The like was true of Dr. Gull, now Sir William. He also professed to have never seen any serious illness caused by vaccination; nor did he believe that vaccination from a diseased child would communicate disease. As a defence against smallpox, he held that vaccination was as protective as smallpox itself. It was the duty of the Legislature to enforce vaccination; adding—
4830.—That with our present knowledge, I should think it the most insane thing that any human creature could think of to give up Vaccination.
He had advised the Government to accept no one for service in India without revaccination. Asked by Mr. Candlish whether he would take a child by force from its parents and vaccinate it, he replied—
4854.—I certainly would; just as I would take an ignorant child and have it educated.
Less judicious than Sir William Jenner, Dr. Gull adventured on statistics. It having been pointed out that though smallpox was then epidemic in London, the death-rate was not raised thereby, he attributed the result to vaccination. “In former times smallpox produced an enormous increase in mortality”—
4780.—I think we read of 100,000 people dying of the disease in epidemics, and I am not sure that it was not double the number. I hardly like to trust myself as to numbers, but when I was a professor of medicine at Guy’s Hospital, I brought those numbers before my class, and I was astonished at the enormous number of deaths in a Smallpox epidemic. I remember that taking all the deaths which had occurred in the wars of Napoleon, they were not so many by any means as the number of lives which had been saved by Vaccination at that time. I do not remember, at the moment, the authority for that statement, but I remember that that was the kind of evidence that I had to bring before the class.
Verily the class at Guy’s had romance for science, and the Committee had similar entertainment. They were told that except for vaccination the epidemic then prevalent in London would result “in a perfect pestilence”; for mortality among unvaccinated populations “had been something terrific.” They had “the history of smallpox in China and India, where its effects had been perfectly depopulating.” “To neglect or discourage vaccination in their crowded English towns would be much the same as thrusting a fire-brand into a powder magazine.” Before the introduction of vaccination, “France lost year after year a quarter of a million of inhabitants (250,000) by smallpox”; and so forth and so forth; assertions without warrant outside the intention to excite fear in order to obtain confidence.
The next witness was Dr. Charles West, for twenty years physician to the Hospital for Children, London, where children under two years old were not received—at ages when the immediate effects of vaccination are obliterated or forgotten. Vaccination, in his opinion, prevented or mitigated smallpox. “It had, no doubt, the effect in many cases of developing a disposition to some forms of skin disease, especially eczema;” but on the whole it was not injurious. In the course of his immense experience he had only known of one child whose death was due to erysipelas caused by vaccination. He had no proof of the invaccination of syphilis.
There was nothing peculiar about Dr. West’s evidence. It was according to professional orthodoxy, from which it would have required more than ordinary courage to depart. Medical men by the gross could have been put up to deliver similar evidence; but what was it worth? The medical mind is fixed in two directions; first, that vaccination prevents smallpox, or mitigates it; and second, that it induces a harmless disease; a couple of conclusions that it seems possible to maintain in presence of a vast array of evidence to the contrary.