If any one chooses to assert that vaccination prevents smallpox or mitigates it, How can he be confuted? The prevented smallpox is hid in the unknown, likewise the severity that has been mitigated. Again, if vaccination be held harmless, any instance of its ill effects can be resolved into coincidence with a sneer at the vulgar fallacy of converting post hoc into propter hoc. Possessed with these notions, nothing is easier than to assert with Dr. Stevens, for example, “No man has seen more of vaccination than I have, but I have yet to see any bad effect from the practice.” None are so blind as those whose business it is not to see; or as Mr. Aubrey De Vere has it, “Prejudice, which sees what it pleases, cannot see what is plain.” It is, I contend, plainly impossible to inflict a disease like Vaccinia, in any of its varieties, without injury to the extent of the disease; without intensifying active or exciting latent disease; or without the risk of conveying other inoculable disease from the vaccinifer.
“The great question before the Committee,” said Sir Dominic Corrigan, “is whether vaccine poison can contain within itself syphilitic or any other poison”—the great terror being syphilitic poison. That question the next witness, Mr. Jonathan Hutchinson, an expert in syphilis, determined. He had been called to examine thirteen persons, mostly young adults, engaged in a London shop, who had been revaccinated by order of their employer during the prevalent smallpox panic. The vaccinifer was “a fine, full-grown, healthy child,” yet it conveyed syphilis, beyond mistake, to 11 of the 13 vaccinated. Mr. Hutchinson allowed that the vaccinator was not to be blamed for the disaster, saying—
5032.—I very much doubt whether it could have been avoided by inspection. The child looked healthy, and it had passed at the Vaccine Station as healthy.
Having similar cases within his experience, and convinced “that syphilis can be communicated in the act of vaccination,” Mr. Hutchinson was asked by Mr. Candlish whether he was aware that the medical profession in general denied the possibility, he replied—
5060.—I am not aware that the authorities on the subject deny it; I believe that several of them hold it very clearly; I am aware that the general opinion of the profession is perhaps opposed to it, but not the opinion of those who have carefully investigated the question.
To reduce the effect of testimony so injurious to vaccination, it was attempted to make out that the danger was limited to virus tainted with blood; and although Mr. Hutchinson conceded that blood might be the medium of transmission, it was undecided.
5073.—It is not a subject on which I should like to infer anything; I should like to have experiments and facts.
Subsequent experience has shown that with blood or without blood, syphilis may be invaccinated. Still, Mr. Hutchinson, as an advocate of vaccination, and of its compulsory infliction, “considering it of the utmost necessity and importance,” conceded that the risk was infinitesimal; but (as was remarked at the time) unless the diffusion of syphilis were infinitesimal, there was no ground for the assumption of an infinitesimal risk. As Mr. Hutchinson admitted—
5089.—I believe there are cases of latent Syphilis which cannot be detected by any medical man, unless he examines into the history of the child as well as its appearance.