIMON’S DEFENCE AND HAMERNIK’S JUDGMENT.
An attack on Vaccination like that delivered by John Gibbs had to be met, and Mr. John Simon, Medical Officer to the Board of Health, was selected for the purpose. The answer appeared in 1857 in a quarto blue-book entitled Papers relating to the History and Practice of Vaccination,[288] 83 pages consisting of a defence of Vaccination, and 188 pages of illustrative and corroborative documents. Oddly enough the treatise of Mr. Gibb is never once mentioned, whilst the order of defence is obviously marshalled in front of his positions. The reason for this reserve was double: first, it was considered unadvisable to magnify or advertise so dangerous an antagonist; and second, it is considered unprofessional to discuss a medical question with one who is not in medical orders.
In reviewing Mr. Simon’s defence we are constantly reminded of Mill’s observation, that a doctrine is never truly judged until it is judged in its best form; and of Coleridge’s caution, that an adversary’s bad arguments are no evidence of the goodness of our own. It lay in the nature of things that many absurd and trumpery objections should be advanced against vaccination, but to cite and sneer at them was neither to appreciate nor to refute the objections that were valid. Had Simon been less scornful and less loftily disposed, condescending to deal with his antagonist verbatim, he might have proved no more successful, but he would have had at least the praise of judicial intention.
After the custom of the eulogists of vaccination, Mr. Simon opened with a chapter on “Smallpox before the Discovery of Vaccination,” consisting of terrible tales of the ravages of the disease among Mexicans, Indians, Greenlanders, Icelanders, Siberians, Hottentots, etc., as if disbelievers in vaccination were under any obligation to dispute them. It is not denied that smallpox may be a deadly epidemic: the contention is that vaccination would not abate its deadliness. At the same time, when terrible tales are told of the devastations of smallpox, it is but fair to press for proofs of their authenticity. Travellers and historians occasionally prefer the excitement of wonder to adherence to matter-of-fact. When, for instance, Mr. Simon gravely relates that “in Mexico 3½ millions were suddenly smitten down, leaving none to bury them,” it is permissible to inquire who was responsible for the Mexican census in the days of Cortez, and who counted the unburied dead? Further, it is idle to attach importance to isolated statements about smallpox, as if smallpox were an independent destroyer of mankind. It is a member of a group of destroyers, and its activity is usually coincident with a correspondent dormancy among its associates. Until the complete vital statistics of a community are in evidence, it is vain to assert whom smallpox present has slain, or absent has saved. It is the prevalence of death, and not the mode of death, that is the critical question.
Again, when the familiar list of great folk who died of smallpox in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries is run over, the remark occurs, that considering the habits and habitations of the said great folk, their fate was in nowise surprising. Those who believe that smallpox is generated in unwholesome conditions of life are not to be confounded by facts that illustrate their contention. And the like is to be said of the equally familiar tale of London smallpox. It was to be expected that citizens housed and fed as Londoners were housed and fed should have been plagued with smallpox and its congeners. What is denied is that vaccination could have saved them from smallpox, or reduced their death-rate, their conditions of life remaining the same.
The extravagant exhibition of the horrors of smallpox is the customary preliminary to the presentation of Jenner as the saviour from them; and the part of showman in this respect was fulfilled with more than ordinary abandon by Simon, who thus depicted the situation and the rescue—
Medicine baffled and helpless! For millions of our race in after times the continued raging of that pitiless plague! A drearier picture could scarcely have saddened mankind.
That this despair was not lasting is due to the genius of an English surgeon; and the close of the 18th Century, which had much to darken it, will be remembered till the end of human history for the greatest physical good ever yet given by science to the world.
Then followed the Jennerian legend, related in highly fabulous form with sundry extensions from Simon’s private fancy. It is sufficient to reassert that Jenner did not introduce cowpox. On the contrary, he rejected cowpox for horsegrease cowpox; and such was his prescription because he knew from the evidence of his neighbourhood that cowpox afforded no protection from smallpox. It is true that when Pearson discredited horsegrease cowpox, and recommended cowpox, Jenner dropped his prescription, and put himself forward as the discoverer of cowpox; but it is also true that in subsequent years he resumed his original position, and indeed dispensed with the cow altogether, and, like Sacco of Milan and De Carro of Vienna, used and diffused horsegrease or horsepox neat, describing the equine virus as “the true and genuine life-preserving fluid.” Of all this, however, Simon was either ignorant, or preferred to say nothing. He, too, dropped cowpox as a disease of the cow. Referring to a conjecture by Jenner that cowpox was “smallpox in a milder form,” he maintained that the conjecture had been verified by Gassner in 1801; by Thiele in 1836; by Ceely in 1839; and commercially by Badcock of Brighton in 1840. Again and again Badcock derived fresh stocks of vaccine virus from cows artificially infected with smallpox; having vaccinated with such virus more than 14,000 persons, and having furnished supplies of it to more than 400 medical practitioners—