I do not wish to anticipate the wondrous tale of Jenner—my present purpose is to show how Inoculation was set aside; and it suffices to state that cowpox rapidly made an end of inoculation with smallpox. Indeed, I question whether a revolution in practice was ever effected with similar facility. Within eight years of the delivery of Jenner’s revelation, the writer in the Edinburgh Review of 1806, already cited, was able to testify—
The bitterest enemies of Vaccination will not deny, that more than nine-tenths of the medical world are decidedly and zealously in favour of it, and that all their demonstrations of its dangers and terrors have been insufficient to convert a single one of their brethren from so damnable and dangerous a heresy. Testimonies, it may be said, should be weighed, and not numbered; and in this respect the vaccinators, we are afraid, will have a splendid and indisputable triumph. We give the anti-vaccinists all the advantage in our power when we assign to them a few members of the profession in London; for in the country at large, we believe, they have not one respectable practitioner on their side in five hundred. In this great city and school of medicine [Edinburgh] we are assured, they are without a single public adherent.
The resistance to Vaccination was almost entirely confined to the resistance of inoculators, who were too deeply compromised by their own disloyalty to Nature, to make effective resistance. They were steadily borne down by the vaccinators, many of whom had been energetic inoculators, and displayed the usual ardour of apostates in condemning what they had formerly approved. Indeed, when we consider how Inoculation was commended for its efficiency and harmlessness by the same medical authorities who, within a year or two after Jenner’s appearance, denounced the practice for its difficulties and dangers, their tergiversation appears little short of shameless. Dr. Lettsom had been an inoculator, yet on 2nd July, 1805, he felt warranted in writing—
What have not the abettors of Variolous Inoculation to answer for? To shoot a dozen or two innocent people in the public streets of London would not be half so injurious as allowing the murderers to kill the rising generation, the future hope of the State. Nothing can show the supineness and ignorance of the Government more than legalising these Variolous Murders.
How far the conquest of the inoculators by the vaccinators had advanced, appeared in a debate in the House of Commons in 1806, when Wilberforce urged that Inoculation should be suppressed, or at least that those who insisted on Inoculation should be compelled to place their patients in quarantine. Mr. Windham admitted the scandal of wretched and miserable subjects of Inoculation being carried about in the streets, but he hesitated to recommend coercive legislation until persuasion had been fully tried and had failed. Dr. Matthews, M.P. for Hereford, took occasion at the same time to run with the hounds. Inoculation, he said, was a frequent cause of disfigurement and of death in its most awful form; it was a magazine of the most dreadful evils; a magnifier of mortality; and a means of introducing scrofula, a more dangerous and pernicious disorder than smallpox itself—facts which it would have been more creditable to have proclaimed when Inoculation was in fashion. It is so easy to kick when a foe has fallen, and where all are kicking. Human nature is never so despicable as when thus engaged.
The question of restraining Inoculation came again before the House of Commons in 1807, when the practice of inoculating out-patients at the London dispensaries and hospitals was energetically condemned. “I think that the legislature,” said Mr. Sturges Bourne, “would be as much justified in taking a measure to prevent this evil by restraint, as a man would be in snatching a fire-brand out of the hands of a maniac just as he was going to set fire to a city.”
No one was more eager to suppress Inoculation by force than Jenner himself, and in July 1807, he sought an interview with the Premier for the purpose. In a letter to Dr. Lettsom he thus describes his mortification—
You will be sorry to hear the result of my interview with the Minister, Mr. Perceval. I solicited this honour with the sole view of inquiring whether it was the intention of Government to give a check to the licentious manner in which Smallpox Inoculation is at this time conducted in the metropolis. I instanced the mortality it occasioned in language as forcible as I could utter, and showed him clearly that it was the great source from which the pest of smallpox was disseminated through the country as well as through the town. But, alas! all I said availed nothing, and the speckled monster is still to have the liberty that the Smallpox Hospital, the delusions of Moseley, and the caprices and prejudices of the misguided poor, can possibly give him. I cannot express to you the chagrin and disappointment I felt at this interview.
We are not accustomed to regard politicians of Perceval’s order as favourable to liberty; and yet it is refreshing to remark in even the Tories of the Georgian age a jealous regard for the personal freedom of Englishmen, and a hearty contempt for the plausible quacks who were always contriving to circumscribe it. Perceval was not opposed to Vaccination, but he would not consent to give it an illicit advantage over Inoculation. If it were the good thing it was asserted to be, it might be left to prevail by reason of its own quality.
Under medical and social pressure, the practice of Inoculation at public institutions was gradually abandoned. On 5th May, 1808, the inoculation of out-patients was discontinued at the London Smallpox Hospital, but not until 20th of June, 1822, did the inoculation of in-patients cease. In 1816 the Colleges of Surgeons of London and Dublin pledged themselves against the practice. A formal attempt at coercive legislation, often called for, was at last made by the directors of the National Vaccine Establishment. They framed and promoted a bill, which was introduced to the House of Lords in 1813 by Lord Boringdon, but it was ignominiously withdrawn in 1814—a choice example of grand-motherly legislation. Among its provisions was the enactment that whenever an inoculation took place, the clergyman of the parish should receive notice, and that red flags should be displayed from the house where the patient lay! As Earl Stanhope observed, instead of being a measure of humanity, it would, if passed into law, be one of the most troublesome, inconvenient, and mischievous ever enacted.