“Next I saw that no Parliament or King has, or can have, any right (on medical theory) to stick a poisoned lancet into a healthy person; and that to fancy that Human Health can be improved by altering the natural blood of Health is an imbecile contemptible fancy. Moreover, that unless Vaccination is believed to remove the causes of smallpox, those causes would entail disease in other ways, and perhaps worse, by suppressing the natural eruption, which eruption alone is called ‘Smallpox.’ My mind was thus decided.
“I did not learn till some years later (what alone concerns Parliament) that the more active is smallpox, the less is the Total Mortality of any year; and conversely, the less active the smallpox, the greater is the Total Mortality. This is the only form of statistics worth attending to. All the rest is dust thrown in our eyes.
“Statistics not founded on a scientific principle are the commonest nidus of fallacy; but if any statistics are to be listened to, those of Total Mortality are the least open to suspicion. The primâ facie evidence is, that instead of Vaccination saving yearly 80,000 lives (Sir Lyon Playfair’s monstrous assertion) Vaccination does only harm; but that Smallpox saves every year many lives (some hundreds or thousands) by a natural eruption, under the morbid circumstances desirable.”
The Countess de Noailles contributed most efficient assistance toward opening the public mind and letting in light. In a communication her ladyship says—
“You ask me how it was that my name came to be connected with the present anti-vaccination movement.
“It was in this way. On my return to England in 1865, Mrs. Cowper-Temple, now Lady Mount Temple, asked me to visit the office of the Ladies’ Sanitary Association, which I had joined her in starting four years before. I had wished the Association to be called the Ladies’ Association for the Protection of the Health of the Children of the Poor; but that was thought too long a name, and was changed; and I mention it only to explain what my idea was in helping to form the Society. Well, on visiting the office of the Association, I saw among the sanitary tracts one with the title, When were you vaccinated? On reading the words, it struck me suddenly that vaccination was all wrong, but as I knew nothing whatever about it, and had heard naught but praise of the practice, I told the excellent secretary of the Association my misgivings on the subject, and she set to work to find out all that was known or thought on the question. Miss Griffiths soon learnt that three relatives—John, Richard, and George Gibbs—had for twenty years been writing and working against vaccination, besides Dr. Collins and others. Seeing that I was not alone in my conviction, I resolved to elicit more opinion on the subject by giving a prize for the best essay on the same, setting forth the supposed benefits, dangers, etc. Miss Griffiths went heart and soul into the question, and with the help of Dr. Druitt, I think, she had judges named and the prize of £100 offered. The judges were Mr. Marson, Dr. Richardson, and Dr. Francis Webb—all in favour of vaccination. The great length of the essay by Dr. Ballard gave it a claim for the prize, and the tremendous because unavoidable admissions as to the dreadful dangers of vaccination contained in this Prize Essay, have caused the doctors to try to suppress it—so at least I have heard.
“Miss Griffiths sent me in November, 1866, the Lancet, containing a horrible account of the poisoning of thirty-six children in Morbihan, Brittany, by public vaccination.
“My forebodings being thus so terribly confirmed, I tried to interest all the doctors who advised the Ladies’ Sanitary Association in the new difficulties in the way of this dreadful practice; but the only one who lent an ear to the sad tale was Dr. Garth Wilkinson, who began mildly, but afterwards waxed valiant in fight. May he and the little band which his genius has helped to bring into the field ‘soon put to flight the armies of the aliens.’