In the discussion on this foolish project, Lord Eldon pointed out that the common law was already sufficient to arrest the exposure of sufferers from infectious disease; and acting on the hint the Vaccine Establishment prosecuted a woman, 27th April, 1815, for carrying her inoculated child covered with pustules through the streets of her neighbourhood. Evidence was adduced that she had thus infected eleven persons with smallpox of whom eight had died. The Court of King’s Bench pronounced her conduct illegal and criminal, but as it was the first prosecution for such an offence, she was let off with a sentence of three months’ imprisonment.
A practice thus banned could not long survive in England, and by and by a medical man who would consent to inoculate became a rarity, or was accounted disreputable. Yet there remained old-fashioned folk who would have nothing to do with cowpox, and insisted on having genuine human pox for their children and grandchildren. Hence Dr. Epps writing in 1831 had to say—
There is a class of medical practitioners who inoculate for the smallpox. Society should utter its voice of moral indignation against such individuals, who glory in anything by which they can claim singularity, or by which they can increase their pecuniary means. Let not society be deceived into any parley with such practices upon the plea, that parents will have their children inoculated with the smallpox.[72]
Gradually the inoculating practitioner ceased, and the practice remained in the hands of “ignorant and unqualified persons, old women, and itinerant quacks;”[73] and then the end came. An Act of Parliament was passed in 1840 wherein it was enacted that—
Any person who shall produce or attempt to produce in any person by inoculation with variolous matter, or by wilful exposure to variolous matter, or to any matter, article, or thing impregnated with variolous matter, or wilfully by any other means whatsoever produce the disease of smallpox in any person in England, Wales, or Ireland, shall be liable to be proceeded against and convicted summarily before any two or more justices of the peace in petty sessions assembled, and for every such offence shall, upon conviction, be imprisoned in the common gaol or house of correction for any term not exceeding one month.
The Government did not at first intend to make the prohibition absolute, but Mr. Wakley insisted that the time had arrived to suppress the nuisance summarily, and that not a voice would be raised in opposition. Nor was there any opposition. Mr. Goulburn expressed some hesitation, but the House was practically unanimous.
Outside the House few regrets were expressed. Dr. George Gregory, physician of the Smallpox Hospital at St. Pancras, was, however, a man of philosophic turn, and he did not see the old idol cast down unmoved.
On 23rd July, 1840 [he wrote], the practice of inoculation, the introduction of which has conferred immortality on the name of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, which had been sanctioned by the College of Physicians, which had saved the lives of many kings, queens, and princes, and of thousands of their subjects, during the greater part of the preceding century, was declared illegal by the English Parliament, and all offenders were to be sent to prison, with a good chance of the tread-mill. Such are the reverses of fortune to which all sublunary things are doomed.[74]
Gregory was not blind to the extravagant claims made for Vaccination, and evidently had a lurking conviction that all was not gain in the substitution of the new practice for the old, saying—
Had not the discovery of Jenner interfered to interrupt its extension and improvement, Inoculation would have continued to this day increasing yearly in popularity.[75]