The father would like the family as small as possible that he has to work for. I am afraid that is at the bottom of it.
4176.—Do you not think that is giving credit to the father for looking much further ahead than people in that class of life generally do?
I do not think they have very far to look when they have their daily bread to earn. When the wages come in on Saturday night, it pretty often comes to their mind how the money is disposed of—
A libel as atrocious as absurd, and significant.
Dr. Alexander Wood was brought from Edinburgh to give evidence as to Scotland of much the same tenor as that of Sir Dominic Corrigan concerning Ireland. Dr. Wood’s note was clear—“I do not think,” he said, “that a person has a right to keep an unvaccinated child any more than to keep a mad dog.” Smallpox had been prevalent in Scotland for some years, and had been made use of to pass a Compulsory Vaccination Act in 1863; but it was neither shown that prior to that Act the Scots were unvaccinated, nor that it was the unvaccinated who suffered from smallpox—apart from those conditions of life which make for smallpox. In the course of nature, smallpox abated in Scotland, and the Act had the credit of the abatement: the vaccination of the people being so complete that Dr. Wood testified—
4399.—There would not be an unvaccinated child in Scotland if we had some means of overtaking the migratory population—the railway navvies and tramps, the children born by the roadside and under hedges.
As in Ireland, there was little or no resistance to the law; and as in Ireland, it was asserted that smallpox had been stamped out; but as in Ireland, the assumption was nullified by experience. In the epidemic of 1871-73, there died of smallpox no fewer than 5034 in Vaccinated Scotland—a contradiction unforeseen by Dr. Wood and the Committee before whom he prophesied.
Sir William Jenner appeared as court physician. He had advised Her Majesty the Queen to encourage vaccination in the case of all the members of the Royal Family, and Her Majesty had complied with his advice, and the Prince of Wales too. He had had great experience as physician to the Children’s Hospital and elsewhere, and had never seen any serious illness or death result from vaccination. His testimony as to the harmlessness of the practice was unqualified, and he was “unable to conceive of any medical practitioner of standing disbelieving in it, or thinking it mischievous”; adding—
4521.—I should consider I was very much wanting in my duty, and, in fact, deserving of punishment, if I neglected to have my six children vaccinated.
He approved of the compulsory law, and wished that revaccination was likewise compulsory. As to the statistics of smallpox and vaccination, he disowned sufficient acquaintance; nevertheless he did not hesitate to assert that smallpox, as a form of zymotic disease displacing other forms, or replaced by others, was “a theory utterly without foundation.” Of course testimony of this order was produced for social rather than scientific ends.