yet in spite of some very serious lessons which have been
taught them. We may pass by the objectors of the class who
believe that vaccinated persons cough like cows and bellow like
bulls; these objections go into the limbo of old wives' fables
or into the category of wilful misrepresentation. Unfortunately
there is a large class of persons who can believe the absurdest
nonsense about any subject which is particularly distasteful to
them.[6] Another class of objection is the sentimental
repugnance to the idea of being given one of the diseases of
"the lower animals." Now the fact is that already we share a
great many diseases with the lower animals, a few of them being
tuberculosis, anthrax, rabies, tetanus, cancer,
pleuro-pneumonia, certain insect-borne diseases, some parasitic
worm diseases and some skin diseases like favus. As the
knowledge of the lowly origin of many of our diseases is more
widespread, this sort of objection will die out.
[6] Antivaccinators constantly allude to calf-lymph as "filth";
if lymph is filth, then I am able to assure them that each one
of them has about three liters of it in his own body.
An objection which is worthy of more consideration is that in
being vaccinated a child is apt to contract some infectious
disease such as tuberculosis or syphilis which are the two most
dreaded. Now so long as arm-to-arm vaccination was the routine
practice, there was a remote probability that this sort of
accident might occur. It appears to be true that a few
accidents of this kind have occurred, just as a few arms have
become septic or had erysipelas develop in them. But when the
few such cases are compared with the millions and millions of
uncomplicated vaccinations, their importance becomes very
insignificant. Now that arm-to-arm vaccination is no longer
practiced, but fresh calf-lymph used for each child, these
accidental inoculations are a thing of the past. The ignorance
of cause and effect is responsible for a great deal of the most
childish objections to vaccination as to much else. One woman
lately told me that she could not have her child vaccinated
because a child in the same street was made a cripple for life
by being vaccinated. Could we have a better example of the
"post hoc sed non propter hoc."[7]
[7] Now and again, however, we have the sad spectacle of some
one really well educated but apparently either ignorant of
logic or desirous of wilfully misrepresenting facts. The Hon.
Stephen Coleridge has an article in the June (1914) number of
the Contemporary Review which is, to say the least of it,
highly immoral in ethics and statistics.
I shall examine only that part of it bearing on vaccination.
The statements are that in the last five recorded years, 58
persons died from smallpox vaccination (he means vaccination
against smallpox), whereas in the same five years, 85 persons
died from smallpox itself. The inference we are intended to
draw from these figures is that to be vaccinated is nearly as
fatal as to have smallpox itself.
Now this kind of argument is a very common one with
statistically immoral persons, and is known as the suppression
of the ratio. Before we can appreciate the fact that in five
years 58 persons died after being vaccinated, we at least need
to know the total number of persons who were vaccinated. If
only 58 persons were vaccinated and they all died, then the
mortality was 100 per cent., but if, as was practically the
case, thousands of infants in Great Britain were vaccinated in
five years, then if only 58 died after vaccination (although
not necessarily in consequence of it) the mortality falls some
thousands of a per cent. The suppression of the ratio, i. e.,
58/many thousands is the deceit that is practiced.
Fifty-eight per year for five years, is 11.6 deaths per year of
persons vaccinated: presumably these were infants: taking the
birth-rate in England as 30 per 1,000 living, we may say that
900,000 infants were born; deduct 100,000 as not vaccinated, we
have 800,000 infants vaccinated, of these 11.6 died after being
vaccinated, which is 0.0014 per cent. This is not much of a
mortality from any cause; but using Mr. Coleridge's own
figures, it is a splendid demonstration of the safety of
infant-vaccination, the opposite of what he pretends it shows.
Mr. Coleridge proceeds to tell us that in five years 85 persons
died of smallpox in Great Britain, i. e., an average of 17
persons per year. In other words 17 persons died of smallpox in
a country with 30 million inhabitants, or 0.000056 per cent. of
persons living, not a high mortality. And we strongly suspect,
may we hope, that those 17 were persons who had not been
vaccinated.
But in Pre-Jennerian days, 17 persons died of smallpox out of
every 100 persons dying from all causes.
Mr. Coleridge's figures, properly and honestly interpreted,
testify loudly to conclusions exactly the opposite of what he
desires to insinuate; he has no doubt taken the statistics of
the Registrar-General, but he has prostituted them.
Mr. Coleridge's paper could not be a better example of the art
of concealing the causes of phenomena.
He exhibits the following table:
Deaths from smallpox per annum per a million living:
1862-1870 ................................. 172.2
1871-1880 ................................. 244.6
1881-1890 ................................. 45.8
1891-1900 ................................. 13.3
1901-1910 ................................. 12.8
So that the table shows that since 1880 in Great Britain the
deaths from smallpox per million per year have declined until
they are only about 1/14th of their original number.
The natural inference from these figures, viewed in the light
of the history of smallpox in Great Britain, is that compulsory
vaccination has been steadily eradicating the disease; but this
is not Mr. Coleridge's conclusion: He says it is due to the
large number of persons who have refused to be vaccinated! This
would be laughable if it were not really serious; it is sad and
serious that a man of Mr. Coleridge's education and social
position should so consistently mislead the uncritical readers
of the Contemporary Review to whose pages he has unfortunately
very free access. If Mr. Coleridge really believes these things
he is either very stupid or very ignorant; if he knows them to
be otherwise, but wilfully deceives the public, he is immoral.
He suffers from the worst form of bias, the anti-scientific.
{the end of long footnote}
There is still that group of persons who object to
everything--anti-vivisection, anti-meat eating, anti-breakfast,
anti-hats and of course also anti-vaccination. They are anti
the usual and the normal that are quite good enough for the
most of people. They generally also believe that the earth is
flat; they are past praying for, all we can do with them is to
look them, like the difficulty of Jonah and the whale, "full in
the face and pass on."
Many people at the present time allow themselves to be
persuaded into being anti-vaccinators because neither they nor
their deluders have ever known what an epidemic of smallpox is,
have never seen with their own eyes the awful spectacle of a
person suffering from smallpox in any of its forms--discrete,
confluent or hemorrhagic. Thanks to this very Jenner, the world
has now for 100 years been almost free from epidemic, virulent
smallpox and most perfectly so in the vaccinated countries, so
that millions, the majority, of Englishmen, have never seen a
case of smallpox at all. Not knowing the awful danger they have
escaped, through Great Britain having had compulsory
vaccination since 1853, they have become lax in their belief in
the necessity for the continuance of that precaution. "They
jest at scars that never felt a wound." Towns such as
Gloucester in England, in which a large number of children have
been allowed to grow up unvaccinated, have always been visited
sooner or later by a serious outbreak of smallpox. It must be
so; the laws of natural phenomena can not be changed to suit
the taste of those persons who are mentally incapable of
understanding them. They can not be evaded; ignorance of the
law is no more an excuse in the realm of natural than of
man-made law.
We now come to that undesirable product of present-day,
grandmotherly legislation, the conscientious objector. As I am
not a politician, I shall not say anything for or against the
policy of inserting in a bill which makes vaccination
compulsory a clause giving to the conscientious objector the
power or right to refuse to have his child vaccinated, but as a
medical man who knows a little of the history of medicine, I
can only describe it as gratuitous folly. I am one of those who
believe that the laity should have no say in the matter of
whether any given procedure is or is not advantageous for the
public health. The efficacy of universal inoculation of
vaccinia as a prophylactic against variola is a question of
scientific medicine to be decided on technical grounds and
ought not to be a matter open to debate by the public at all.
It is perfectly monstrous to suppose that the ordinary person,
quite untrained to weigh evidence for or against the
advisability of the carrying out of a particular form of
national immunization against a horrid disease, is qualified to
form any opinion. He might as well be consulted on the
advisability of making the channel tunnel or on the safest type
of aeroplane or on any other subject involving the technical
training of the engineer. To permit the so-called "man in the
street" to say whether he shall or shall not permit the
carrying out of some important piece of civic hygiene is to
introduce a principle subversive of all system and obstructive
of all progress in the science of public health. It is absurd
that in a case like this the pronouncements of the judges are
to be submitted to the criticisms of the jury. England has
already had one or two pretty severe lessons through allowing
such places as Gloucester and Leicester to exercise their right
of private judgment on the question of vaccination. In
Gloucester where there was at one time a vigorous
anti-vaccination movement, a serious epidemic overtook the city
a few years ago (1896). What science pronounces to be
beneficial, the layman must submit to. What we want in these
days is less superstition and more faith--in science. I am
informed that there are more than 2,000 unvaccinated children
in the schools of this city at the present moment, and all
because a piece of legislation allows any unintelligent,
prejudiced or credulous parent to decide on the momentous
question of the vaccination of his children.
Our quarantine regulations are extremely strict, and rightly
so, on the subject of smallpox; but is it not a farce to take
so much trouble about the health of our immigrants when inside
the city we are all the time encouraging a high degree of
receptivity towards this very disease? I should call this a
very clear case of straining at the international gnat and
swallowing the municipal camel. The community at present is at
the mercy of its least instructed members. A most sensible
suggestion is that if an outbreak of smallpox occurs in
Halifax, the cost of it should be borne by the unvaccinated and
by the anti-vaccinators. The fact is we have forgotten what
smallpox is like. In 1796 before Jennerian vaccination, the
death-rate from smallpox in England was 18.5 per cent. of
deaths from all causes; in London between 1838 and 1869 it was
1.4 per cent., while in 1871--the worst year for smallpox since
vaccination became compulsory--the deaths from smallpox were
barely 4.5 per cent. of deaths from all causes, a proportion
which was exceeded 93 times in the eighteenth century. At the
present moment the deaths from smallpox in London constitute a
little under 0.24 per cent. of deaths from all causes, or 77
times less than in pre-Jennerian times.
According to MacVail, in the pre-vaccination period smallpox
was nine times as fatal as measles and seven and one half times
as fatal as whooping cough. To-day in the vaccinated community
its fatality is negligable, in the unvaccinated it is as high
as it was in the Middle Ages. In the city of Berlin, where
vaccination is absolutely compulsory, there is no smallpox
hospital at all; the cases of smallpox in that city being only
a few unvaccinated foreigners. In 1912 the deaths in New York
City were as follow: 671 from measles, 614 from scarlatina, 500
from typhoid fever, 187 from whooping cough and 2 from
smallpox.
In London there were in 48 years of the seventeenth century no
less than 10 epidemics of smallpox; in the whole of the
eighteenth, 19; and in the nineteenth no epidemic at all during
which smallpox was responsible for more than one tenth of the
deaths from all causes in any one year.
In Sweden, the highest death-rate before vaccination was 7.23
per 1,000 persons, the lowest 0.30; under permissive
vaccination the highest was 2.57, the lowest 0.12; under
compulsory vaccination the highest was 0.94, the lowest 0.0005.
It is so frequently said that the disappearance of smallpox is
due not to vaccination, but to improved general hygiene, that
we must look into this criticism with some care. In the first
place, a large diminution in the mortality from smallpox
occurred before there was any great change in the unsanitary
conditions of the English towns, before there was any enforcing
of the isolation of patients either in hospitals or in their
own homes. Since the introduction of vaccination, measles and
whooping cough still remain in the status quo ante, while
smallpox has been exterminated in all fully vaccinated
communities, these two diseases of children are as prevalent as
ever in England even although the general sanitary conditions
have been immensely improved in that country. Of course the
effects of vaccination wear out in time, and that is why it is
well to be revaccinated once or twice. Now there has been a
remarkable progressive change in the age-incidence of smallpox
"which can only be explained," says Dr. Newsholme, "on the
assumption that vaccination protects children from smallpox and
that the protection diminishes, though it never entirely
disappears, as age advances.
The "conscience clause" should be immediately removed from the
act in which it was inserted on the grounds that it is weak and
reactionary in principle, not in the interests of the
development of the legislative aspect of the science of public
health, and that it permits in certain unintelligent
communities quite a considerable number of unvaccinated
children to grow up as a permanent menace to their town and
district.
When the history of medicine becomes more widely known, when
the principles of prophylactic inoculation are more generally
understood, when respect for science is the rule rather than
the exception, when great achievements in the saving rather
than the destroying of life are objects of national veneration,
then we may hope to see the day when it will be unhesitatingly
admitted that the discovery by Dr. Edward Jenner, the
Englishman, was one of the most momentous in the history of the
human race, and that his life was one of the noblest, most
unselfish and, in its far-reaching effects, most important that
has ever been lived on this planet.
THE VALUE OF INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH
BY W. A. HAMOR
MELLON INSTITUTE OF INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF
PITTSBURGH
THE aim of all industrial operations is toward perfection, both
in process and mechanical equipment, and every development in
manufacturing creates new problems. It is only to be expected,
therefore, that the industrial researcher is becoming less and
less regarded as a burden unwarranted by returns.
Industrialists have, in fact, learned to recognize chemistry as
the intelligence department of industry, and manufacturing is
accordingly becoming more and more a system of scientific
processes. The accruement of technical improvements in
particularly the great chemical industry is primarily dependent
upon systematic industrial research, and this is being
increasingly fostered by American manufacturers.
Ten thousand American chemists are at present engaged in
pursuits which affect over 1,000,000 wage-earners and produce
over $5,000,000,000 worth of manufactured products each year.
These trained men have actively and effectively collaborated in
bringing about stupendous results in American industry. There
are, in fact, at least nineteen American industries in which
the chemist has been of great assistance, either in founding
the industry, in developing it, or in refining the methods of
control or of manufacture, thus ensuring profits, lower costs
and uniform outputs.
At the recent symposium on the contributions of the chemist to
American industries, at the fiftieth meeting of the American
Chemical Society in New Orleans, the industrial achievements of
that scientific scout, the chemist, were brought out
clearly.[1]
[1] In this connection, see Hesse, J. Ind. Eng. Chem., 7
(1915), 293.
The chemist has made the wine industry reasonably independent
of climatic conditions; he has enabled it to produce
substantially the same wine, year in and year out, no matter
what the weather; he has reduced the spoilage from 25 per cent.
to 0.46 per cent. of the total; he has increased the shipping
radius of the goods and has made preservatives unnecessary. In
the copper industry he has learned and has taught how to make
operations so constant and so continuous that in the
manufacture of blister copper valuations are less than $1.00
apart on every $10,000 worth of product and in refined copper
the valuations of the product do not differ by more than $1.00
in every $50,000 worth of product. The quality of output is
maintained constant within microscopic differences. Without the
chemist the corn-products industry would never have arisen and
in 1914 this industry consumed as much corn as was grown in
that year by the nine states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont,
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey
and Delaware combined; this amount is equal to the entire
production of the state of North Carolina and about 80 per
cent. of the production of each of the states of Georgia,
Michigan and Wisconsin; the chemist has produced over 100
useful commercial products from corn, which, without him, would
never have been produced. In the asphalt industry the chemist
has taught how to lay a road surface that will always be good,
and he has learned and taught how to construct a suitable road
surface for different conditions of service. In the cottonseed
oil industry, the chemist standardized methods of production,
reduced losses, increased yields, made new use of wastes and
by-products, and has added somewhere between $10 and $12 to the
value of each bale of cotton grown. In the cement industry, the
chemist has ascertained new ingredients, has utilized
theretofore waste products for this purpose, has reduced the
waste heaps of many industries and made them his starting
material; he has standardized methods of manufacture,
introduced methods of chemical control and has insured
constancy and permanency of quality and quantity of output. In
the sugar industry, the chemist has been active for so long a
time that "the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." The
sugar industry without the chemist is unthinkable. The Welsbach
mantle is distinctly a chemist's invention and its successful
and economical manufacture depends largely upon chemical
methods. It would be difficult to give a just estimate of the
economic effect of this device upon illumination, so great and
valuable is it. In the textile industry, he has substituted
uniform, rational, well-thought out and simple methods of
treatment of all the various textile fabrics and fibers where
mystery, empiricism, "rule-of-thumb" and their accompanying
uncertainties reigned. In the fertilizer industry, it was the
chemist who learned and who taught how to make our immense beds
of phosphate rock useful and serviceable to man in the
enrichment of the soil; he has taught how to make waste
products of other industries useful and available for
fertilization and he has shown how to make the gas works
contribute to the fertility of the soil. In the soda industry,
the chemist can successfully claim that he has founded it,
developed it and brought it to its present state of perfection
and utility, but not without the help of other technical men;
the fundamental ideas were and are chemical. In the leather
industry, the chemist has given us all of the modern methods of
mineral tanning, and without them the modern leather industry
is unthinkable. In the case of vegetable-tanned leather he has
also stepped in, standardized the quality of incoming material
and of outgoing product. In the flour industry the chemist has
learned and taught how to select the proper grain for specific
purposes, to standardize the product, and how to make flour
available for certain specific culinary and food purposes. In
the brewing industry, the chemist has standardized the methods
of determining the quality of incoming material and of outgoing
products, and has assisted in the development of a product of a
quality far beyond that obtaining prior to his entry into that
industry. In the preservation of foods, the chemist made the
fundamental discoveries; up to twenty years ago, however, he
took little or no part in the commercial operations, but now is
almost indispensable to commercial success. In the water supply
of cities, the chemist has put certainty in the place of
uncertainty; he has learned and has shown how, by chemical
methods of treatment and control, raw water of varying quality
can be made to yield potable water of substantially uniform
composition and quality. The celluloid industry and the
nitro-cellulose industry owe their very existence and much of
their development to the chemist. In the glass industry the
chemist has learned and taught how to prepare glasses suitable
for the widest ranges of uses and to control the quality and
quantity of the output. In the pulp and paper industry, the
chemist made the fundamental observations, inventions and
operations and to-day he is in control of all the operations of
the plant itself; to the chemist also is due the cheap
production of many of the materials entering into this
industry, as well as the increased and expanding market for the
product itself.
Sufficient has been presented to show that certain industries
of the United States have been elevated by an infusion of
scientific spirit through the medium of the chemist, and that
manufacturing, at one time entirely a matter of empirical
judgment and individual skill, is more and more becoming a
system of scientific processes. The result is that American
manufacturers are growing increasingly appreciative of
scientific research, and are depending upon industrial
researchers--"those who catalyze raw materials by brains"--as
their pathfinders. It is now appropriate to consider just how
industrialists are taking advantage of the universities and the
products of these.
THE METHODS EMPLOYED IN THE ATTACK OF INDUSTRIAL PROBLEMS[2]
[2] See also Bacon, Science, N. S., 40 (1914), 871.