It is said that inasmuch as the rising generation of medical men are more roundly educated than their predecessors, they are likely to deal with vaccination in a more scientific and independent spirit. The experience of Dr. W. J. Collins at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital lends reason to the anticipation. Study and observation confirmed Dr. Collins in his father’s practical judgment, which he has re-stated firmly and temperately on proper occasions; supporting it with the wide and open evidence at his command. He has been heard with patience and favour, nor has he encountered any but honourable opposition; proving how much depends on the manner in which a man fights his battle, and how much is conceded to courage with courtesy. Dr. Collins has argued, “Ought Vaccination to be enforced?” before the Abernethian Society; he has met Dr. W. B. Carpenter in public debate; he has discussed the Vaccination Disaster at Norwich in 1882; he has answered Sir Lyon Playfair; and he has brought the doctrine of evolution to bear on the generation of disease.[297] If sometimes we refer to the medical profession with severity, the recollection of members like Dr. Collins operates as a check. Still we must be just. Professions, like kindred trade unions, are controlled by their interests, and there never was church, or community, or corporation which surrendered any source of gain, save by external compulsion. Public vaccination in England represents a medical endowment of £100,000 annually, which the profession, true to the law of its being, cannot renounce voluntarily; and there is no sense in shutting our eyes to that certainty. Of course, it would be absurd to charge medical men individually with defending vaccination because of the gain attached thereto: nothing of the kind is intended: but as Hobbes observed of mankind in the gross, “Even the axioms of geometry would be disputed if their interests were peculiarly affected by them.”
When, therefore, it is said that vaccination is a medical question which may be left to medical men to settle, the answer is—“Nay: vaccination is paid for out of the public pocket, and whatever the evidence adverse to its usefulness, it will be upheld as beneficial by those who profit by it. If those who pay do not object, those who are paid never will. In face of common experience, we hold it cannot be otherwise.”
There are fashions in medicine as in millinery: they are started; they flourish; they pass away; but the permanence of any medical fashion might be secured if fortified by endowment. Venesection was once in vogue; now it is scarcely known; but if in its heyday a law had been passed for its performance at the public expense, a ring of official venesectors would have been created to justify the practice against all gainsayers; to deny or explain away every disaster and fatality; and at all hazards preserve its credit from reproach; whilst it would cost something like a constitutional struggle for the nation to escape from the imposition. It is thus with vaccination. Left to itself, it would, like venesection, have dropped into disuse; but it acquired permanence from the initial error—the endowment of the National Vaccine Establishment in 1808.
The enforcement of vaccination supplies a yet stronger reason for public interference. A church endowed by the State might be endured by Dissenters, but if submission to any of its offices were made compulsory, endurance would give place to active resistance. Such is the case with vaccination. As it is endowed and enforced, it is hopeless to try to reserve it from general discussion and denunciation. Since citizens are liable to fine and imprisonment who withhold their children from the lancet, it becomes their duty to satisfy themselves as to the character of the operation for which they are taxed, and with which their families are menaced; and should their convictions be adverse to its utility and safety, they cannot do their fellow-citizens better service than by bearing the testimony of open resistance.
Thus vaccination is translated to politics and made every man’s business; whilst the interest created by its endowment and enforcement deprives its medical advocates of judicial authority in the controversy. It would be as reasonable to expect slaveholders to denounce slavery, or protected manufacturers to advocate free trade as for those whose professional prestige and advantage are involved in the practice to speak the truth about vaccination. Let us be reasonable. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? We should not require of average human nature the virtue of its rarer forms. Like all monopolies, vaccination endowed and enforced, is defended with unanimity from within, and must be attacked and overthrown from without—nevertheless be it said with some assistance from within, and that assistance most efficient.
It is therefore no cause for surprise that a large share in the agitation against compulsory vaccination has fallen to laymen. Mr. George S. Gibbs (cousin of John Gibbs and brother of R. B. Gibbs) has for thirty years maintained a criticism, chiefly statistical, of the official defences of vaccination, characterised throughout by an accuracy which has never been impugned.[298]
Mr. H. D. Dudgeon has been described as “a veritable and venerable apostle of health.” With a consummate knowledge of hygiene, and a profound faith in its power to overcome zymotic disease, he has set forth its principles with such lucidity and persistency that he has gone far to educate Leicester in setting at naught the vaccine superstition. To the standard assertion of the vaccinators, that sanitation is good against all febrile affections, except smallpox, for which there is no preventive save vaccination (the sovereign variety being conveniently undefined) he has been an opponent merciless as truth. Regret is frequently expressed that the abundant information and admirable sense which pervade Mr. Dudgeon’s writing have been confined to newspapers and occasional pamphlets, but it is probable his teaching has been all the more fruitful because adapted to immediate circumstances.[299] The word spoken in due season how good it is!
The name of Mr. Alexander Wheeler of Darlington is familiar wherever vaccination is brought under discussion. Mr. Wheeler’s interest in the subject was first excited, he writes, by Mr. G. S. Gibbs, “whose scepticism as to its virtue seemed to me absurd”—