Scores of such testimonies might be adduced, twitching the reader from conclusion to conclusion; and in the conflict of authorities what is to be said? It is true that if we select what evidence we like, and call it sound, and reject what we dislike, and call it unsound, we may prove anything; but it is also true, that if we are to be fettered by evidence we shall stand paralysed amid contradictions. When men who are competent, and obviously honest, deliver varying testimony, we are driven to seek some method of reconciliation; and in this matter of Inoculation wherein our resort is to books, and about which we can have no immediate experience, we may derive much light from the corresponding practice of Vaccination. Thus, what is commoner than for vaccinators to assert, that never within their sphere of observation have they witnessed a single case of injury resulting from Vaccination—not one! Subject any dozen ordinary practitioners to judicial examination, and they would thus testify with scarcely a note of variation. On the other hand, take any dozen mothers of families, especially from among the poor, and they would tell of illness, disease, and death following the vaccinators’ lancets. The men are more or less competent and honest, and the women likewise, and how shall we account for their variance? In the first place, the men have been drilled from the outset of their profession into the conviction that Vaccination is absolutely harmless, and if any disaster follows, it is coincidence, not consequence. Occasionally a practitioner of more vigorous intelligence than the average, like Mr. Henry May of Birmingham, sees what the mothers see, but does he report accordingly? Not at all. In Mr. May’s own words—
A death from Vaccination occurred not long ago in my practice, and although I had not vaccinated the child, yet in my desire to preserve Vaccination from reproach, I omitted all mention of it from my certificate of death.[70]
Mr. May recognised the fact and concealed it: a duller man would have ascribed the death mechanically to erysipelas or pyœmia. Indeed, it is a commonplace with medical men, that no child dies of Vaccination; and hence Vaccination is not an admitted cause of death; and when the fact is insisted upon, there is no limit to the hardihood wherewith the truth is crushed down and covered up. Coroners refuse to hold inquests on children slain by Vaccination, and Dr. Lankester, as coroner for Middlesex, did not hesitate to authorise a false certificate of death in order, like Mr. May, “to preserve Vaccination from reproach.”[71] As for mothers, poor creatures, few of them have minds of their own, and if only they were adequately assured that it was for the good of their offspring that their noses should be slit, they would believe, weep, and submit.
But it will be pointed out that inoculators of the more reasonable sort admitted a certain mortality from the practice. It is so; but the admission was unavoidable. Inoculation communicated smallpox, and there was no evasion of the fact that occasionally the malady assumed a severe form, and the patient died. For such mishaps, however, there were always excuses. The patient was not in a suitable condition of body; he had been eating improperly; he had caught cold; and so on. There remained, nevertheless, the sequelæ of Inoculation, which were just as persistently denied as are those of Vaccination, although there were always clear-sighted observers who maintained that it was impossible to infect the blood with a complex organic virus, and that it should exhaust its effects in a single and definite issue. We all remember how we used to be assured with contemptuous emphasis that it was utterly impossible to communicate Syphilis by Vaccination, and that assertions to the contrary were the fables of ignorance and malice; yet, we see that what was fabulous a few years ago, is now accepted as medical matter-of-fact. Nowhere is scepticism so useful as among physicians; for whenever they protest most, suspect most.
With the close of the 18th Century, Inoculation with smallpox to avert smallpox was accepted as sound practice throughout England. Its safety and efficiency were extolled by medical writers in terms curiously identical with those applied to Vaccination. The objectors were few, and for pious rather than physiological reasons; and the question that exercised practical and benevolent minds was how to universalise the remedy, which, on account of its troublesome accompaniments, was chiefly confined to the upper and middle classes. On this point it may be well to cite the words of Dr. Haygarth of Chester, who, in a letter to the Council of Health of Geneva, dated 10th February, 1792, thus sets forth the position of affairs—
In Chester, and, I believe, in most of the large towns of England, the casual smallpox is almost constantly present. All the children of the middle and higher ranks of our citizens are inoculated in early infancy. The populace, very generally regarding the distemper as inevitable, neither fear nor shun it; but much more frequently by voluntary and intentional intercourse, endeavour to catch the casual infection. All the difficulties of our Smallpox Society in Chester proceeded from this strange delusion and perversity of disposition. With us the smallpox is seldom or never heard of except in the Bills of Mortality; but there its devastation appears dreadful indeed.
The strong objection to Inoculation was, that it diffused the disease generally which it was supposed to avert individually. Inoculators tried to minimise and deny the danger, but in vain; and nothing so contributed to the supersession of the practice by Vaccination as the expectation of escape from the artificially propagated disease. How extensive was that propagation, we leave the writer in the Edinburgh Review of 1806 to describe—
The inoculated smallpox is an infectious disease, and those who take it naturally from an inoculated patient have it as violently as if they had been infected from a case of spontaneous disease; it is to all intents and purposes the natural smallpox again in them. Now, if it be considered that several hundred thousand persons have been annually inoculated in these Kingdoms for the last fifty years, it will be easy to calculate the immense addition that must have been made in that period to the cases of actual disease, and the increase of natural smallpox that may be supposed to have arisen from this constant multiplication of the sources and centres of infection.
Unless this culture and this traffic in smallpox throughout the United Kingdom be realised, the potent cause of the immediate and extravagant success of Vaccination will be left out of reckoning. When we are harassed, anxious and impatient under some course of conduct, our ears are open to any promise of relief; and it was to a generation so afflicted and so receptive that Jenner in 1798 made his revelation of the virtue of cowpox. No more need, said he, to inoculate with smallpox. Substitute cowpox; and whilst it will protect as effectually, it will inflict no injury and diffuse no infection. The revelation was received with acclamation, and within eighteen months of its delivery (without due experience, and without any warrant that could pass muster in the severe realm of science) the leading physicians and surgeons of London subscribed and published the following manifesto in the newspapers of 1800—
We, the undersigned physicians and surgeons, think it our duty to declare our opinion, that those persons who have had the Cowpox are perfectly secure from the infection of the Smallpox, provided this infection has not been previously communicated.