To re-affirm and illustrate our meaning, we take the following piece of physiological poetry, poetic yet scientifically accurate, from Dr. Garth Wilkinson—
In the human body, whatever enters the blood, be it even the most bland food, the juice of the grape or the pomegranate, or the fine flour of wheat, be it oil, wine, or fig, is broken up first, and then led inwards through long avenues of introduction. The most innocent food goes in most easily and first. The police and surveillance for the rest are exceeding great and many. The senses electively appetise the fine food; it has to pass through their peremptory doors of liking and disliking; instructed doors of memory, association, imagination, reason, wisdom, religion, in adults. It is then attacked by digestive salivas, tests, examinations, and severe juices, and questioned to the uttermost in that degree, which corresponds to the former. It is strained through organ after organ; each a tribunal of more than social exactitude. It is absorbed by the finest systems of choice in pore and vessel, organic judgment sitting in every corner, and presiding over each inner doorway. It is submitted to glandular and lung purifications, and their furnaces of trials and eliminations. At last it is weighed in the balances, and minted by supreme nerve wisdoms; and only after all these processes is it admitted into the golden blood. This of the best food, such as good and wise men eat. The worst food is made the best of by a constant passage through bodily mercies and mitigations—a no less sedulous though a penal process. This is physiology, and divine-human decency, and like a man’s life. Vaccination traverses and tramples upon all these safeguards and wisdoms; it goes direct to the blood, or, still worse, to the lymph, and not with food; it puts poison, introduced by puncture, and that has no test applicable to it, and can have no character given to it but that it is fivefold animal and human poison, at a blow into the very centre, thus otherwise guarded by nature in the providence of God. This is blood assassination, and like a murderer’s life.[307]
Finally, vaccination is an attempt to swindle Nature. The vaccinator says, “Come, my little dear, come and let me give you a disease wherewith I shall so hoax Nature that henceforth you may live in what stench you please, and smallpox shall not catch you.” But can Nature be swindled? can Nature be hoaxed? Mr. Lowell, in praising the genius of Cervantes, says, “There is a moral in Don Quixote, and a very profound one it is—that whoever quarrels with Nature, whether wittingly or unwittingly, is certain to get the worst of it.” There is sometimes an apparent triumph over Nature. We do wrong, and fancy we may evade the penalty by some cunning contrivance, but ere long we perceive with dismay that the consequences were only concealed or staved off, and that we have to answer to the uttermost farthing. Vaccination is a dodge kindred with incantations and similar performances whereby it is hoped to circumvent the order of the Highest, and compel his favour apart from obedience to his will. By artifice it is attempted to obviate a consequence of ill-living, whilst persisting in ill-living; but if it were possible to escape smallpox by such means, we should have equal punishment in some other mode. No: smallpox with its alternatives and equivalents can only be avoided through compliance with the old-fashioned prescription, “Wash you, make you clean; cease to do evil, learn to do well.” The lesson is hard to learn, and harder to practise; but there is no evading it if we would be healthy and happy. Wherefore all tricks like vaccination are bound to nullity and disaster. As Hosea Biglow says—
“You hev gut to git up airly
Ef you want to take in God.”
WILLIAM A. GUY, F.R.C.P., F.R.S.
Is Vaccination a preventive of Smallpox? To this question there is, there can be, no answer except such as is couched in the language of figures.—Journal of the Statistical Society, 1882, vol. xlv. p. 414.
G. F. KOLB,
Member of the Royal Statistical Commission of Bavaria.