CHAPTER XLII.

THE GATHERING MOVEMENT--1867-70.

Section 31 of the Act of 1867 implied the doom of Vaccination.

It was bad enough to fine a parent for refusing to vaccinate his

child; it was, however, a circumscribed annoyance; but to make of

refusal a continuous offence until a child attained the age of

fourteen was to set up a cause of quarrel that had to be fought

out. Slavery in the United States is abolished, but slavery might

have endured to this day had the Southerners been more forbearing;

but, in the arrogance of their power, they imposed on the Union the

Fugitive Slave Law, compelling the people of the North to surrender

runaway negroes. This triumph of the slaveholders determined the

fate of slavery. In like manner the arrogance of the vaccinators

overcame their prudence. Resolved to subdue resistance to their

rite, they drove resistance to extremity, and set up an irreducible

insurrection. As a medical prescription accepted at discretion,

vaccination might have survived unquestioned and paid for; but its

transition into an aggressive statute removed it from the safe

realm of professional mystery into the jurisdiction of common

sense, common observation, and every man’s business.

Sec. 31, Act ’67, was quickly turned to account by the medical

officials who had devised and imposed it upon the indifference of

Parliament. They had, of course, to operate through local poor-law

authorities--a painful necessity; but guardians were occasionally

as fanatical as themselves, and exasperated, too, that their petty

authority should be set at naught, and especially by parents

in humble life. Consequently, here and there over the country

continued prosecutions for refusing to vaccinate were initiated,

stirring up strife, begetting sympathy with the prosecuted, and

gradually converting vaccination into a living political question.

Whatever may be thought of Sec. 31, Act ’67, all will allow that

it drew a line and established irritation and conflict. Opposition

to vaccination had hitherto to contend with nothing so deadly

as apathy, but from that drawback it was now delivered. On the

other hand, in many parishes, Sec. 31, Act ’67 was allowed to

make no difference. Those who disliked vaccination were warned,

or prosecuted once, and then let alone; but this leniency served

to accentuate the severity practised elsewhere, and to render the

law still more odious by reason of the flagrant inequality of its

administration.

The scientific opposition to vaccination, initiated by Mr. John

Gibbs in 1855, had for some years few accessions, and it required

faith in truth in full measure to persist in its advocacy. The

Jennerian tradition was so rooted in the public mind that to

question it savoured of paradox or profanity. There were occasional

manifestations of scepticism when smallpox attacked the vaccinated,

but doubt was crushed down as impious and dangerous to established

confidence. Mr. Herbert Spencer, for example, in _Social Statics,_

published in 1851, observed--

The measures enjoined by the Vaccination Act of 1840 were to have

exterminated Smallpox; yet the reports of the Registrar-General

show that deaths from Smallpox have been increasing.

To such matter-of-fact criticism, any answer must have taken

form in the style of the bewildered divine, who exclaimed, “Dear

brethren, what theology can we enjoy if such objections be

entertained!”

Dr. Charles T. Pearce was one of the first to unite with Mr.

Gibbs in his labours. As editor of a medical journal, he happened

to receive an article from Mr. Gibbs which set him thinking,

and as the result of his inquiries, he came out an enthusiastic

anti-vaccinator. He made the question of vaccination completely

his own, and lectured on the subject throughout the country, eager

and ready for combat. In Northampton, in 1860, he held his first

public debate, and under his influence the town became a centre

of resistance to the compulsory law, so that Mr. Charles Gilpin,

M.P. for the borough, addressing his constituents in 1870, thus

expressed himself--

I have always thought that when we try to enforce one of the

ever-changing opinions of medical men, we touch upon the

liberty of the subject and the rights of human nature. I find

that a number of parents are fined because they are convinced

that Vaccination is useless and injurious. I ask, What is the

character of those parents? Are they idle? Are they dissolute?

Are they drunken? Are they careless of the welfare of their

children? The answer is emphatically, No! They are thoughtful,

they are industrious, they are sober. They are men who look into

the reasons of things, and who decline to be driven into any

course of conduct which they do not rationally approve. When

I was in business in the City of London I had my goods seized

almost every year for Church rates. I objected to the law,

and with a free heart and a firm voice, I said I will endure

the penalty. I would not obey a law which I knew to be wrong.

Therefore it is that I sympathise with those who are persuaded

that Vaccination is wrong; and for their encouragement and

consolation let me say, that as compulsory Church rates were

abolished because of the stedfast testimony borne against them

by Nonconformists, so will compulsion as applied to Vaccination,

if resistance is consistently and seriously maintained. As the

Society of Friends has demonstrated, no law can survive under the

persistent protest of conscience.

Tenacity was the distinction of Dr. Pearce. Undismayed by whatever

odds, he maintained his position with deliberation and patience,

and by neither historical, statistical, or physiological data was

it possible to circumvent him. When he entered into the controversy

in 1856, fool and fanatic was the summary designation of whoever

ventured to dispute the salvation wrought by vaccination; but,

living until 1883, he witnessed such epithets received with

amusement as denoting the ill-humour and impotence of those who

employed them.

An energetic advocate of the good cause appeared in Dr. W. J.

Collins, who, after twenty years of service in London as public

vaccinator, felt compelled to renounce the practice as useless and

injurious. He stated his conviction frankly and forcibly before

the St. Pancras Sanitary Committee in 1863,[290] and in an essay,

vigorous with mother-wit, published in 1867,[291] he communicated

much useful and unpleasant information to the credulous and

deceived public. To contend with a judgment thus instructed and

qualified was useless; and those who were affected by the exposure

took care to avoid it. Nor considering the danger to the craft from

discussion, was the policy injudicious. Truth has many adversaries,

but none so hard to overcome as the non-resistant silence of

timorous self-interest.

A leader and organiser of the opposition was wanted, and he

appeared in Richard Butler Gibbs, cousin of John Gibbs, who, as we

have seen, framed the first systematic indictment of vaccination in

1855. Mr. Gibbs, of Irish parentage, was born in London in 1822,

and in the course of a commercial career became agent at Pease’s

West Collieries for Joseph Pease of Darlington, the first Quaker

M.P. It was in 1863, when a member of the Bishop Auckland board of

guardians, that he first moved publicly against vaccination, and

then less against the practice itself than against its prescription

by the authority at that time vested in the Privy Council. He

cautioned his colleagues that they were likely to become (as they

since have) the tools of a central medical clique. Subsequently

finding himself comparatively free from business, he devoted

himself to the cause with which his name has been identified.

Gathering together the scattered elements of resistance, he formed

in 1866 the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League, and travelled over

the country, lecturing and holding public meetings. The enactment

of repeated penalties for non-vaccination, strenuously resisted

by Mr. Gibbs, established “a raw,” and conferred on the League a

grievance and purpose everywhere recognised as indisputable by

the people. Sec. 31, Act ’67 was in a popular sense the making of

the agitation against vaccination; and it has been maintained (in

a sense fortunately) until even the withdrawal of the aggravation

cannot save vaccination itself from ultimate rejection. What at the

moment we like least, often in the end serves us best.

Mr. Henry Pitman of Manchester entered actively into the movement.

He had observed the ill effects of vaccination upon one of his own

children, and in connection with Mr. R. B. Gibbs organised public

meetings in Manchester and other places. In 1869 he tried how far

a penny journal would succeed, and started _The Anti-Vaccinator_

which ran for eighteen weeks. As editor of _The Co-operator_, which

he conducted for ten years, he gave prominence to vaccination news,

and in 1870 adjoined _Anti-Vaccinator_ to the title, which was

continued until _The Co-operative News_ was established in 1871,

when he maintained the publication as _The Anti-Vaccinator_ until

the close of the year. In 1876 Mr. Pitman bore testimony to his

convictions by going to the Knutsford House of Correction rather

than pay the fine and costs imposed upon him for refusing to have

his daughter, Violet, vaccinated, and in _Prison Thoughts_ conveyed

to others the lesson of his experience. Mr. Pitman has been

remarkably successful in impressing public men with his opinions.

Courteous and persistent, he has won consideration where rougher

speech might not have prevailed.

Professor F. W. Newman was led to a knowledge of the dangers of

vaccination by Mr. Henry Pitman; and those who have been observant

of his career in later years know with what courage and consistency

he has asserted his convictions. Having asked the Professor how he

became concerned in the opposition to vaccination, he favoured me

thus--

“The outline of my mental history in this direction is as follows.

Circumstances had led me to respect Mr. Henry Pitman as a competent

and truthful witness of fact. On a certain occasion he spoke

publicly on the miserable state to which he had seen a poor lad,

Ira Connell of Southport, reduced by vaccination. Ira’s parents,

and his brothers and sisters, were all hale: his mother attested

that previous to vaccination so was Ira. But _after_ vaccination,

Ira had never recovered its dreadful effects, three of his four

limbs being crippled.

“Some years later, I myself saw Ira Connell at Southport. I think

his age was then 25, but am not sure. He had only one leg sound,

and hardly one arm. I will not undertake to describe his state

exactly, but it was _very pitiable_. I am happy to add that in nine

or ten years more he has gradually recovered, so as at least not to

be visibly crippled.

“Previously I had _refused to read_ anti-vaccination tracts,

_having too much already to read_. I had never _known_ or _heard_

in my own circles of mischief from vaccination, and when some

German ladies spoke of its ‘_horrors_’ I thought them absurd and

fanatical; but now that Henry Pitman publicly attested _a fact_,

this woke me up to the duty of further inquiry.

“I at once remembered that in my early youth or boyhood I had

been staggered by reading in a medical journal that experience

made it impossible to sustain Jenner’s doctrine that vaccination

was a certain preventive of smallpox; but the writer nevertheless

urged that it was valuable for making smallpox _milder_ if it did

follow. This struck me as an ugly shifting of the basis, and far

from plausible. One school-and-college fellow of mine, _after

vaccination_, had smallpox that marked him; but nothing further led

me to pursue the argument.

“I now at once saw that _compulsory_ vaccination was an infamy,

since Parliament could not secure any one from Ira Connell’s

fate: and I was indignant on learning that doctors pooh-poohed

such miseries, as endured ‘_for the general good_,’ a theory

which justifies any amount of tyranny under the influence of

superstition; and I presently remembered that in Roman pestilences

_sacrifices_ were believed efficacious, and the arguments of the

priests and senators were quite as good as those of our physicians.

“I find that in 1869 I had a sharp debate with a clever young

student of Medicine, who poured out the doctrines of the Faculty,

which he had been getting up. My respect for the whole Faculty has

rapidly got less and less; it had long been declining. I need not

obtrude on you the depth to which it has now sunk, excepting always

a noble few, who are what Heretics were to the Mediæval Church.

“Next I saw that no Parliament or King has, or can have, any right

(_on medical theory_) to stick a poisoned lancet into a _healthy_

person; and that to fancy that Human Health can be improved by

altering the natural blood of Health is _an imbecile contemptible

fancy_. Moreover, that unless Vaccination is believed to _remove

the causes_ of smallpox, those causes would entail disease in other

ways, and perhaps worse, by suppressing _the natural eruption_,

which eruption alone is called ‘Smallpox.’ My mind was thus decided.

“I did not learn till some years later (_what alone concerns

Parliament_) that the more active is smallpox, the less is the

Total Mortality of any year; and conversely, the less active the

smallpox, the greater is the Total Mortality. This is the only form

of statistics worth attending to. All the rest is dust thrown in

our eyes.

“Statistics not founded on a scientific principle are the commonest

_nidus_ of fallacy; but if _any_ statistics are to be listened

to, those of Total Mortality are the least open to suspicion. The

_primâ facie_ evidence is, that instead of Vaccination saving

yearly 80,000 lives (Sir Lyon Playfair’s monstrous assertion)

Vaccination does only harm; but that Smallpox _saves_ every year

many lives (some hundreds or thousands) by a natural eruption,

under the morbid circumstances _desirable_.”

The Countess de Noailles contributed most efficient assistance

toward opening the public mind and letting in light. In a

communication her ladyship says--

“You ask me how it was that my name came to be connected with the

present anti-vaccination movement.

“It was in this way. On my return to England in 1865, Mrs.

Cowper-Temple, now Lady Mount Temple, asked me to visit the office

of the Ladies’ Sanitary Association, which I had joined her in

starting four years before. I had wished the Association to be

called the Ladies’ Association for the Protection of the Health of

the Children of the Poor; but that was thought too long a name,

and was changed; and I mention it only to explain what my idea

was in helping to form the Society. Well, on visiting the office

of the Association, I saw among the sanitary tracts one with the

title, _When were you vaccinated?_ On reading the words, it struck

me suddenly that vaccination was all wrong, but as I knew nothing

whatever about it, and had heard naught but praise of the practice,

I told the excellent secretary of the Association my misgivings

on the subject, and she set to work to find out all that was

known or thought on the question. Miss Griffiths soon learnt that

three relatives--John, Richard, and George Gibbs--had for twenty

years been writing and working against vaccination, besides Dr.

Collins and others. Seeing that I was not alone in my conviction,

I resolved to elicit more opinion on the subject by giving a

prize for the best essay on the same, setting forth the supposed

benefits, dangers, etc. Miss Griffiths went heart and soul into the

question, and with the help of Dr. Druitt, I think, she had judges

named and the prize of £100 offered. The judges were Mr. Marson,

Dr. Richardson, and Dr. Francis Webb--all in favour of vaccination.

The great length of the essay by Dr. Ballard gave it a claim for

the prize, and the tremendous because _unavoidable_ admissions as

to the dreadful dangers of vaccination contained in this Prize

Essay, have caused the doctors to try to suppress it--so at least

I have heard.

“Miss Griffiths sent me in November, 1866, the _Lancet_, containing

a horrible account of the poisoning of thirty-six children in

Morbihan, Brittany, by public vaccination.

“My forebodings being thus so terribly confirmed, I tried to

interest all the doctors who advised the Ladies’ Sanitary

Association in the new difficulties in the way of this dreadful

practice; but the only one who lent an ear to the sad tale was Dr.

Garth Wilkinson, who began mildly, but afterwards waxed valiant in

fight. May he and the little band which his genius has helped to

bring into the field ‘soon put to flight the armies of the aliens.’

“In 1867 a letter from the Rev. W. Hume-Rothery against compulsory

vaccination struck me, and he set to work at the question in the

co-operative newspapers; and latterly in the _Reporter_, in which

he has been ably helped by Mrs. Hume-Rothery, the daughter of the

late Mr. Joseph Hume, M.P. The strength given to the bad law by

Lord Robert Montagu’s Act in 1867 roused its enemies at the same

time; and, feeling that my task was done, I left the contest to

abler hands.

“I thus found that the Association I had inaugurated in order ‘_to

protect the health of poor children_,’ was being made into an

instrument to bind them through their mothers’ ignorance to the

most wholesale plan for their degeneration, if not destruction,

ever invented by the mind of man. It was in vain that I tried

to get the ladies of the Sanitary Association to think over the

matter. I was always met by the remark that it was _a medical

question_ and one which _doctors alone could decide_; and all I

could obtain of them was to allow me to buy up the offending tract

and to remain neutral in the question. When I left the Association

a few years after, the tract was circulated again.

“The compulsory law seems to me well described in these words of

Carlyle:--‘To decree _injustice_ by a _law_--inspired prophets have

long since seen, what every clear soul may still see, that of all

Anarchies and Devil-worships there is none like this; that this is

the “throne of iniquity” set up in the name of the Highest, the

human apotheosis of Anarchy itself.’”

Dr. Ballard’s essay was of itself a notable achievement. Written in

defence of vaccination, the difficulties, dangers and futility of

the practice were so largely revealed, that any thoughtful reader

was compelled to inquire, Where shall we find compensation for all

this trouble, these risks, these sufferings? Dr. Ballard’s essay

soon ran out of print, and the author was judiciously enlisted in

the medical service of the Local Government Board.

In Dr. Garth Wilkinson the movement obtained the assistance not

only of an able physician, but of one whom Emerson has described as

“a philosophic critic, with a coequal vigour of understanding and

imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon’s;” and “with a rhetoric

like the armoury of the invincible knights of old.” Having asked

Dr. Wilkinson how he came over to the side we identify with sound

science and sound sense, he answered--

“The early History of my Opposition to Vaccination is, briefly,

this--I had not considered Vaccination a question; but practised

it when required. About 1865 the Countess de Noailles assailed my

conscience on the subject, and her earnestness forced me to study

it. She was backed by the late Mrs. Gibbs, then Miss Griffiths.

Through Miss Griffiths I sent the following message to Madame de

Noailles--‘Tell her Ladyship that the question is comparatively

unimportant. Vaccination is an infinitesimal affair; its reform

will come in with greater reforms.’ I also wrote to Madame that the

only short way of getting rid of the Medical vested interest was by

paying half a million or a million of money down to the Profession,

and buying the slaves, the people, out, as the West Indian Blacks

were bought out.

“After-studies extending over eighteen years have convinced me that

I was wrong in my estimate of the smallness of the Vaccination

question compared with other Evils. As forced upon every British

Cradle, I see it as a Monster instead of a Poisonous Midge; a

Devourer of Nations. As a Destroyer of the Honesty and Humanity

of Medicine, which is through it a deeply-degraded Profession. As

a Tyrant which is the Parent of a brood of Tyrants, and through

Pasteur and his like a Universal Pollution Master. As a Ghoul

which sits upon Parliament, and enforces Contamination by Law,

and prepares the way for endless violations of personal liberty

and sound sense at the bidding of cruel experts. Not denying other

forms of Social Wickedness, I now, after careful study, regard

Vaccination as one of the greatest and deepest forms, abolishing

the last hope and resort of races, the new-born soundness of the

Human Body.”

The agitation against compulsory vaccination prospered under

the leadership of Mr. Gibbs. He sought help on all sides, and

harmonised its various elements to the common purpose of the

League. In his various labours he derived efficient assistance

from his brother, Mr. G. S. Gibbs of Darlington, who displayed

remarkable ability in the interpretation of vital statistics and

in the exposure of their misapplications. Mr. Gibbs established

branches of the League wherever there were adversaries of the

practice, and was especially successful in the north of England.

The relentless application of Sec. 31, Act ’67, in certain parts

of the country did much to rouse public attention and sympathy.

Parents were repeatedly fined for persistent refusal to have

children vaccinated, and in default of payment had their property

seized, or were committed to prison, sometimes with hard labour.

Occasionally sentences were accompanied with gross insolence from

the bench. For example, Mr. Bowman having pleaded at Newcastle his

conscientious conviction that vaccination might prove injurious

to his child, whilst it could never save him from smallpox, was

compared to a thief by the magistrate, who said, “I once knew a

man who had conscientious scruples against working so long as he

could live by stealing; and I do not think conscience of that

sort is entitled to respect.” Law on such terms naturally invites

execration, and many who might hold by vaccination are thereby

turned against it.

By some it was thought questionable whether Sec. 31, Act ’67, did

afford warrant for repeated prosecutions. Mr. John Candlish, M.P.

for Sunderland, who sat on the Committee of 1866 which dealt with

the Bill which became law in 1867, maintained “that it was not

intended that penalties should be repeated, but that one penalty

should be a discharge from any obligation to submit a child to

vaccination.” It is needless to say, an Act of Parliament is not to

be interpreted by the intentions of its framers, but by its words.

Moreover, if intentions are brought into question, it would be fair

to set intentions against intentions. Several who were concerned in

promoting the Act of ’67 had intentions more arbitrary than were

conveyed in Sec. 31.

The question, was raised by the Rev. H. J. Allen, Primitive

Methodist. He had been repeatedly before the bench at St. Neots,

and was committed to prison for fourteen days, but, having paid

the fine, £5, was liberated. In less than a month, he was summoned

again, and fined £1 for each of his children, including costs. An

appeal was made to the Court of Queen’s Bench in 1870, and judgment

confirmed the severer interpretation of Sec. 31, Act ’67. Lord

Chief Justice Cockburn held that a parent having been fined under

the Act for disobeying an order to have his child vaccinated, may

be proceeded against from time to time as long as the child remains

unvaccinated. He declined to discuss whether vaccination was

good or bad; the Legislature had treated it as a matter of great

importance, and had passed Acts to ensure attention to it; that

being so, he could not doubt that the intention of the Legislature

was not merely to impose a penalty upon a person, once and for all,

for having omitted to do that which the public health and safety

required; but to enforce obedience to the requisitions of the law.

He thought, therefore, the order to vaccinate might be renewed,

and the penalties might be repeated until the order was obeyed.

Mr. Justice Mellor and Mr. Justice Hannen concurred. The judgment

in this case, known as Allen _v._ Worthy, has been repeatedly

questioned and always reaffirmed.

Immediately after Mr. Candlish introduced a Bill to the House

of Commons to amend the law, repeating his conviction that the

construction put upon the Act of ’67 was never intended by

Parliament, and that it was by mere verbal accident that penalties

were made continuous. The Bill was introduced too late in the

session (6th July, 1870) to be carried, but it led to discussion

and a promise from Government that the question would be remitted

to a Committee next year, 1871.

FOOTNOTES:

[290] _Twenty Years’ Experience of a Public Vaccinator._ Read

before the Sanitary Committee of St. Pancras, 9th June, 1863. Third

edition. London, 1866.

[291] _Have you been Vaccinated? and What Protection is Vaccination

against Smallpox?_ By William J. Collins, M.D. Fourth edition.

London, 1868.

CHAPTER XLIII.

HOUSE OF COMMONS COMMITTEE, 1871.

On 13th February, 1871, Mr. W. E. Forster moved that a Select

Committee be appointed to inquire into the operation of the

Vaccination Act of 1867, and to report whether such Act should be

amended. Mr. Forster’s remarks on the occasion are noteworthy, as

manifesting the prevalent prejudice. He said--

I make the motion in compliance with a promise made to the

Member for Sunderland last session, who had brought in a Bill

to relax the punishment for refusal to permit Vaccination. I do

not imagine that Mr. Candlish, more than any other member of the

House, has the slightest doubt of the utility and necessity of

Vaccination, and that it is necessary not only to encourage the

practice, but to make it compulsory. Opposition to Vaccination is

not heard in the House of Commons; but it is found, I am sorry

to say, among certain persons in the country, who have carried

their resistance to an extent that has been injurious to health

and destructive to life. [Evolution this from Forster’s fancy.]

These people must have forgotten the state of the country before

Vaccination was introduced.

Then followed the usual fabulous matter of rote--the awful

mortality prior to vaccination, the reduction of that mortality

by vaccination, the extraordinary immunity enjoyed by the

vaccinated and revaccinated, and so forth--uttered and accepted as

indisputable.

The Government do not entertain any doubt of the efficacy and

advantages of Vaccination, nor of the necessity of enforcing

it. They have to contend with opposition--the opposition of

ignorance, and also, I am sorry to say, with the opposition

arising from interested motives [What possibly could they be?]

preying upon that ignorance; and lastly, with the great neglect

arising from apathy.

Sir Charles Adderley opposed the appointment of the Committee.

Accepting Mr. Forster’s statement as valid, he demanded--

What is there to inquire about? Inquiry that is superfluous may

be mischievous. Nothing can be more dangerous than to affect

doubtfulness concerning legislation as to which there is not only

no doubt, but a call for more rigorous administration.

Apparently the Government were of the same mind as Sir Charles, and

the Committee was conceded in fulfilment of an inadvertent pledge.

Mr. Forster assured the House--

The Government do not propose this Committee with the slightest

doubt about the principle of Vaccination, or the necessity of

Compulsory Vaccination; and I need not say we have no intention

of relaxing the operation of the law during the deliberations of

the Committee.

The Committee was nominated as follows on 16th February--

Dr. BREWER, Colchester.

Mr. JACOB BRIGHT, Manchester.

Mr. JOHN CANDLISH, Sunderland.

Mr. R. M. CARTER, Leeds.

Mr. STEPHEN CAVE, Shoreham.

Sir SMITH CHILD, West Staffordshire.

Sir DOMINIC CORRIGAN, Dublin.

Mr. W. E. FORSTER, Bradford.

Mr. J. T. HIBBERT, Oldham.

Mr. J. M. HOLT, North-East Lancashire.

Lord ROBERT MONTAGU, Huntingdonshire.

Mr. P. H. MUNTZ, Birmingham.

Dr. LYON PLAYFAIR, Edinburgh University.

Mr. W. H. SMITH, Westminster.

Mr. P. A. TAYLOR, Leicester.

The first witness examined was Mr. Candlish, himself a member of

the Committee and promoter of the inquiry. Whilst professing a

limited faith in vaccination, and willing to exercise a degree

of pressure sufficient to overcome mere apathy, Mr. Candlish

was strongly opposed to the compulsion of parents who seriously

objected to vaccination, and especially to their persecution by

repeated penalties and imprisonment.

Dr. W. J. Collins, the next witness, opened the entire question of

vaccination, and by a variety of experience showed that the vaccine

disease neither superseded nor mitigated smallpox, whilst it was

frequently a severe ailment and the means of exciting and conveying

other diseases.

Dr. C. T. Pearce followed suit. The purpose of the Committee

(limited to the consideration of the compulsory law) was apparently

forgotten, and Dr. Pearce delivered a comprehensive discourse, in

which the history, claims, failure, fallacies, and disasters of

vaccination were freely displayed; and in the cross-examination

which followed made good the positions he had assumed.

Sir Jervoise Clarke Jervoise, Bart., formerly M.P. for South

Hants, disputed the common notions of infection as confused with

contagion, and pointed out that it was absurd to draw comparisons

between the vaccinated and unvaccinated unless their pecuniary

status were at the same time defined: cases of smallpox in

Belgravia were not to be likened to cases in Clerkenwell. Smallpox

was not mitigated by vaccination: he had two relatives vaccinated

by Jenner himself who subsequently had confluent smallpox so

severely that “their own father did not know them.” Nor if smallpox

had diminished was there any reason to ascribe it to vaccination:

Jenner’s cowpox had ceased out of the land, and the cause of its

cessation might equally apply to smallpox.

Dr. Garth Wilkinson gave evidence with the characteristic wisdom of

the physician of genius who sees with his own eyes. He showed how,

endowed and lucrative, the futility and mischief of vaccination

were concealed or denied, and how, considered all sufficient

against smallpox, the causes of the disease were overlooked, and

the introduction of improved methods of treatment were unattempted

or discouraged.

Mr. George S. Gibbs contested the right of the State to inflict

vaccination, or to interfere between parent and child. Having a

faculty for statistics, he had applied himself to the records of

smallpox before and since the practice of vaccination, at home and

abroad, and showed that smallpox was the same at present as in the

past, neither more mortal nor less mortal, while there was reason

to believe that vaccination was a breeder of smallpox as well as a

source and excitant of other maladies.

Mr. Aaron Emery related in vigorous English how an infant of his

had been vaccinated from a healthy-looking child on 31st May,

1869; how erysipelas followed; how it gradually got worse; how

“the little fellow had no rest night nor day from 9th June to 4th

July, when death put an end to his sufferings.” Then he told the

difficulty he had to obtain a true certificate of death from the

vaccinator; how he forced an inquest; how a verdict was returned,

“Died from erysipelas caused by vaccination”; and how its terms

were subsequently altered by Coroner Lankester and registered as

altered at Somerset House. Up to the time of this fatality, Mr.

Emery had been an unsuspicious believer in vaccination; but his

sorrow led him to acquaintance with numerous cases like his own,

screened from public recognition, any artifice being accounted

laudable which seemed necessary to preserve vaccination from

reproach.

Mr. F. Covington, secretary of the Northampton Anti-Vaccination

League, described injuries from vaccination in his family and among

his acquaintance; the distrust and dislike of the practice in

Northampton with widespread resistance to the compulsory law.

Mrs. E. Kemp brought her baby, and told how it had been vaccinated

without examination, although there was a sore on the side of its

head. As the vaccination began to take, the child’s face and ears

broke out, until through the mass of eruption “you could only see

its little eyes.”

Mr. Thomas Baker, barrister, had been engaged in the Board of

Health from 1849 to 1854, and officially connected with several

sanitary inquiries. In his opinion what were called epidemics

were fevers with a common origin, against which cleanliness was

the efficient prophylactic, and to which his friend, Dr. Southwood

Smith, held smallpox was equally amenable. As a shareholder in the

Metropolitan Association for the Improvement of the Dwellings of

the Industrial Classes, he knew that residents in wholesome houses,

even in insanitary neighbourhoods, enjoyed remarkable exemption

from epidemic maladies.

Mr. W. J. Addison testified that his perfectly healthy child had

had syphilis invaccinated, and had died in consequence after

horrible suffering. The facts of the case were beyond question.

One hospital doctor had the temerity to ask the mother, “Whether

is it not better for one in a thousand to die like this than have

smallpox raging about our towns.” “Possibly,” replied the poor

woman, “but it is strange that my child should be the thousandth.”

The Rev. Wm. Hume-Rothery said his attention was first drawn

to vaccination by the operation on his own child, his wife

observing instinctively, “This is an unnatural and wrong thing.”

Investigation confirmed his wife’s judgment, and he became an

open opponent of the practice, writing and lecturing against it.

His acquaintance with the people in Lancashire had led him to the

conviction that the majority disliked and distrusted vaccination:

they were coerced to its observance, and evaded it when possible.

He himself was opposed to vaccination because there was nothing in

nature, human nature, or revelation to justify it. This assertion

of principle over and above practice led to considerable discussion

as to divine law, providence, and the nature of things, and the

right of conscience to withstand corporate dictation.

Mr. R. B. Gibbs, secretary of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination

League, referred to the origin of vaccination, as attested

by Jenner, in the production of cowpox from the contagion of

horsegrease, and subsequently to the use of horsepox, by which

equination was substituted for vaccination; the diverse virus thus

derived from Jenner continuing in official arm-to-arm currency to

the present day. What vaccination was had never been determined;

and consequently there had been no proper basis for legislation.

Nor had legislation been preceded by impartial and adequate

inquiry: it had been promoted by certain medical men, supported

by the press, and especially by _The Times_, the editors of which

jealously suppressed all communications which impugned the efficacy

of the rite. Interrogated as to the amendment of the law, Mr. Gibbs

said he had no amendment to propose: the State should withdraw

all assistance from the practice, and leave its use or disuse to

individual discretion.

At this point the evidence of the anti-vaccinists was cut short.

They had much more to produce, but enough had been heard. The

Committee had forgotten its purpose, which was not to discuss

vaccination, but, accepting the rite as unquestionable, to consider

whether the law which enforced it was capable of amendment. Still,

the mischief being done, it was thought advisable to counteract it;

and forthwith contrary testimony was laid on. Various officials who

for years had made the promotion of vaccination their business were

summoned to the rescue, along with certain fashionable physicians,

whose assurance, it was calculated, would overcome any distrust

that might be excited in the public mind.

The first of the officials was Mr. John Simon, a review of whose

_Papers on Vaccination_ forms Chapter XL. of the present volume.

Evidence from Mr. Simon relative to vaccination was of much the

same order as that of a Virginian of former days on slavery, or a

thriving London publican on the liquor traffic. Mr. Simon answered

to the demand upon him: he was thorough: there was nothing like

leather--nothing! Smallpox was among the most contagious and most

fatal of pestilences, and “for an overwhelming majority of persons,

well vaccinated in infancy, vaccination was a security for life

against even an attack of smallpox.” The unvaccinated died at

the rate of 35½ per cent.; the vaccinated in general at 7 per

cent.; and “the properly vaccinated” at from 1 to ½ per cent.--the

fact being concealed that in times when all were unvaccinated,

the smallpox death-rate ranged from 10 to 18 per cent., the same

overhead death-rate of vaccinated and unvaccinated at this day.

There had never been, he believed, a case of death from the direct

effect of “properly performed vaccination”--the qualification,

it will be observed, referring all cases of death to something

other than the correct rite. He admitted there was not the least

doubt that syphilis had been invaccinated on the Continent, but

either from carelessness or culpable intention. Sanitation, he

said, had little or no influence on smallpox: vaccination was the

only protective--which variety of vaccination being judiciously

left undefined. Smallpox did not displace other fevers during its

prevalence, as alleged by Dr. Pearce. Holding that 97 per cent.

of Londoners were vaccinated, he did not see that the epidemic

then raging, the severest of the century, disproved the security

asserted for vaccination.

As we read Simon’s evidence, we realise afresh the possibilities

of audacity operating on credulity: there is nothing that men,

otherwise sane, may not believe when their disposition is set

toward belief. This Committee sat in London amid a population,

almost universally vaccinated, suffering from smallpox as they

never had suffered within living memory; and yet in presence of

such a demonstration of the impotence of the vaccine ordinance,

they listened to the soothsayer with abject acquiescence! Strange

as are the records of witchcraft, there is nothing in them more

marvellous than this 1871 Committee of select men from the House of

Commons taking for true what under their own eyes was visible as

untrue--deceived and consenting to be deceived.

As for those who disputed the efficacy of vaccination, and

justified their disbelief by smallpox among the vaccinated, Simon’s

contempt was unqualified--contempt being essential to the success

of the part enacted. “Some of them were ignorant,” he said, “and

others dishonest.” They were a “league of persons interested in

interrupting the fulfilment of the law, and very actively engaged

in disseminating falsehoods against vaccination”--falsehoods in its

favour actively disseminated by Simon and his trade-union being

disinterested and praiseworthy.

Dr. R. Hall Bakewell, vaccinator-general for Trinidad, was somehow

produced by mistake, his evidence being in several respects the

reverse of what was wanted. He thought vaccination good, but that

“it should be done in a more careful manner.” It ought not to be

compulsory, but left to the good sense of the people. Having been

proved to cause death, “it was unjust to oblige a parent to submit

his child to an operation attended with such risk, however rare.”

Referring to his experience in Trinidad, he said--

3557.--I have seen Vaccination produce inflammation of the arm

and general fever lasting for several days. Such illness was

often alleged as an excuse by mothers for not bringing their

children for inspection on the 8th day. At first I was inclined

to regard the assertion as a mere excuse, but on visiting the

homes I found the children were really ill, and that it was not

safe to bring them for inspection.

3563.--There is a strong opinion prevalent in Trinidad, and in

the West Indies generally, that Leprosy has been introduced

to the system by Vaccination. I found that medical men when

they had occasion to vaccinate their own children, or those of

patients in whom they were specially interested, applied to me

for English lymph in order to avoid the invaccination of Leprosy,

notwithstanding there was an equal, and probably a greater,

chance of the English lymph being contaminated with Syphilis. I

had several cases of Leprosy in which Vaccination seemed the only

means of accounting for the disease.

As a consequence of this prevalent opinion, vaccination was

much disliked in Trinidad, and, although by law compulsory, was

indifferently enforced, so that at least half the population

escaped unvaccinated.

Interrogated concerning smallpox in Trinidad, Dr. Bakewell said

there had been no epidemic for fourteen or fifteen years when one

occurred “frightfully severe, as are all epidemics in Trinidad,

owing to the entire neglect of sanitary precautions”; adding that

“the mortality from smallpox may be greatly diminished by sanitary

measures independently of vaccination.” The Doctor still further

ruffled the prejudices of the Committee in asserting--

3783.--I do not believe that the general mortality of the country

is at all diminished by the absence of Smallpox. In Trinidad, for

instance, our mortality is none the less because we have neither

Smallpox, nor Whooping Cough, nor Scarlet Fever, nor Measles--the

four most prolific causes of death among young children.

Nevertheless infant mortality in Port of Spain is double that of

London. By merely cutting off one disease from the category of

diseases, you do not lessen the mortality of a country--

Precisely what Dr. Watt proved of Glasgow in 1813, and Dr. Farr at

a later date confirmed; and what the comparison of the statistics

of mortality in epidemic and non-epidemic years everywhere

illustrates.

With the examination of Mr. Danby Palmer Fry, head of the legal

department of the Poor Law Board, the Committee reverted to its

proper function. Questioned as to the state of the law and the

difficulties connected with its administration, Mr. Fry showed

that whilst vaccination was nominally compulsory, any resolute

parent might disregard it. To make vaccination really compulsory,

it would be necessary to legislate for its application by force,

which legislation public opinion would not tolerate. For himself,

he thought that parental conviction adverse to vaccination was

entitled to respect, and he therefore suggested--

3845.--That it might, perhaps, be worthy of consideration whether

a man might not be exempted from the penalty who takes an oath

or makes an affirmation that he has a conscientious objection

to the vaccination of his child. It seems to me that this would

be similar in principle to the statutes which prohibited the

Ecclesiastical Courts from issuing execution against the person

of a Quaker, though they might do so against his goods, on the

express ground that the people called Quakers were known to

entertain conscientious objections to the payment of tithes and

church rates.

Sir Dominic Corrigan, M.D., a member of the Committee, next gave

evidence, and the defence of vaccination was resumed. So little

did Sir Dominic apprehend the purpose of the Committee that he

observed--

3992.--I think the great question before us is whether vaccine

poison can contain within itself syphilitic poison or any other

poison.

As to the invaccination of syphilis, he was clear: it was

impossible. Vaccination induced no disease. Virus was nothing but

pure lymph, even when taken from an impure subject. Vaccination

was regarded with favour throughout Ireland. It was enforced, but

it required no enforcement: there was no disposition to resist the

law. He disliked penalties, and would rather operate by excluding

the unvaccinated from schools, factories, and public employments,

on the ground that “they might become a mine of disease and injure

others,” namely, to the vaccinated fortified against smallpox!

Smallpox had been gradually declining in Ireland under the

influence of vaccination, and the disease was then, 28th April,

1871, practically extinct. Foolhardy was the assertion. Even while

Sir Dominic was testifying, smallpox had reappeared: 665 died of it

in 1871 and 3,248 in 1872. From 1871 to 1875 there perished 5,521

of smallpox in a land from which it was claimed vaccination had

banished the disease!

Mr. James Furness Marson followed Sir Dominic--a fanatical

vaccinator and promoter of compulsion. For thirty-five years

surgeon of the Highgate Smallpox Hospital, he had there elaborated

the whimsical notion that the efficacy of vaccination was measured

by the number and character of the cicatrices; holding that--

4149.--A large number of the people in this country are very

badly vaccinated, having but one cicatrix hardly perceptible, and

have Smallpox as bad as if they had never been vaccinated at all.

Confronted by Mr. Jacob Bright with the fact that Dr. Gregory, of

wide experience and admitted authority, had expressed the contrary

opinion in his work on _Eruptive Fevers_, saying--

4670.--Hence we may learn how small importance is to be attached

to the cicatrix as an evidence of the perfection or imperfection

of the vaccine process. Perfect security is compatible with a

small and scarcely distinguishable cicatrix or without a large

wafery cicatrix at all; at least none perceptible five years

after the operation--

Marson made answer--

Dr. Gregory was an authority; but he was a very singular man

indeed, and had never investigated the subject in the extensive

way I have.

Marson was the victim of a notion, and that a poor one, to which

whatever stood in opposition was sacrificed. Among his assertions

and admissions, the following are characteristic and illustrative--

4151.--If all children were properly vaccinated, the mortality

from Smallpox would be less than 1 per cent. There are

difficulties: there is the opposition of mothers to having their

children well vaccinated.

4125.--Persons who catch Smallpox after being vaccinated do not

generally have it until 18 to 25 years afterwards.

4220.--Smallpox itself is a much greater protection from Smallpox

than Vaccination.

4136.--Certainly Smallpox has no tendency to die out: it is

precisely the same disease it was a thousand years ago, and will

be a thousand years hence.

4148.--We have no control over Smallpox: there is no specific.

We have no power whatever of controlling Smallpox, Scarlatina,

Measles, and other febrile eruptive affections.

4694.--I look upon hospitals as necessary evils. They are not

places I would recommend the sick to go to. Anybody who can

afford to keep in his house should not go to an hospital.

4327-28.--Dr. Jenner was wrong when he said Cowpox was derived

from Horsegrease: it was supposed so at one time, but that is set

aside now.

4325 and 4697.--I have two sources of vaccine lymph; one from the

inoculation of a cow with Smallpox, and the other from a cow in

the neighbourhood of Brussels which had Cowpox in the natural way.

4646.--There was no epidemic of Smallpox in London from 1796 to

1825; and as the absence of Smallpox was contemporaneous with the

introduction of Vaccination, it was imagined that Vaccination had

a great deal to do with it; and it was a fair conclusion.

4705.--Smallpox was raging to a great extent in the east of

London before the French war broke out--

Yet it is customary to ascribe the Smallpox epidemic of 1870-71 to

the Franco-German war.

The unscrupulous ferocity which animated Marson and his associates

toward those who impugned their practice is forcibly displayed in

the following questions and answers; premising that Simon attested

of Marson that “he was a singularly careful observer”--

4174.--I suppose you are aware there is a strong feeling and

a great objection on the part of a number of people against

Vaccination?

Yes, I know there is; but I nearly always find that it is the

father who objects and not the mother; and it makes it very

suspicious.

4175.--What do you mean?

The father would like the family as small as possible that he has

to work for. I am afraid that is at the bottom of it.

4176.--Do you not think that is giving credit to the father for

looking much further ahead than people in that class of life

generally do?

I do not think they have very far to look when they have their

daily bread to earn. When the wages come in on Saturday night, it

pretty often comes to their mind how the money is disposed of--

A libel as atrocious as absurd, and significant.

Dr. Alexander Wood was brought from Edinburgh to give evidence as

to Scotland of much the same tenor as that of Sir Dominic Corrigan

concerning Ireland. Dr. Wood’s note was clear--“I do not think,”

he said, “that a person has a right to keep an unvaccinated child

any more than to keep a mad dog.” Smallpox had been prevalent

in Scotland for some years, and had been made use of to pass a

Compulsory Vaccination Act in 1863; but it was neither shown that

prior to that Act the Scots were unvaccinated, nor that it was

the unvaccinated who suffered from smallpox--apart from those

conditions of life which make for smallpox. In the course of

nature, smallpox abated in Scotland, and the Act had the credit of

the abatement: the vaccination of the people being so complete that

Dr. Wood testified--

4399.--There would not be an unvaccinated child in Scotland if

we had some means of overtaking the migratory population--the

railway navvies and tramps, the children born by the roadside and

under hedges.

As in Ireland, there was little or no resistance to the law; and

as in Ireland, it was asserted that smallpox had been stamped out;

but as in Ireland, the assumption was nullified by experience. In

the epidemic of 1871-73, there died of smallpox no fewer than 5034

in Vaccinated Scotland--a contradiction unforeseen by Dr. Wood and

the Committee before whom he prophesied.

Sir William Jenner appeared as court physician. He had advised Her

Majesty the Queen to encourage vaccination in the case of all the

members of the Royal Family, and Her Majesty had complied with his

advice, and the Prince of Wales too. He had had great experience as

physician to the Children’s Hospital and elsewhere, and had never

seen any serious illness or death result from vaccination. His

testimony as to the harmlessness of the practice was unqualified,

and he was “unable to conceive of any medical practitioner of

standing disbelieving in it, or thinking it mischievous”; adding--

4521.--I should consider I was very much wanting in my duty, and,

in fact, deserving of punishment, if I neglected to have my six

children vaccinated.

He approved of the compulsory law, and wished that revaccination

was likewise compulsory. As to the statistics of smallpox and

vaccination, he disowned sufficient acquaintance; nevertheless he

did not hesitate to assert that smallpox, as a form of zymotic

disease displacing other forms, or replaced by others, was “a

theory utterly without foundation.” Of course testimony of this

order was produced for social rather than scientific ends.

The like was true of Dr. Gull, now Sir William. He also professed

to have never seen any serious illness caused by vaccination;

nor did he believe that vaccination from a diseased child would

communicate disease. As a defence against smallpox, he held that

vaccination was as protective as smallpox itself. It was the duty

of the Legislature to enforce vaccination; adding--

4830.--That with our present knowledge, I should think it the

most insane thing that any human creature could think of to give

up Vaccination.

He had advised the Government to accept no one for service in India

without revaccination. Asked by Mr. Candlish whether he would take

a child by force from its parents and vaccinate it, he replied--

4854.--I certainly would; just as I would take an ignorant child

and have it educated.

Less judicious than Sir William Jenner, Dr. Gull adventured on

statistics. It having been pointed out that though smallpox was

then epidemic in London, the death-rate was not raised thereby, he

attributed the result to vaccination. “In former times smallpox

produced an enormous increase in mortality”--

4780.--I think we read of 100,000 people dying of the disease in

epidemics, and I am not sure that it was not double the number.

I hardly like to trust myself as to numbers, but when I was a

professor of medicine at Guy’s Hospital, I brought those numbers

before my class, and I was astonished at the enormous number of

deaths in a Smallpox epidemic. I remember that taking all the

deaths which had occurred in the wars of Napoleon, they were not

so many by any means as the number of lives which had been saved

by Vaccination at that time. I do not remember, at the moment,

the authority for that statement, but I remember that that was

the kind of evidence that I had to bring before the class.

Verily the class at Guy’s had romance for science, and the

Committee had similar entertainment. They were told that except

for vaccination the epidemic then prevalent in London would result

“in a perfect pestilence”; for mortality among unvaccinated

populations “had been something terrific.” They had “the history

of smallpox in China and India, where its effects had been

perfectly depopulating.” “To neglect or discourage vaccination in

their crowded English towns would be much the same as thrusting

a fire-brand into a powder magazine.” Before the introduction of

vaccination, “France lost year after year a quarter of a million

of inhabitants (250,000) by smallpox”; and so forth and so forth;

assertions without warrant outside the intention to excite fear in

order to obtain confidence.

The next witness was Dr. Charles West, for twenty years physician

to the Hospital for Children, London, where children under two

years old were not received--at ages when the immediate effects

of vaccination are obliterated or forgotten. Vaccination, in his

opinion, prevented or mitigated smallpox. “It had, no doubt, the

effect in many cases of developing a disposition to some forms

of skin disease, especially eczema;” but on the whole it was not

injurious. In the course of his immense experience he had only

known of one child whose death was due to erysipelas caused by

vaccination. He had no proof of the invaccination of syphilis.

There was nothing peculiar about Dr. West’s evidence. It was

according to professional orthodoxy, from which it would have

required more than ordinary courage to depart. Medical men by the

gross could have been put up to deliver similar evidence; but what

was it worth? The medical mind is fixed in two directions; first,

that vaccination prevents smallpox, or mitigates it; and second,

that it induces a harmless disease; a couple of conclusions that it

seems possible to maintain in presence of a vast array of evidence

to the contrary.

If any one chooses to assert that vaccination prevents smallpox or

mitigates it, How can he be confuted? The prevented smallpox is

hid in the unknown, likewise the severity that has been mitigated.

Again, if vaccination be held harmless, any instance of its ill

effects can be resolved into coincidence with a sneer at the vulgar

fallacy of converting _post hoc_ into _propter hoc_. Possessed with

these notions, nothing is easier than to assert with Dr. Stevens,

for example, “No man has seen more of vaccination than I have, but

I have yet to see any bad effect from the practice.” None are so

blind as those whose business it is not to see; or as Mr. Aubrey

De Vere has it, “Prejudice, which sees what it pleases, cannot see

what is plain.” It is, I contend, plainly impossible to inflict a

disease like _Vaccinia_, in any of its varieties, without injury to

the extent of the disease; without intensifying active or exciting

latent disease; or without the risk of conveying other inoculable

disease from the vaccinifer.

“The great question before the Committee,” said Sir Dominic

Corrigan, “is whether vaccine poison can contain within itself

syphilitic or any other poison”--the great terror being syphilitic

poison. That question the next witness, Mr. Jonathan Hutchinson,

an expert in syphilis, determined. He had been called to examine

thirteen persons, mostly young adults, engaged in a London shop,

who had been revaccinated by order of their employer during the

prevalent smallpox panic. The vaccinifer was “a fine, full-grown,

healthy child,” yet it conveyed syphilis, beyond mistake, to 11 of

the 13 vaccinated. Mr. Hutchinson allowed that the vaccinator was

not to be blamed for the disaster, saying--

5032.--I very much doubt whether it could have been avoided by

inspection. The child looked healthy, and it had passed at the

Vaccine Station as healthy.

Having similar cases within his experience, and convinced “that

syphilis _can_ be communicated in the act of vaccination,” Mr.

Hutchinson was asked by Mr. Candlish whether he was aware that the

medical profession in general denied the possibility, he replied--

5060.--I am not aware that the authorities on the subject deny

it; I believe that several of them hold it very clearly; I am

aware that the general opinion of the profession is perhaps

opposed to it, but not the opinion of those who have carefully

investigated the question.

To reduce the effect of testimony so injurious to vaccination, it

was attempted to make out that the danger was limited to virus

tainted with blood; and although Mr. Hutchinson conceded that blood

_might_ be the medium of transmission, it was undecided.

5073.--It is not a subject on which I should like to infer

anything; I should like to have experiments and facts.

Subsequent experience has shown that with blood or without blood,

syphilis may be invaccinated. Still, Mr. Hutchinson, as an advocate

of vaccination, and of its compulsory infliction, “considering it

of the utmost necessity and importance,” conceded that the risk

was infinitesimal; but (as was remarked at the time) unless the

diffusion of syphilis were infinitesimal, there was no ground

for the assumption of an infinitesimal risk. As Mr. Hutchinson

admitted--

5089.--I believe there are cases of latent Syphilis which cannot

be detected by any medical man, unless he examines into the

history of the child as well as its appearance.

Mr. James Neighbour, vaccination officer of St. Luke’s, Middlesex,

a district of 60,000 inhabitants, chiefly poor, described the

operation of the Vaccination Acts. He met with little resistance

to the law; the births were vaccinated up to the registration

point, but he had no check on those who might neglect or evade

registration, or leave or settle in St. Luke’s.

Dr. E. C. Seaton, as select representative of the official vaccine

ring, was reserved for the consummation of the inquiry. To review

his evidence, delivered with much elaboration, would be to repeat

much of our story. Vaccination was afresh set forth as “a perfectly

safe and efficient prophylactic against smallpox, which might be as

reasonably disputed as the demonstrations of Euclid.” Nevertheless,

the perfectly safe and efficient variety of vaccination was neither

defined by the witness, nor demanded by the Committee--whether

with horsegrease cowpox, cowpox, horsepox, or smallpox cowpox;

an omission that illustrates the slovenly and credulous habit of

those concerned--a 19th century miracle and mystery, being under

discussion, and matter and mode being taken for granted under cover

of a word!

Throughout Seaton’s evidence, smallpox was treated as an isolated

disease, which might be dealt with specifically and exterminated

without reference to other fevers, the common mortality being

reduced to the extent of its reduction: no relation being

recognised between fever and fever, epidemic and epidemic--

5344.--Epidemics of Smallpox, like epidemics of other diseases,

come and go according to laws which we have not made out. They

vary in their intensity, and vary in their power of diffusion.

I have no explanation to offer why the present epidemic (1871)

should be so much more intense than the epidemic of 1863, any

more than I can tell why the epidemic of 1863 should have been

more severe than the subsequent epidemic of 1866-67; or why one

Cholera or Scarlet Fever epidemic should be so much more fatal

than another Cholera or Scarlet Fever epidemic--

Yet when explanation was offered, namely, that the febrile disease

of a community is a measure of its sanitary aberrations; that

whilst the forms of fevers may vary, the activity of one form is

balanced by the quiescence of others, the tale of death being

equal--the explanation was waved aside; and why? Because it did not

make for the glory of vaccination!

Curiously, and for a different reason, Malthus argued, as we now

argue, that if vaccination could exterminate smallpox, not a life

would be saved--supposing, let us add, no change effected in the

conditions out of which smallpox and cognate maladies arise. Thus

Malthus wrote--

I am far from doubting that millions of human beings have been

destroyed by Smallpox; but were its devastations, as Dr. Haygarth

supposes, many times greater than the Plague, I should still

doubt whether the average population of the earth had been

diminished by them by a single unit. Smallpox is certainly one

of the channels, and a very broad one, which Nature has opened

for the last thousand years to keep down population; but had this

been closed others would have become wider, or new ones would

have been formed. For my own part I feel not the slightest doubt,

that, if the introduction of Cowpox should extirpate Smallpox,

we shall find a very perceptible difference in the increased

mortality of some other diseases.[292]

Like Simon and Marson, Seaton had his insult for the opponents

of Smallpox. Simon charged them with ignorance and dishonesty;

and Marson, with the desire to have their families reduced by

smallpox. Seaton held that they enjoyed martyrdom and courted

imprisonment, in order to get silver watches from their admirers on

their release! Here imputation was self-revelation. Seaton had won

place and pay by his promotion of State vaccination; and absurdly

ascribed to his antagonists his own venality. Indeed, his evidence

throughout was pervaded by the temper and tactics of the quack,

with an end to promote _per fas et nefas_. Asked what would happen

if compulsion were withdrawn from vaccination, he answered--

5510.--Simply an awful increase in the mortality from Smallpox,

and a considerable increase therefore in the amount of mortality

in the kingdom.

The typical answer of the quack when his dupe hesitates over

his prescription is, “You’ll see then what will happen!” When

vaccination was not compulsory prior to 1853, nothing “awful”

happened; it had been compulsory for fourteen years in 1871, and

yet in 1871 the kingdom was under experience of the severest

smallpox epidemic of the century! Nevertheless, the anticipation

of Malthus was fulfilled: there was no proof that the average

mortality was increased by a single unit.

The evidence concluded, a draft report was drawn up by the medical

officials, submitted to the Committee, and, after some trivial

alterations, agreed to. The character of the report may be

estimated from this its second article--

That Cowpox affords, if not an absolute, yet a very great

protection against an attack of Smallpox; and _an almost absolute

protection against death from that disease_--

And this in face of the fact that deaths from smallpox among the

vaccinated and revaccinated were recorded by thousands!

Against the evidence in favour of vaccination, the prevalence of

the present (1871) smallpox epidemic, especially in London, was

alleged, and the awkward circumstance was thus tried to be evaded--

Your Committee, however, believe that, on the one hand, if

Vaccination had not been general, this epidemic might have become

a pestilence as destructive as Smallpox has often been where the

population has been unprotected; and that, on the other hand, if

this preventive had been universal, the epidemic could not have

approached its present extent.

There is no arguing against what might have been. When Sangrado’s

patients died, he averred that if only they had been bled more

and taken more water, they would indisputably have recovered; and

Sangrado had believers. So when vaccination does not save from

smallpox, we are assured, “Ah, but it would, if only there had

been more of it.” Descending from fancy to experience,--from what

_might have been_ to what _has been_, there is no record of a worse

epidemic in England than that of 1871-72. The only one to compare

with it was the epidemic of 1838-40, which occurred when not 50 per

cent. of the English were vaccinated; but they fared no worse than

in 1871-72, when the number of vaccinated was doubled.

The proper business of the Committee lay in legislation, and their

report thereon took this form--

There appear to have been several cases of infliction of more

than one fine or imprisonment in regard to the same child; and

your Committee, though by no means admitting the right of the

parent to expose his child or his neighbour’s to the risk of

Smallpox, must express great doubt whether the object of the law

is gained by thus continuing a long contest with the convictions

of the parent.

The public opinion of the neighbourhood may sympathise with a

parent thus prosecuted, and may in consequence be excited against

the law; and after all, though the parent be fined or imprisoned,

the child may remain unvaccinated. In such a case the law can

only triumph by the forcible Vaccination of the child.

In enactments of this nature, when the State, in attempting to

fulfil the duty, finds it necessary to disregard the wish of the

parent, it is most important to secure the support of public

opinion; and, as your Committee cannot recommend that a policeman

should be empowered to take a baby from its mother to the Vaccine

Station--a measure which could only be justified by an extreme

necessity, they would recommend that, whenever in any case two

penalties, or one full penalty (20s.), have been imposed upon a

parent, the magistrate should not impose any further penalty in

respect of the same child.

It has been suggested that the parent’s declaration of belief

that Vaccination is injurious might be pleaded against any

penalty, but your Committee believe that if the law were thus

changed it would become a dead letter, prosecutions would soon

cease, and the children of the many apathetic and neglectful

parents would be left unvaccinated, as well as the children of

the few opponents of Vaccination.

The recommendations of the Committee, chiefly administrative,

were embodied in a Bill, passed by the House of Commons on 15th

August. The tenth clause, limiting penalties, was the subject of a

short debate, and was carried on a division by 57 to 12. When the

Bill was brought before the House of Lords on 18th August, Lord

Redesdale moved to omit clause 10, saying--

The clause exempts persons who have been fined the full penalty,

or two penalties of any amount, from any further proceedings.

The clause has been hailed with triumph by the opponents of

Vaccination, who justly think it destroys the whole effect of the

compulsory law. The poor will naturally argue that, if the rich

are let off with a fine of 20s., the penalty ought in their case

to be reduced; and such a resistance to the measure will spring

up, that the whole purpose of the former Acts will be done away.

Viscount Halifax replied--

I hope the House will not strike out the clause, as it might

entail the loss of the Bill. I admit there are objections to its

principle; but it has been unanimously recommended by a Committee

of the House of Commons. Determined opposition has been offered

to Vaccination by a limited number of persons on grounds which I

deem unreasonable; but, nevertheless, whilst this feeling exists,

it is the opinion of Mr. Simon, the medical officer to the Privy

Council, that it is unwise to insist upon anything which is not

indispensable; and, further, that the penalty now proposed will

answer all the practical purposes of the Act. It is desirable

that public feeling should go with the Act, which will be the

case, since the exceptions will be very few; whereas an adverse

feeling may be excited to the prejudice of the Act, if even a

few prosecutions are persisted in. The strongest advocates of

Vaccination deprecate repeated fines and imprisonments, which

leave the defendants’ children unvaccinated.

Lord Redesdale rejoined--

I presume the noble Viscount thinks it useless to fine a man

more than once for drunkenness? The clause surrenders the whole

principle of Compulsory Vaccination.

On the question whether the clause should stand part of the Bill,

their Lordships divided:--Contents 7; Non-contents, 8; Majority, 1.

Resolved in the negative.

On the 19th August the House of Commons considered the Lords’

amendment, when Mr. W. E. Forster observed--

The House of Lords has struck out of the Bill the 10th Clause,

the important clause which mitigates penalties. That clause was

passed in this House by a majority of 57 to 12, and expunged in

the other House by a majority of 8 to 7, the total number of

peers voting being just equal to the number of members of the

Select Committee which, after long and careful consideration,

came to a unanimous conclusion in favour of the clause. I

should have no hesitation in asking the House to disagree to

the amendment, if the period of the session would allow of such

disagreement being made without loss of the Bill; but as that

is not the case, and as such a course may involve the loss of

the Bill, which effects several great improvements, I fear the

House has no choice, and must accept the amendment. Although the

clause is doubtless an important one, I may remark it is not

necessary to other parts of the Bill, and, with Smallpox raging

in the country as it is, I think it will not be safe to postpone

the measure. I regret the omission of the clause, because in my

opinion it strikes a heavy blow at the principle of Compulsory

Vaccination, which their Lordships, as well as I, think necessary

for the health of the country. I move that the House agree to the

Lords’ amendment.

Mr. M‘Laren said--

Whilst I concur in the course proposed, I hope the Government may

lose no time in bringing in a Bill to enact the clause that is

dropped.

The motion was agreed to, and repeated penalties continue to this

day.

FOOTNOTE:

[292] _Essay on the Principle of Population._ 2nd Ed. London, 1803.

CHAPTER XLIV.

THE STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM.

The temper and conduct of Parliament satisfied Mr. Gibbs and his

associates that they must turn again to the people and achieve

success through their instruction, enlightenment and fears. At this

juncture, however, the labours of Mr. Gibbs terminated. He had

married Miss Griffiths (for many years secretary of the Ladies’

Sanitary Association), and had gone with her on a tour through

the United Kingdom, holding meetings and discussing the evidence

and report of the House of Commons Committee. His last public

appearance was at Cork; proceeding thence to Dublin, he died there

after a short illness on 1st December, 1871.

The removal of Mr. Gibbs was a severe discouragement; but a good

cause may always be trusted to evolve its own prophets. Mrs. Gibbs,

as became a wise woman, felt that she could not better honour her

husband than by consecrating herself to his work. She formed the

Mother’s Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League; and until her own

death, 10th November, 1878, devoted her training, experience and

intelligence to awakening an interest in those divine laws of life

of which a practice like vaccination is a deliberate negation.

In 1872 Mr. John Pickering, of Leeds, in conjunction with Mr.

Henry Pitman, started the _The Anti-Vaccinator_ fortnightly, and

continued it for a year. To maintain such a journal is far from

easy. As Napoleon III. observed to Cobden, “There are a good many

free-traders in France, but you must remember that the people

are not organised, whilst the trades which prey upon the people

are organised and are always alert.” To overthrow the trade in

vaccination, established, endowed and enforced, is to encounter

the enmity and opposition of the organised profession at whose

instigation and for whose advantage vaccination was established,

endowed and enforced; and to effect the overthrow, it is necessary

to raise up a countervailing force among a public apathetic,

ignorant, and credulous as to medical mysteries. The overthrow

might be thought hopeless were it not for the leverage afforded by

the compulsory law. Every parent who has wisdom and love enough

to refuse to have his child vaccinated, is enabled to bear his

testimony in court, to have it certified by fine or imprisonment,

and to have his triumph published for encouragement and repetition.

There is no preaching like such practice, for which the evil law

itself provides opportunity.

Mr. Pickering was fined over and over again, and in his

_Anti-Vaccinator_ he proved abundantly that he had reason and

science without end for his steadfast resistance to the legalised

superstition. In 1876 he was enabled to strike a blow for the

truth not likely to be forgotten, especially in Yorkshire. The

statistics of the Leeds Smallpox Hospital had been published after

the fashion of similar concoctions--an insignificant mortality

among the vaccinated being set against a prodigious mortality among

the unvaccinated. The statistics were denounced as fictitious, and

proof of the accusation being demanded, Mr. Pickering produced the

proof.[293] The requisite inquiry was tedious and difficult; and

because tedious and difficult it was presumed it would never be

attempted, and that impunity was assured. The exposure demonstrated

afresh how little dependence is to be placed on the collocation

of figures by those whose pride and interest are committed to a

foregone conclusion.

The severity of the compulsory law is subject to frequent abatement

in its administration by poor law guardians. They appoint and

pay vaccination officers, and it is for them to consider and, to

sanction repeated prosecutions. Hence a majority, or an energetic

minority of guardians adverse to vaccination may do much to

frustrate its public administration. What is practicable in this

way was shown by the Keighley guardians in 1876. They declined to

prosecute; they disregarded the admonitions of the Local Government

Board; and they refused to obey a mandamus issued from the Queen’s

Bench. They were thereon arrested for contempt of court, and

committed to York Castle, from which they were released after

nominal submission. They were re-elected by the ratepayers, and did

as before, but more discreetly.

There is a proverb about taking a horse to the water and trying to

make him drink, which applies to legislation when equally disliked

by those expected to enforce it and by those on whom it is to be

enforced. Under such conditions the compulsory act is of no effect

in Keighley: those who like may be vaccinated, and those who do

not, need not. The majority are unvaccinated and nowhere is

smallpox less feared. In several towns where public sentiment is

similarly enlightened, something of the same freedom is enjoyed. In

many parishes it is the rule to disallow repeated prosecutions: the

vaccination officer fulfils his commission in prosecuting once, and

then his hand is stayed. In some parishes those who are known to be

opposed to vaccination are passed over on the tacit understanding

that they keep quiet as to their indulgence; a course of procedure

extremely injurious to the good cause, damping enthusiasm and

suppressing that conflict and agitation by which it prospers.

In other parishes no quarter is allowed: the law is worked with

rigour. Prosecution follows prosecution until either fury exhausts

itself, or the nonconformist is driven elsewhere.

Such persistent prosecution often becomes a public scandal. To a

parent with adequate means, the fines and costs are trivial, and

are amply repaid by the satisfaction of setting guardians and

justices at defiance, and publishing far and wide his contempt for

the vaccine superstition. On the other hand, a parent in humble

circumstances is often put to cruel straits between his love and

duty to his child and the comfort of conformity.

In the difficulty thus created by the law, the Local Government

Board is frequently appealed to for advice; and in 1876 the Board,

at that time under the presidency of Mr. Sclater-Booth, addressed

a letter of counsel to the Evesham guardians, which, translated

from official circumlocution, came to this--Prosecute until you

are satisfied your antagonist cannot be overcome: then consider

whether you had not better desist; for he may obtain sympathy, and

the law and the rite alike suffer discredit in public estimation.

In Cowper’s words, “Safe policy, but hateful.” This Evesham letter

has become a standard document, and is regularly posted by the

Board to guardians in perplexity as to the extent of vengeance

they should execute. Such is the variety of valour taught from

Whitehall--“Fight until you discover you are not likely to prevail;

and take care to leave off before you make yourselves hateful or

ridiculous.” Law was never, perhaps, reduced to baser terms.

Several attempts have been made to modify the law as recommended

by the Vaccination Committee of 1871 and approved by the House of

Commons. Mr. Pease (now Sir Joseph) introduced a bill with that

purpose in 1872 and 1878, limiting the penalty in any case to 20s.,

but without success. In 1880 the Gladstone administration, fresh

from the country, and flushed with good intentions, brought forward

a similar bill, but dropped it in abject fright in consequence of

the clamour of the medical trade unions, who fancied their vested

interest in vaccination endangered. Nevertheless, those responsible

for the law at the Local Government Board avow their disapprobation

of repeated prosecutions, and regret that Parliament does not

appear to be of a like mind, reckless of the fact that Parliament

is rarely unwilling to consent to an administrative change when

those in authority state the reasons for it, and insist on the

necessity of giving them effect.

Mr. Forster, when moving for the Committee of 1871 in the House of

Commons, spoke as if no member was prepared to dispute the efficacy

of vaccination against smallpox; and, though the assumption was

excessive, it was not far from correct. Even Mr. Candlish only

objected to the injustice of compulsion. Since then considerable

progress has been made. Mr. P. A. Taylor, who shared the position

of Mr. Candlish, subsequently examined the history and evidences of

vaccination for himself, with the inevitable result: he discovered

that he had been imposed upon, and having made sure, straightway

began to make known his discovery to others. Mr. C. H. Hopwood,

equally enlightened, moved Parliament for various statistical

returns which exhibited the influence of enforced vaccination, in

authentic form and on a national scale, as a factor of death and a

communicator and aggravator of other maladies. In conjunction, Mr.

Taylor and Mr. Hopwood have raised the standard of resistance to

vaccination in the House of Commons; and what Mr. Forster in 1871

set forth as indisputable, is now openly and unanswerably disputed;

for those who have come to the defence, like Sir Lyon Playfair

and Sir Charles Dilke, have been convicted of unquestionable

mis-statements which could only pass muster as addressed to

uncritical credulity.

Parliament is the creature of public opinion, and to arouse and

inform that opinion and to bring it to fruit in legislation, it

is necessary to agitate and to organise. Consequent on the death

of Mr. R. B. Gibbs in 1871, the League, of which he was leader,

underwent a course of vicissitude until, in 1876, it was revived

under the presidency of Mr. William Hume-Rothery, with the

_National Anti-Compulsory Vaccination Reporter_ for its organ,

edited by Mrs. Hume-Rothery. The energy and ability which Mr.

and Mrs. Hume-Rothery have brought to their arduous enterprise

have been unwearied and conspicuous--their self-consecration has

been unreserved. Sometimes they have been charged with vehemence

and intolerance, but when we consider the craft with which they

are confronted on one side, and the credulity on the other, the

misery and mortality resulting from the cruel practice, and the

monstrous oppression exercised on those who resist the despicable

superstition, it is not easy to be calm, or to adjust invective

to a scruple. “Thou shouldst not speak so strongly, John,” said a

Friend to her husband, when denouncing some iniquity. “Ah! Jane,”

he replied, “thou knowest not what I keep back.”

It is frequently said that anti-vaccinators are fanatical, which

may be more or less true; but if in quest of fanaticism, where

shall we find it so ruthless, so untruthful, or so mercenary as

among vaccinators? Take for example, Jenner, or Ring, or Seaton, or

Marson, or Simon. The fury of anti-vaccinators stands excused by

the strongest reason that can justify or ennoble fury. If a father

has a child injured or killed by vaccination, and is threatened (as

is often the case) with a second attack on his family life, with

what temper may he be expected to regard the law? When Macduff’s

children were slaughtered, it was only in Macbeth’s blood that he

could ease his soul, and with Macduff goes the sympathy of every

human heart. So it is with those bereaved by vaccination; only for

them there is no personal Macbeth to receive his deserts, but a

bodiless law.

It is not difficult to philosophise over other people’s wrongs,

or advise forbearance where there is no sense of hurt; but fury

and indignation constitute the natural reaction against outrage

and injustice, and where feeble or absent denote defective moral

sensibility. Nevertheless, fury and indignation are poorly spent

if allowed to exhaust themselves in vituperation. Their proper use

is to give vigour to action, and, invested in prudence, to achieve

swift and sure redemption. Wise is the advice--

“Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control

That o’er thee swell and throng:

They will condense within thy soul,

And change to purpose strong.”

The National League holds an annual conference in some convenient

centre, to which representatives from affiliated societies are

appointed. Many of these societies co-operate for the defence of

their members under prosecution; they organise public meetings and

discussions; provide lectures; distribute tracts; bring to light

vaccination disasters; frustrate the attempts of medical men to

get up smallpox panics; and, in short, to do all in their power to

turn confidence aside from a magical, misleading and mischievous

prescription to trust in the common conditions of health, as

verified by science and continual experience.

It is needless to say that these societies excite much annoyance

and evoke much bad language from the practitioners whose craft

they discredit and despoil. Thus, for example, the British Medical

Association, in a petition addressed to Government in 1879,

protesting against any relaxation of the compulsory law, and signed

by several thousand members of the profession, gave voice to the

trade grievance--

The outcry against Compulsory Vaccination is mainly due to

certain interested persons [_interested in what?_] who, by

the dissemination of inflammatory literature and distorted

statements, stir up opposition to Vaccination on the part of

ignorant and thoughtless people.

Here what is wished to be taken for true is set forth as fact.

Whatever the opponents of vaccination may be, they are neither

ignorant or thoughtless, nor do they influence the ignorant and

thoughtless. On the contrary, it is their exact acquaintance

with the history and theories, the inutility and dangers of the

multiform rite, designated vaccination, which renders them such

dangerous and disagreeable antagonists. Further be it said,

compulsory acquaintance with vaccination has been for thousands an

introduction to vigorous intellectual life. It has demonstrated

the fallibility of authority, and how it is possible for what is

accounted established beyond dispute to be false to the core.

Certain it is that ere long vaccination will be ranked among the

crassest of human follies, and what force that exposure will lend

to scepticism in conflict with other forms of conventional opinion,

may be left to the consideration of the judicious reader.

The London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination was

formed in 1880 with objects thus defined--

1.--The Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination.

2.--The Diffusion of Knowledge concerning Vaccination.

3.--The Maintenance of an Office in London for the Publication of

Literature relating to Vaccination, and as a Centre of Action and

Information.

An office was opened in Victoria Street, Westminster, with Mr.

William Young, as secretary, and _The Vaccination Inquirer_,

established by Mr. William Tebb in 1879, was adopted as the organ

of the Society. The executive committee, liberally assisted by the

Countess de Noailles, Mr. P. A. Taylor, Mr. Tebb, and others, have

been enabled to make many and visible marks on public opinion,

which by all means possible they are ever intent to repeat. Mr.

J. G. Talbot, M.P. for Oxford University, took early opportunity

to stigmatise the London Society as a Murder League, and Dr.

Barrow, president of the British Medical Association in 1881, as “a

Disgrace to Humanity”--these and similar amenities being taken as

badges of honour and tokens of success. The London Society has also

actively co-operated in successive International Anti-Vaccination

Congresses--at Paris in 1880, at Cologne in 1881, and at Berne in

1883.

Of late years the literature of anti-vaccination has been steadily

increasing in volume, variety and power. A notable effort to

bring the question within range of common apprehension was the

publication in 1876 of _Our Medicine Men_, by Mr. H. Strickland

Constable. Apart from vaccination, _Our Medicine Men_ is a pleasant

book, full of anecdote, good humour, shrewdness and excellent

philosophy, not likely to be forgotten by those who make its

acquaintance.[294]

A series of _Vaccination Tracts_,[295] fourteen in number, was

commenced by Mr. Wm. Young in 1877 and completed by Dr. Garth

Wilkinson in 1879. Fuseli, reproaching his contemporaries for

their indifference to Flaxman, said, “You English, you see

with your ears”; and Fuseli’s observation recurs as we think

of the limited repute of Dr. Wilkinson; not that any more than

Flaxman he is unknown, but because he is so _inadequately_

known, probably because he is so frequently at variance with

the fashionable science of the day, nor has paid court to its

fashionable professors. Nevertheless, those who have sense and

courage to recognise what is admirable without direction find in

these _Tracts_ not only vaccination made an end of, but thoughts

new and deep, with felicities of diction and cadence that every

connoisseur in words must appreciate and revert to with delight.

However wide our acquaintance with English literature, a variety

of singular affluence and originality remains until Dr. Garth

Wilkinson has been discovered.

It is a mistake to suppose that all medical men believe in

vaccination in one or any of its varieties. Those who use their

eyes and are not bewitched by prescription or self-interest,

recognise the failure and disasters of the practice, but may not

care to set themselves at open variance with their profession. Many

privately confess their vanishing or vanished faith in the rite,

adding, perhaps, that its dangers are exaggerated, and that it does

little harm with due precaution, whilst affording a comfortable

sense of security to its recipients. Others go further, and wish

the discredit of compulsion were removed from the practice, when

they would leave it to their patients to decide for themselves

to vaccinate or not to vaccinate, they disowning responsibility.

A nobler few decline to hold any terms of compromise with the

imposture, and among these Mr. Enoch Robinson is conspicuous. He

has lectured and debated against vaccination, and by his temperate

and competent advocacy has made converts of the most unwilling

and prejudiced. Moved by a popular compilation in defence of

vaccination, he published a reply to it in 1880, entitled, _Can

Disease protect Health?_[296]--a polemic cogent and perspicuous,

and ingenuous as its opposite was the reverse. As illustrative

of the character of the medical press, it may be mentioned that

advertisements of Mr. Robinson’s pamphlet were declined by _The

Lancet_ and _The British Medical Journal_, it being their rule

to exclude announcements injurious to the interests involved in

vaccination--surely in such quarters a superfluous precaution.

Some people appear to fancy that intolerance is a peculium of

theologians; but they would find abundant cause for a different

opinion if familiar with the medical world.

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”--

Mr. Gibbs inquired whether I had examined the question, and when

I confessed that I had not, he asked if I would read Baron’s

_Life of Dr. Jenner_. Nothing loath, I accepted the loan of the

volumes. Doubts began to trouble me with the first volume, and

the second quite upset my confidence in Vaccination as a positive

preventive of Smallpox. I then set to work to ascertain with

what care I could, whether there was any truth in the assertion

that Vaccination diminished Smallpox or modified its virulence.

The process of determination was not rapid, but long before I

had formed a definite opinion, I was satisfied that _Compulsory_

Vaccination was indefensible; and my first efforts were directed

to the protection of my own children from the infliction.

Unsatisfied as to what Vaccination was, or what the Vaccinator

effected, I clearly saw that the State had no right to enforce a

practice by no means harmless, nor preventive of Smallpox, nor

easy to explain the use of.

As lecturer, debater and newspaper controversialist, Mr. Wheeler

has acquired well-earned distinction. Knowing far more of

vaccination, its history, varieties, consequences, and statistics

than his adversaries, they are usually overthrown with a dexterity

realised as horrible and astonishing. Like savages with bows and

arrows, they come forth in the innocence of faith to encounter arms

of precision. In 1878 Mr. Wheeler held a debate with Dr. George

Wyld, an enthusiastic advocate of the cowpox discarded by Jenner

as impotent against smallpox. Sir Thomas Chambers presided, and

the question discussed being, “Is Vaccination worthy of National

Support?” How rash and how futile was Dr. Wyld’s championship is

recorded in the report of the debate.[300]

Mr. William Tebb is another well-known name in connection with the

movement against vaccination. For a time dubious, his attention was

quickened and his course decided by the summons of the St. Pancras

guardians to have his daughter, Beatrice, vaccinated. His refusal

was followed by prosecution after prosecution in the Marylebone

police-court, until at last the guardians gave up the contest as

hopeless.[301] It was a bad day for vaccination when the compulsory

law was applied to Mr. Tebb. As with many others, persecution

made of him an inflexible and active antagonist. His tongue, his

pen, and his purse, coupled with untiring industry and eminent

executive ability, have been devoted to the exposure and overthrow

of the conjoint superstition and tyranny. Mr. Tebb is a fine

exemplification of Sir T. Fowell Buxton’s opinion, “Vigour, energy,

resolution, firmness of purpose--these carry the day. Is there

one whom difficulties dishearten, who bends to the storm? He will

do little. Is there one who will conquer? That kind of man never

fails:” adding, “The longer I live, the more I am certain that the

great difference between men, between the feeble and the powerful,

is energy--invincible determination, a purpose once fixed, and then

death or victory. That quality will do anything that can he done

in this world.”[302]

Mr. P. A. Taylor’s speeches in the House of Commons have been

widely read, but his Letter to Dr. W. B. Carpenter has been,

perhaps, the most effective contribution to the good cause.[303]

Dr. Carpenter had volunteered for the defence of vaccination, and

had challenged Mr. Taylor; and being of a credulous and uncritical

habit of mind, he collected and recited the various legends and

factitious statistics that form the body of vaccination, with

additions from his private resources; thus constituting himself an

objective of attack, and providing Mr. Taylor with an excellent

opportunity. Mr. Taylor accepted the challenge: he captured and

destroyed Dr. Carpenter’s positions seriatim, leaving him routed

and helpless. The Letter has had an immense circulation, and its

influence on public opinion is manifesting itself in a thousand

ways. Neither Dr. Carpenter nor any vaccinator has ventured to

reply to Mr. Taylor; the fact being that no reply is possible.

Any one who attentively reads Mr. Taylor’s Letter cannot fail to

perceive that the practice represented by Dr. Carpenter is rooted

in illusion and imposture. Silence under the circumstances may

therefore pass for discretion: silence on Dr. Carpenter’s part

possesses a significance it would be difficult to misinterpret.

Indeed, none know better than those responsible for vaccination as

a medical interest, that the less it is brought under discussion

the more likely it is to endure. _Quieta non movere_ is their

motto; and officious champions like Dr. Carpenter have little

thanks for their restlessness.

Correspondence in newspapers is a well-recognised means for the

diffusion of new ideas, and in the use of this means the opponents

of vaccination have acquired no little distinction. There is an

increasing number throughout the country who not only know their

own case, but the case of their adversaries better than do their

adversaries themselves; and if an editor has grace enough to

maintain a fair field and show no favour, the issue is invariably

satisfactory. Two able correspondents, who have gone hence, are

especially worthy of mention--Andrew Leighton and William Gibson

Ward. Mr. Leighton was a Liverpool merchant, who, having become

interested in the vaccination question, made its discussion the

occupation of his leisure. With a clear and logical mind, patient,

sagacious, and tolerant, prejudice itself could scarcely withstand

his sweet reasonableness. Almost to the day of his death, 14th

January, 1877, he was engaged in newspaper controversy, each

letter bearing witness to his admirable temper and persuasive

power.[304] Mr. Ward of Perriston Towers was a man of wide reading

and perfervid character, who wrote and talked after the manner of

Cobbett, whom in many respects he resembled. Having discovered the

truth as concerned vaccination, he applied himself vigorously and

successfully to its diffusion. He sustained his prosecution as a

parent with the joy of one who delights in battle; and, indeed,

as it was said, a periodical prosecution would have suited him

exactly, providing him with occasion for a rousing speech in

court and a discussion with the bench, to be duly reported in

the Herefordshire newspapers. Mr. Ward died 18th October, 1882.

Latterly he had access to _The Times_, and followed up a series

of letters on subjects he had made his own with one on which he

argued, that smallpox was neither an unmixed evil, nor a cause of

extra mortality.[305]

To enter into a closer enumeration of those engaged in the movement

against vaccination would be invidious and bound to imperfection.

Still it would be grateful to refer to the various services of

veterans like Sir Jervoise Clarke Jervoise, Mr. Thomas Baker,

Dr. Edward Haughton, Mr. T. B. Brett of St. Leonards, Mr. Edmund

Proctor of Newcastle, Mr. John Lucas of Gateshead, Mr. R. A.

Milner of Keighley, Mr. W. F. Fox of Dewsbury, Dr. E. J. Crow of

Ripon, Mr. Francis Davis, jun., of Enniscorthy, Mr. Wm. Thurlow

of Sudbury, Mr. Wm. Adair of Maryport, Mr. Charles Gillett of

Banbury, Dr. T. L. Nichols, Mr. James Burns, and Mr. Amos Booth

of Leicester. These and others have borne the odium of despised

truth, and live to see it steadily acquiring favour and force,

whilst the delusion to which it is opposed is entering the region

of scepticism preparatory to dispersion and contempt.

All means are good against evil, but deeds are more than words; and

talk against vaccination counts far less than resistance to its

infliction. The more who are withheld from the rite, the more live

to prove its inutility; and the more the law designed to enforce

is set at defiance, the surer and sooner will be its overthrow.

Nevertheless, let us not forget what this warfare costs, nor how we

are indebted to the men and women, brave, tender, and true, by whom

it is endured. As a rule, the rich are exempt: the contest is with

the poor. As Mrs. Jacob Bright says--

I object to Compulsory Vaccination because it is an outrageous

piece of class legislation. No one in easy circumstances, no one

possessing the luxury of a family doctor, need have his child

vaccinated. He has only to tell his family doctor that he objects

to Vaccination, and the matter is at an end. Did ever any one

hear of a family doctor who threatened to prosecute the head of

a family for nonconformity in this respect? I think not. But

the family doctor of the poor is the parish doctor. He is quite

independent of his patient, and being paid by other people to

vaccinate them, he not only vaccinates them in many cases against

their will, but he does it _when_ he likes, and with _what_ virus

he likes, irrespective of the feelings or opinions they may

entertain.

I was riding some time ago in Sherwood Forest, and stopped to

ask for a glass of water at a cottage, where a poor woman was

standing with her fat little baby in her arms. I said, “You’ve

got a pretty boy there. Has he been vaccinated?” The mother’s

face, which was glowing with pride at praise of her boy, suddenly

fell, and she said, “No, madam, he hasn’t, but he’ll have to be.

We’ve lost one through it,” she added, with tears in her eyes.

She is one of a great number of poor people who, rightly or

wrongly, believe that Vaccination is dangerous, and yet are not

able to resist the pressure put upon them to vaccinate; they are

too poor, and in most cases have not the spirit to resist.

I say that it is disgraceful to fine and imprison people for

forming an independent opinion on a medical question; and it is

particularly disgraceful that my poor neighbour should be thus

persecuted when I am free, absolutely free, to please myself

whether my children shall be vaccinated. It is not possible that

this thing can continue.[306]

The contest, be it repeated, is with the poor. “There is no

getting over the fact,” says Dr. John Scott of Manchester, “that

vaccination is hated among the working class, in Lancashire, at

least.” Vaccination is hated, and rightly hated, and the law is set

to overcome that hatred. Multitudes submit because they either know

not how, or dread to do otherwise; but an honourable and increasing

number prefer the better part--holding by what they recognise for

right, resolved to obey God rather than man. It has been said,

“The days of martyrdom, like those of miracles, have ceased”; but

have they? The record of humble English folk, who, during the

past thirty years, have withstood the infamous Vaccination Acts,

bears witness to the contrary. Martyrdom and heroism are rarely

recognised by those who occasion or dislike their manifestation:

it is sympathy that opens the eyes to their appearance. Unknown

or despised, these medical nonconformists have stood true to

their faith in the order of nature against doctor-craft, and have

counted nothing dear to them if so be they could preserve their

children and conscience from outrage. They have been prosecuted

with all the malice and pertinacity of petty authority--of Justice

Shallow and Bumble; have been insulted from the judgment seat; have

been fined to the uttermost farthing and loaded with uttermost

costs, and this repeatedly; have had their goods and furniture

distrained, and their homes broken up; have been sent to jail

with hard labour, and subjected to every indignity and cruelty of

the prison-house; have been hunted from parish to parish, and in

despair driven to exile. And these have been Englishmen, the law

English, and the time our own! The Master of the Rolls recently

observed, “What is contrary to the feelings of every honest man

cannot be the law of England--or, if it be, the sooner it ceases

to be law the better.” It would be unfair to charge the injustice

of the Vaccination Acts to the English people. To most of them

their character and operation are unknown. The chief sufferers are

hidden under the hatches of poverty, and are unable to make the

land resound with their wrongs. Those, too, who essay to speak

for them are confronted with that obdurate dulness with which the

early Free-Traders had to contend when restriction was thought to

be as good for commerce as cowpox is thought to be good for health

in stopping smallpox. Mr. Bright, in praising the speeches of Mr.

Villiers at Birmingham, 29th January, 1884, remarked--

I mention their publication to revive the strange and painful

fact that during the years when those speeches--so convincing,

so absolutely unanswerable, were spoken in the House of Commons,

they were addressed, as it were, to men morally stone deaf.

The arguments were not answered, the facts adduced were not

disproved, the appalling suffering of the people was not denied.

A similar deafness to the oppression of compulsory vaccination

prevails, though there are signs of awakening. Still it is not for

those who suffer to wait on politicians. The words are trite, but

true as trite--

“Know ye not,

Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?”

Many are discovering that in union is strength. Combinations for

mutual protection and insurance against penalties are multiplying.

Resist and Organise is their watchword: organise, study the

law, find out its weak places, make the most of them, harass

its administrators, vote only for guardians who are opposed to

compulsion; and, in short, do whatever is possible to frustrate

the pernicious legislation.

Sometimes it is asked, “Why not obey the law and agitate for

its repeal?” but the suggestion is designed for stultification.

Suppose the Society of Friends had consented to take oaths until

the law was adjusted to their consciences, would they not have

been swearing to this day? Suppose some dissenters had not refused

to pay church rates, when would church rates have been abolished?

Suppose the Irish had submitted to English rule until convinced by

reason of the wickedness and folly of their domination, how long

would they have had to wait for the redress of their wrongs? Such

questions might be run over pages, but to what purpose? All know

(unless submerged in cant) that those who would have must take;

and that no man’s rights can be entrusted to another’s good-will,

be the trustee ever so just. Vaccination is a medical monopoly

established, endowed, and enforced--a tyranny to be overthrown.

Those who profit by it will never consent to its surrender,

whatever the evidence of its inutility and mischief: it would be

against experience to expect otherwise: and they will never be

so valiant in defence of their monopoly, and so profuse in the

assertion of its overwhelming advantages, as when its dissolution

is imminent. The wise understand these things. There is, therefore,

but one way in which to get rid of the incubus, and that way is

outright resistance. Already such resistance has proved successful

in several parts of the country. The law has been reduced to

abeyance, and similar resistance will be rewarded with similar

results. Moreover, further legislation in favour of vaccination has

been checked. Parliament will pass no more Vaccination Acts. The

plague thus far is stayed: the worst possible has been seen: the

business is to clear away what remains.

* * * * *

It is sometimes said that vaccination is unnatural, and the saying

is disregarded as unscientific or absurd. But is it unscientific?

and is it absurd? Men deserve an order in Nature, and when they

perceive that any procedure is at variance with that order, they

instinctively condemn it as unnatural, though possibly they may be

unable to give a philosophic account of their aversion.

We unite in the assertion that vaccination is unnatural, and when

we are asked, Why? we answer, Because it is an operation which

violates the order maintained in the formation of the blood. If

we follow food into the stomach and attend to the processes of

digestion, rejection, and assimilation--the infinite care, in

short, with which blood is made, we shall start back with dislike,

and even horror, from a practice which sets at naught all this

care; which attacks the blood directly, and attacks it to poison

it. Hence it is that vaccination is stigmatised as unnatural,

being a process which not only reverses the course of Nature in

blood-making, but doubly unnatural, as violating that course and

poisoning its product.

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._

From childhood I had been trained to look upon Cowpox as an

absolute protective from Smallpox. I believed in Vaccination

more strongly than in any ecclesiastical dogma. Numerous and

acknowledged failures did not shake my faith. I attributed them

either to the carelessness of the operator or the badness of the

lymph.

In course of time the question of Compulsory Vaccination came

before the Reichstag, when a medical friend supplied me with a

mass of statistics in favour of Vaccination, in his opinion,

conclusive and unanswerable. This awoke the statistician

within me. On inspection, I found the figures delusive; and

closer examination left no shadow of doubt in my mind that the

statistical array of proof represented a complete failure.

My investigations were continued, and my judgment was confirmed.

For instance, Cowpox was introduced to Bavaria in 1807, and for

a long time none, except the newly-born, escaped Vaccination;

nevertheless in the epidemic of 1871, of 30,472 cases of

Smallpox, no less than 29,429 were vaccinated, as is shown in the

documents of the State.--_From Letter to_ MR. WILLIAM TEBB, _22nd

January, 1882_.

FOOTNOTES:

[293] _The Statistics of the Medical Officers to the Leeds Smallpox

Hospital Exposed and Refuted in a Letter to the Leeds Board of

Guardians._ By John Pickering. Leeds, 1876.

[294] Mr. Constable’s publications have been as follows--

_Medical Evidence in the Case of Dale_ v. _Constable_. York, 1872.

Pp. 30.

_Doctors, Vaccination, and Utilitarianism._ York, 1873. Pp. 239.

_Our Medicine Men: a Few Hints._ Hull, 1876. Pp. 689.

_Fashions of the Day in Medicine and Science._ Hull, 1879. Pp. 300.

[295] _Vaccination Tracts with Preface and Supplement._ London,

1879. Pp. 348.

[296] _Can Disease protect Health? being a Reply to Mr. Ernest

Hart’s pamphlet, entitled The Truth about Vaccination._ By Enoch

Robinson, M.R.C.S. London, 1880. Pp. 38.

[297] _A Review of the Norwich Vaccination Inquiry._ London,

1883. _Sir Lyon Playfair’s Logic._ London, 1883. _Specificity and

Evolution in Disease._ By W. J. Collins, M.D., B.S., B.Sc. (Lond.)

London, 1884.

[298] The first publication of Mr. Gibbs, _The Evils of

Vaccination_, is dated 1856: the latest is a reply to the question,

“Is Vaccination Scientific?” in _The Journal of Science_, March,

1884.

[299] An article, “Compulsory Vaccination,” in evidence of Mr.

Dudgeon’s quality, will be found in _The Westminster Review_, No.

CXXX., April, 1884.

[300] _Vaccination: Is it Worthy of National Support? A Public

Discussion in South Place Chapel, Finsbury, on 28th May, 1878_,

under the Presidency of Sir Thomas Chambers, M.P., Recorder of the

City of London. London, 1878.

Mr. Wheeler has published the following pamphlets--

_Vaccination in the Light of History._ London, 1878.

_Vaccination--Opposed to Science and a Disgrace to English Law._

London, 1879.

_Vaccination--1883._ London, 1884.

[301] _Government Prosecutions for Medical Heresy; a Verbatim

Report of the case Regina_ v. _Tebb_. _Dedicated to the Board

of St. Pancras Guardians. With an Introduction and Appendix of

Illustrative Matter._ London, 1879.

[302] Mr. Tebb’s publications have been many, and his last is

especially noteworthy--_Compulsory Vaccination in England: with

Incidental References to Foreign States_. London, 1884. Pp. 64.

[303] _Vaccination. A Letter to Dr. W. B. Carpenter, C.B._ By P. A.

Taylor, M.P. London, 1881.

[304] Mr. Leighton published nothing outside the newspapers except

a letter addressed to William Chambers of Edinburgh, entitled, _The

People of Dewsbury and Vaccination_. London, 1876.

[305] “A New View of Smallpox.”--_The Times_, 25th December, 1879.

[306] Letter from Ursula M. Bright to Annual Meeting of the London

Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination, held in

Shoreditch Town Hall, 13th May, 1884.

[307] _On Human Science, Good and Evil, and its Works; and on

Divine Revelation and its Works and Sciences._ London, 1876.

INDEX.

Abbott, Mr., speaker, House of Commons, 219.

Abercrombie, Sir Ralph, 396.

Aberdeen degrees, 330.

Aberdeenshire, Maitland at home, 34.

Acksell, Dr., 408.

Adair, William, 590.

Adams, Dr., Waltham, uses smallpox cowpox, 76.

Adams, Dr., pearly pox for variolation, 120;

on cowpox before Jenner, 138.

Adams, American president, 379.

Adderley, Sir Charles, 553.

Addington, Mr., 186, 195.

Addington, John, surgeon, 189, 218.

Addison, W. J., evidence House of Commons’ committee, 1871, 556.

Alexander, Emperor of Russia, cautioned by Jenner against Walker, 329;

disappoints Jenner, 362;

enforces vaccination, 406.

Allen _v._ Worthy, 551.

Alsop, Mr., surgeon, Calne, 130.

Amelia, Princess, variolated, 18, 22.

Anderson, Mr., Madras, fraud, 387.

Anderson, Dr., Leith, 151.

Angerstein, Mr., 230.

Antimony, tartarated, substitute for cowpox, 121, 348.

Anti-Vaccination Congresses--Paris 1880, Cologne 1881, Berne 1883, 581.

_Anti-Vaccinator_, Henry Pitman’s, 544;

John Pickering’s, 574.

Anti-Vaccinators, characterised by Robert Lowe, 528;

by Simon, 558-59;

by Marson, 563;

by Seaton, 569;

by British Medical Association, 580;

by J. G. Talbot, M. P., and by Dr. Barrow, 581.

Aspinwall, Dr., variolator, Boston, 376, 377.

Atheism imputed to variolators, 42.

Austria, death-rates compared with those of England, 506.

Avelin, Professor, vaccination in Prussia, 405.

Ayrton, A. S., vaccinators should be subject to penalties, 532.

Badcock, Mr., Brighton, produces and uses smallpox cowpox, 75, 272,

472, 512, 514.

Bagehot, Walter, 8.

Baillie, Dr., witness for Jenner, 190.

Baker, Sir George, practice of the Suttons, 47.

Baker, John, one of Jenner’s victims, 117, 154.

Baker, Thomas, 509, 590;

evidence House of Commons’ committee 1871, 555.

Bakewell, Dr. R. H., evidence House of Commons’ committee 1871,

559-560.

Ballard, Dr., prize Essay on Vaccination, 547, 548.

Balmis, Dr. F. X., expedition as trader and vaccinator, 401.

Banks, Mr., Jenner’s claims, 195, 233.

Banks, Sir Joseph, 146, 147, 226.

Baptism conjoined with vaccination, 276.

Barbados, variolation, 38.

Barge, Mary and John, 104, 119.

Baron’s _Life of Jenner_, 349-363, 586.

Baron, Dr. John, romance as to Jenner’s early years, 94;

extra-ordinary narrative, 95;

gush over George IV., 220;

Jenner _v._ Walker, 226;

Jenner’s shyness, 230;

letter from Jenner on Grosvenor case, 319;

first meeting with Jenner and attitude toward him, 349, 352;

appalled by no inconsistency, 354;

nor admitted change of mind in Jenner, 355-356;

rant over Balmis expedition, 402;

Jenner’s inability to count, 416;

Dr. Watt’s mischievousness, 452.

Uses and sends Jenner equine virus, 269;

apology for confounding horsegrease with horsepox, 270.

Barrow, Dr., “a disgrace to humanity,” 581.

Barrow, Mr., 538.

Barttelot, Colonel, 537.

Bath Vaccine Pock Institution, 163.

Bathurst, Lord, servant variolated and died, 34.

Batts of Temple variolated, 19.

Bavaria, results of vaccination, 596.

Beale, Dr. Lionel, much vaccinated, 302.

Beaufort, Duke of, 176.

Beddoes, Dr., cowpox, 138;

smallpox after cowpox, 165.

Bedford, Duke of, 219, 220.

Bengal subscription to Jenner, 390.

Berkeley, Jenner’s birthplace and home, 92;

inhabitants variolated, 99.

Berkeley, Admiral, 186, 194.

Berkeley, Earl of, 176, 191.

Berlin Royal Vaccine Institution, and Jennerian feast, 405.

Berne Anti-Vaccination Congress, 1883, 581.

Birch, John, variolation harmless, 66;

treatment of smallpox a chief cause of fatalities, 85;

summoned on Jenner’s case, 187;

character of his opposition to vaccination, 274;

scorn for means used to extend craze, 276;

nature of evidence submitted to House of Commons, 276;

desire to know what cowpox was, 277;

absurdity of spurious cowpox, 277;

what had Jenner discovered? 278;

assertion that cowpox was harmless and would never prove fatal, 279;

futility of variolous test, 279;

smallpox following vaccination, 280;

Jenner pestered with failures, 280;

fine promises belied, 281;

death and epitaph, 281, 282;

Jenner’s treatment of Birch, 283;

mention in _Edinburgh Review_, 290.

Birch, Penelope, reprints brother’s papers, 281,

and erects his monument, 282.

Blandford fire and smallpox, 85.

Blane, Sir Gilbert, 83, 397;

witness for Jenner, 187;

estimate of smallpox for United Kingdom, 208, 209.

Bleeding, 519, 584.

Blistering, 519.

Blood-making, process described, 594-595.

Bombay, vaccination introduced, 385, 388;

subscription to Jenner, 390.

Bompas, flaming fire-brand, 77.

Booth, Amos, 590.

Boringdon, Lord, bill to suppress variolation, 73, 353.

Boston, variolation first practised, 2-4, 7, 377;

completely variolated, 57;

method of practice, 58, 373;

smallpox in 18th century, 371-373.

Bouley, Prof., experiments with horsepox, 273.

Bourne, Sturges, denounces variolation, 72, 246.

Boy, cowpox ox-faced, 297.

Boylston, Dr. Zabdiel, variolation in New England, 2, 5-7, 56, 371.

Bowman, Mr., Newcastle, 550.

Bradley, Dr., Jenner’s conjectural income, 188.

Brady, Mr., liberal pay for vaccination, 536.

Bragge, Mr., surgeon, attempts use of cowpox, 138.

Brahmins hold cowpox impure, 387.

Bread, Beef and Beer, 88, 316.

Bremer, Dr., vaccinations in Berlin, 406.

Brett, T. B., St. Leonards, 590.

Bridgewater, Duke of, son variolated and killed, 34.

Bright, Jacob, 553;

cites Gregory against Marson on marks, 561.

Bright, John, deafness of House of Commons, 592.

Bright, Ursula M., forcible vaccination of poor, 590.

_British Medical Journal_, refusal of advertisements, 582.

British Medical Association on anti-vaccinators, 579-580.

Brodie, Sir Benjamin, medical practice, 92.

Brotherton, Joseph, 501.

Brown, Thomas, Musselburgh, criticism of vaccination, 285;

sees vaccinated with smallpox, 286;

fallacy of variolous test, 287;

attempted refutation by Edinburgh vaccinators, 287;

re-affirmed position in 1842, 288;

Jenner’s malice toward, 351;

Moore’s insolence, 457;

confession that Brown was in the right, 458;

cited by Hamernik against re-vaccination, 520.

Browne, Hawkins, 246.

Bruce, H. A., spokesman for vaccination ring, 530-531;

untruthful statement, 537-538.

Bryce’s Test, 353.

Buchan, Dr. William, _Domestic Medicine_, 53;

recommends variolation, 54;

appeal to clergy, 54;

mortality from smallpox and variolation, 66;

maltreatment of smallpox, 85;

prevalence and cause of scurvy, 87-88;

denounces tea, 90.

Bullpox, 144, 272, 374.

Burdett, Sir Francis, scepticism as to vaccination, 253.

Burnet, Mr., prosecuted for variolation, 463.

Burns, James, 590.

Burrows, Dr., London bills of mortality, 1818, 77.

Burrows, Sir J. Cordy, production of smallpox cowpox, 76.

Butler, Bishop, national insanities, 91.

Buxton, Sir T. Fowell, 587.

“Buying the smallpox,” 29.

Byng, Lady, two children variolated, 21.

Calcraft, Miss, Jenner on Grosvenor case, 320.

_Calcutta Gazette_, 1804, 383.

Cameron, Dr., smallpox cowpox, 273.

Candlish, John, 565, 567, 577;

repeated prosecutions, 550-552;

witness before House of Commons’ committee 1871, 553.

Canning, George, declaration as to compulsory vaccination, 254, 310,

476, 480, 485.

Canterbury, Archbishop of, would not commit Church, 275.

Carioli, syphilis invaccinated, 523.

Carlyle, stupidity, 19;

teeth outwards, 215;

swarmery, 291, 292;

injustice by law, 548.

Caroline, Princess of Wales, has six felons variolated, 14;

six charity children, 17;

her own children, 18, 22;

promoter of Maitland’s experiments, 171.

Carpenter, Dr. W. B., answered by Dr. Collins, 583,

and by P. A. Taylor, 588.

Carter, R. Brudenell, invaccination of syphilis, 310.

Catharine, Empress of Russia, variolated, 62, 362, 514;

payment to Dimsdale, 64.

Catpox, 170.

_Caution against Vaccine Swindlers_, 326.

Ceely of Aylesbury generates smallpox cowpox, 75, 272, 472, 514, 528.

Cervantes, 595.

Ceylon, variolation and vaccination, 345;

smallpox, 392-393; 408.

Chadwick, Edwin, “Keep your eye on the death-rate,” 450.

Chambers, Sir Thomas, denies that smallpox increases mortality, 439;

his prophecy, 538;

Wheeler and Wyld debate, 586.

Chambers, Wm., Andrew Leighton’s letter to, 589.

Chapman, Mrs., variolator, 44.

Charlotte, Queen, 171, 219, 221, 370, 380.

Chastellux, 59.

Chavasse, Dr., ravages of smallpox, 77.

Chemists and apothecaries friends of smallpox, 325.

Chester smallpox in 18th century, 69.

Cheyne, Dr. George, prevalence of scurvy, 87-88.

Chickenpox, _alias_ smallpox, 366-367.

China, vaccination introduced, 386, 393.

Chinese method of variolation, 16, 394.

Chincough, Watt’s treatise, 439.

Christ’s Hospital, smallpox from, 15;

mortality of smallpox among inmates, 23, 32, 524.

Christie, Dr. Thomas, Ceylon, 392.

Chiswell, Sarah, 8, 10.

Cholera, 1831-32, 448.

Church-rates, compulsory, 542, 560, 593.

Clarence, Duke of, (William IV.) 171, 191, 219.

Clarke, Dr., advocates compulsory vaccination, 305.

Cline, Henry, letter describing first vaccination, 128;

advises Jenner to come to London, 129;

witness for Jenner, 189;

apology for Walker, 227;

National Vaccine Establishment, 459.

Cobbett, William, shuffles of quackery, 20;

in Gray’s Inn, 81;

denounces potatoes and tea, 89-90, 316;

power in common sense, 304;

vaccination fury, 305;

addresses Wilberforce on compulsion, 305;

endowment of vaccination, 307, 311;

its proved failure, 308;

spurious cowpox dodge, 309;

foresees invaccination of syphilis, 309, 531;

_Advice to Young Men_, 312;

smallpox-made-milder dodge, 313;

had Cobbett followed Jenner, 314;

children variolated, 315;

sanitary science undiscovered, 316;

honourable prejudices, 317.

Cockburn, Lord Chief Justice, unvaccinated infants, 77;

repeated prosecutions, 551.

Cockermouth and Dr. Walker, 220, 325.

Codd, Philip, son vaccinated by Jenner takes smallpox, 312.

Cole, James, infected with horsegrease, 115.

Collins, William, painter, 448.

Collins, Dr. W. J., opponent of vaccination, 543, 547;

evidence House of Commons’ committee, 1871, 554.

Collins, Dr. W. J., 583.

Colchester, itch and vaccination in 85th Regiment, 126, 277.

Coldbath Fields Smallpox Hospital, 40.

Colliander, Dr., Swedes decline variolation, 408.

Cologne Anti-Vaccination Congress, 1881, 581.

Combe, Andrew, 427.

Combes, The, 449.

Common-sense defined, 303.

Condamine, La, 59.

Coningham, William, 529.

Connah, Mr., Seaford, rarity of smallpox, 83.

Connell, Ira, 545.

Constable, H. Strickland, writings, 581.

Constantinople, practice of variolation, 1, 8, 11, 12, 18.

Convulsions, enormous death-rate in London, 80.

Cook, Turkey merchant, 15.

Cook, Captain, and Jenner, 92.

Cooke, C., cowpox did not prevent smallpox, 165.

Copenhagen, smallpox and vaccination, 420.

Copland, Dr., scepticism as to vaccination, 478.

Corfield, Dr., “the falsest of falsehoods,” 86.

Cornwallis, Marquis, 398.

Corrigan, Sir Dominic, evidence House of Commons’ committee, 1871,

560-561, 567.

Corry, Mr., withdraws 1866 vaccination bill, 532.

Cortez, Mexican smallpox, 511.

Corvisart and Jenner, 400.

Cother, Mr., variolates Jenner’s child, 357;

resulting scandal, 358.

Cough, Whooping, Newcastle, 429, 430;

Glasgow, 439-443;

England and Wales 1838-40, 505.

Courtney, Mr., amazing estimate, 194.

Covent Garden grave-yard, 82.

Covington, F., evidence House of Commons’ committee, 1871, 555.

Cowper, William, 80, 576.

Cowper, W. F., 496;

operates in House of Commons for Epidemiological Society, 497;

extreme docility, 498;

answer to Mr. Duncombe, 499;

simple-minded defence of compulsion, 500.

Cowpox, Jenner’s cases in _Inquiry_, 104-108;

assures absolute security from smallpox unaffected by time, 105,

121, 141;

incommunicable to those who have had smallpox, 106;

taken repeatedly, 107, 108, 141;

action in conjunction with smallpox, 150;

cowpox and smallpox modifications of same disease, 166;

description of in cow and man, 109;

generation in horsegrease beyond possibility of denial, 100, 110,

112;

reasons for this belief, 154;

difficulty of proof, 100;

indistinguishable in effects from horsegrease, 156, 157;

an uncommon and erratic disease, 75;

probable extinction, 111;

when it ought to be taken, 111;

its inflammation always erysipelatous, 143;

sores eat into flesh, and action checked with escharotics, 157;

recommended as an expulsive irritant, 123.

Mr. Knight attests common faith, 132;

notorious belief in its prophylaxy, 94, 136-139, 179;

Jesty and Nash’s claims, 94-95, 204-206;

unnoticed in Cheshire, 133;

well known in south and unknown in north of England, 137;

known in Gloucestershire _not_ to prevent smallpox, 95, 165;

inquiry of Ingenhousz in Wilts, 130;

unknown in New England, 375;

unknown in bulls, 144, 272.

Discovered, 1799, in London, 145;

distributed by Pearson, 146;

its diverse action, 149;

Jenner’s views discriminated from Pearson’s, 153, 178, 198, 203,

347.

Spurious Cowpox, 99, 113;

various definitions by Jenner, 240;

in Spain, 401;

disowned by Jenner, 239, 336, 454;

a dodge, 278, 356;

Birch’s inquiry, 277-278;

Cobbett, 309;

Hamernik’s opinion, 519-522.

Crewe, Lady, and Jenner, 231.

Crichton, Dr., vaccination and enforcement in Russia, 406-407.

Croft, Dr., faith in cowpox in Staffordshire, 137.

Cross, John, the Norwich epidemic, 1819, 432-439.

Crow, Dr. E. J., 590.

Cumberland, Duke of, 219.

Dairymaids’ faith in cowpox, 95, 114, 334.

Dalkeith, vaccination introduced, 151.

Darwin, Erasmus, letter to Jenner, 275, 371.

Davis, Francis, Enniscorthy, 590.

Davy, Sir Humphry, hydrophobia, 359, 371.

De Carro, Vienna, writes to Jenner, 264, 266-267, 405;

uses horsegrease, 265, 404-405, 512;

conveys virus to India, 384;

Jenner’s congratulation, 385.

Decimation by smallpox, 76.

Delafaye, Dr., preaches and writes against variolation, 42.

Denmark, variolation, 62;

vaccination, 419-420.

Des Gouttes, smallpox and variolation in Geneva, 61.

Devonshire, Duchess of, works for Jenner, 230.

Diarrhœa and vaccination, Newcastle, 429-430.

Diderot, promotes variolation, 59.

Diet, influence on smallpox, 87.

Dilke, Sir Charles, 578.

Dillwyn, William, letter from Jenner, 341-344.

Dimsdale, Dr. Thomas, variolator, 47-48;

controversy with Lettsom, 49;

summoned to Russia to variolate Catharine, 63;

price paid for job, 64, 362;

variolation from arm-to-arm, 76;

parish variolations, 379;

might have anticipated Jenner, 514.

Doddridge, Dr., favours variolation, 41.

Dog distemper, 360;

Jenner vaccinates King’s staghounds, 360.

Dolling, Mr., Blandford, vaccination before Jenner, 138.

Domeier, Dr., 221.

_Don Quixote_, 595.

Downe, Mr., Bridport, vaccination before Jenner, 139, 204.

Drew, Rev. Herman, anticipates vaccination, 138.

Drysdale, Dr., 84.

Druitt, Dr., 547.

Dublin, variolation, 34.

Dublin Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons report on vaccination,

242-243.