An energetic advocate of the good cause appeared in Dr. W. J. Collins, who, after twenty years of service in London as public vaccinator, felt compelled to renounce the practice as useless and injurious. He stated his conviction frankly and forcibly before the St. Pancras Sanitary Committee in 1863,[290] and in an essay, vigorous with mother-wit, published in 1867,[291] he communicated much useful and unpleasant information to the credulous and deceived public. To contend with a judgment thus instructed and qualified was useless; and those who were affected by the exposure took care to avoid it. Nor considering the danger to the craft from discussion, was the policy injudicious. Truth has many adversaries, but none so hard to overcome as the non-resistant silence of timorous self-interest.
A leader and organiser of the opposition was wanted, and he appeared in Richard Butler Gibbs, cousin of John Gibbs, who, as we have seen, framed the first systematic indictment of vaccination in 1855. Mr. Gibbs, of Irish parentage, was born in London in 1822, and in the course of a commercial career became agent at Pease’s West Collieries for Joseph Pease of Darlington, the first Quaker M.P. It was in 1863, when a member of the Bishop Auckland board of guardians, that he first moved publicly against vaccination, and then less against the practice itself than against its prescription by the authority at that time vested in the Privy Council. He cautioned his colleagues that they were likely to become (as they since have) the tools of a central medical clique. Subsequently finding himself comparatively free from business, he devoted himself to the cause with which his name has been identified. Gathering together the scattered elements of resistance, he formed in 1866 the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League, and travelled over the country, lecturing and holding public meetings. The enactment of repeated penalties for non-vaccination, strenuously resisted by Mr. Gibbs, established “a raw,” and conferred on the League a grievance and purpose everywhere recognised as indisputable by the people. Sec. 31, Act ’67 was in a popular sense the making of the agitation against vaccination; and it has been maintained (in a sense fortunately) until even the withdrawal of the aggravation cannot save vaccination itself from ultimate rejection. What at the moment we like least, often in the end serves us best.
Mr. Henry Pitman of Manchester entered actively into the movement. He had observed the ill effects of vaccination upon one of his own children, and in connection with Mr. R. B. Gibbs organised public meetings in Manchester and other places. In 1869 he tried how far a penny journal would succeed, and started The Anti-Vaccinator which ran for eighteen weeks. As editor of The Co-operator, which he conducted for ten years, he gave prominence to vaccination news, and in 1870 adjoined Anti-Vaccinator to the title, which was continued until The Co-operative News was established in 1871, when he maintained the publication as The Anti-Vaccinator until the close of the year. In 1876 Mr. Pitman bore testimony to his convictions by going to the Knutsford House of Correction rather than pay the fine and costs imposed upon him for refusing to have his daughter, Violet, vaccinated, and in Prison Thoughts conveyed to others the lesson of his experience. Mr. Pitman has been remarkably successful in impressing public men with his opinions. Courteous and persistent, he has won consideration where rougher speech might not have prevailed.
Professor F. W. Newman was led to a knowledge of the dangers of vaccination by Mr. Henry Pitman; and those who have been observant of his career in later years know with what courage and consistency he has asserted his convictions. Having asked the Professor how he became concerned in the opposition to vaccination, he favoured me thus—
“The outline of my mental history in this direction is as follows. Circumstances had led me to respect Mr. Henry Pitman as a competent and truthful witness of fact. On a certain occasion he spoke publicly on the miserable state to which he had seen a poor lad, Ira Connell of Southport, reduced by vaccination. Ira’s parents, and his brothers and sisters, were all hale: his mother attested that previous to vaccination so was Ira. But after vaccination, Ira had never recovered its dreadful effects, three of his four limbs being crippled.
“Some years later, I myself saw Ira Connell at Southport. I think his age was then 25, but am not sure. He had only one leg sound, and hardly one arm. I will not undertake to describe his state exactly, but it was very pitiable. I am happy to add that in nine or ten years more he has gradually recovered, so as at least not to be visibly crippled.
“Previously I had refused to read anti-vaccination tracts, having too much already to read. I had never known or heard in my own circles of mischief from vaccination, and when some German ladies spoke of its ‘horrors’ I thought them absurd and fanatical; but now that Henry Pitman publicly attested a fact, this woke me up to the duty of further inquiry.
“I at once remembered that in my early youth or boyhood I had been staggered by reading in a medical journal that experience made it impossible to sustain Jenner’s doctrine that vaccination was a certain preventive of smallpox; but the writer nevertheless urged that it was valuable for making smallpox milder if it did follow. This struck me as an ugly shifting of the basis, and far from plausible. One school-and-college fellow of mine, after vaccination, had smallpox that marked him; but nothing further led me to pursue the argument.
“I now at once saw that compulsory vaccination was an infamy, since Parliament could not secure any one from Ira Connell’s fate: and I was indignant on learning that doctors pooh-poohed such miseries, as endured ‘for the general good,’ a theory which justifies any amount of tyranny under the influence of superstition; and I presently remembered that in Roman pestilences sacrifices were believed efficacious, and the arguments of the priests and senators were quite as good as those of our physicians.
“I find that in 1869 I had a sharp debate with a clever young student of Medicine, who poured out the doctrines of the Faculty, which he had been getting up. My respect for the whole Faculty has rapidly got less and less; it had long been declining. I need not obtrude on you the depth to which it has now sunk, excepting always a noble few, who are what Heretics were to the Mediæval Church.