XVIII. HORSEGREASE AS A SOURCE OF VACCINE
In order to complete the account of Jenner’s awards and the adoption of Vaccination by Parliament, I have passed over several matters of interest and significance, which I shall now proceed to deal with, commencing with the tactics of our hero in relation to Horsegrease.
In his Inquiry, published in 1798, Jenner set forth Horsegrease as the origin of that form of Cowpox, which, when inoculated on the human subject, ensured life-long security from Smallpox. Many attempts were consequently made to produce pox on the teats of cows by inoculating them with Horsegrease, but in vain; and the possibility became discredited. Moreover, the notion of inoculation with Horsegrease, either immediately or through the cow, was disliked intensely. It was pronounced repulsive. Why virus from horses’ heels should be more repulsive than virus from cows’ teats was not explained; but, as we know, there is no accounting for tastes. Many who eat beef with relish would start with disgust from horse-flesh. A story is told of a Wesleyan who rebuked a sister for wearing feathers in her hat, and was sharply referred to the existence of flowers in her own. “Yes, sister dear,” was the cogent reply, “but we must draw the line somewhere, and it is drawn at feathers.” The line was drawn at Horsegrease, and the origin of Cowpox as asserted by Jenner and his country acquaintance was conveniently denied. Jenner was not slow to perceive how the wind of opinion was blowing, and let Horsegrease drop. He said not a word about it in his petition to Parliament in 1802, nor did he again advance it as a reason for consideration.
Now, why was this? Was it because he had ceased to believe that Cowpox originated in Horsegrease? Not at all! Why, then, did he not vindicate his opinion and confront vulgar prejudice? Simply because he had the wit to discern, that whilst he might get something out of the national purse for the Cowpox recipe, he could get nothing for the Horsegrease one. As Dr. Pearson observed, “The very name of Horsegrease was like to have wrecked the whole concern”--an observation that Dr. Mason Good confirms in saying, “The mere idea of using the matter of grease from the horse’s heel excited from the first so deep and extensive a disgust that Cowpox Inoculation had nearly fallen a sacrifice from the supposed union of the two diseases.”
It is not to be supposed that I am censuring Jenner as a tradesman.[142] If any of us had two patents for sale, we should be great fools if we declined to take £30,000 for one without the other, or suffered one to prejudice the other, or tried to inflict any doctrine about them upon the purchaser. It is for those who go to market to adapt themselves to the market, and remember that sellers were made for buyers, and not buyers for sellers. Since then the public were ready to pay for Cowpox, whilst they shuddered at Horsegrease, it was not for Jenner to force Horsegrease upon them.
Such is mercantile logic; and on its own conditions it is irrefragable; but it is not the custom to deal with Jenner as a tradesman, but as a man of science, and to range him with great discoverers, inventors, and benefactors of mankind; and here it is that I decidedly demur. What, I ask, did he discover? He did not discover that Cowpox prevented Smallpox: that was the dairy-maids’ faith. He did not discover that Horsegrease prevented Smallpox: that was the farriers’ faith. He did not discover that Horsegrease on milkers’ hands begot pox on cows’ teats: that was the farmers’ belief. He did not discover that inoculated virus could be conveyed from arm to arm: that was an existing practice. What then did he discover? He discovered nothing. He did no more than take the vulgar opinion of his neighbourhood to the London market. He made a few perfunctory experiments by way of confirmation, advertised them in a book, and by good or ill luck the notion was caught up, and worked to practical issues, chiefly by Pearson, who thereby incurred the full malignity of Jenner’s jealousy.
The distinction between a man of science and a tradesman is this, that the mind of the one is set on the extraction of truth and the other on the extraction of profit. The man of science does not inquire what the public may be pleased to know and pay for, but he ascertains and defines what is fact, and leaves the public to adjust themselves thereto as they may find convenient. If they recognise the truth communicated, it is well for them; if they dislike or deny the truth, it is ill for them; but well or ill, the man of science is the disinterested expositor of what he knows to be true; not unfrequently, when his revelation vitally affronts popular prejudice, realising the blessing of those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.
What therefore I maintain concerning Jenner is, that the truth (as we may presume he regarded it) he did not fully reveal; that what he did reveal, he suffered to be derided and denied; that he was content to take credit for so much of it as was marketable; whilst his private conviction about Horsegrease remained unaffected, not only in theory, but in deliberate practice.
It is for me to establish these assertions.
First, I say, he did not fully reveal what he knew. In 1789 Jenner inoculated his son, Edward, an infant of 18 months, not with Cowpox, or with Horsegrease, but with Swinepox; and, according to the evidence of his own papers, the result was perfectly satisfactory. The child was subsequently inoculated with Smallpox on five or six different occasions, and always without effect. According to the well-known variolous test, he was proof against Smallpox. In short, there was nothing that Jenner ever adduced in favour of Cowpox that was not equally valid of Swinepox. And this Swinepox experiment was made nearly ten years prior to his advertisement of Cowpox and Horsegrease. Why, I ask, did he keep back the truth about Swinepox? When Cowpox was scarce, and every cow-house was explored for virus, why did he not recommend Swinepox as an alternative? Why, too, did he refrain from the obvious generalisation, that Cowpox, Horsegrease, Swinepox, and probably other sorts of pox, generated fevers, during the prevalence of which inoculation with Smallpox was not apt to take? The answer is plain, Because he had something to sell rather than something to teach.
In conformity with this conduct he suffered the origin of Cowpox in Horsegrease, and the specific virtue of grease to be derided and denied. “It was fortunate for Dr. Jenner, and the triumph of his discovery,” wrote Dr. Mason Good, “that a minuter attention to the subject gave sufficient proof that there was no foundation for his opinion that Cowpox originated in Horsegrease, nor that any connection existed between the diseases.”[143] Such was the convenient medical verdict, which Jenner did not venture to disturb, though all the while persuaded of its error. There were failures to inoculate cows with Horsegrease, but Thomas Tanner, veterinary surgeon, of Rockhampton, Gloucestershire, “had the merit,” says Dr. Baron, “of proving the truth of Jenner’s statement.”[144] He succeeded in communicating the disease to the cow from the heel of the horse, producing on the cow’s teat a complete vaccine pustule. “From handling the cow’s teats,” said Tanner, “I became myself infected and had two pustules on my hand, which brought on inflammation, and made me unwell for several days. The matter from the cow, and from my own hand, proved efficacious in infecting both human subjects and cattle.”[145] Jenner distributed the virus from Tanner, and it operated precisely like Cowpox. But the proof did not rest with Tanner: others repeated his experiment with similar issues. Dr. Loy of Whitby published in 1801 Some Observations on the Origin of the Cowpox, in which he confirmed Jenner’s country tales, and described how (dispensing with the cow) he managed to inoculate patients with Horsegrease, producing pustules identical with those from Cowpox, and subjecting the persons thus equinated to the variolous test with complete impunity. Yet, with so much to fortify him, Jenner kept silent. He preferred to be adjudged mistaken rather than risk the forfeit of public favour and pay. Nor might I blame him, had he frankly reasserted the integrity of the Gloucestershire faith, and allowed that since the public were ready to accept Cowpox without Horsegrease, it was not for him to stand in the way of their preference by an obstinate defence of what was non-essential in practice.
But the case for Horsegrease was yet stronger than I have stated. Dr. Sacco of Milan was sometimes described as “the prince of vaccinators” by reason of his enthusiasm, his professional attainments, and the facilities that were accorded to him in the Cisalpine Republic of those days for universal vaccination. He tried to generate pox on the cow with grease from the horse, but failed, and in 1801 reported to Jenner his failure. In 1803, however, he cried, Eureka! A coachman presented himself at the Milan Hospital suffering from an eruption contracted in grooming a horse with greasy heels. He was at once led off by Sacco to the Foundling Asylum, where nine children were inoculated from the vesicles on his hands. On three of the children the inoculation took, producing vesicles which were pronounced to be the same as those resulting from Cowpox. The virus was propagated from arm to arm, and distributed in all directions. Dr. Sacco from thenceforth avowed himself a Horsegreaser. “It is now admitted and settled,” he wrote to Jenner from Milan, 25th March, 1803, “that grease is the cause of vaccine, and we cannot too soon alter the designation to equine.”
Was the designation changed to equine? It was not, nor was the attempt made. Those chiefly concerned in promoting vaccination in England would not hear of Horsegrease, and many were ready to swear that in the matter of pox, the horse and the cow had no connection whatever, and that Jenner had too hastily assumed the truth of a vulgar west country opinion.
Dr. De Carro of Vienna, who described himself as Jenner’s friend and first apostle, having effected the first vaccination on the Continent and transmitted the first charge of vaccine to India, was also a Horsegreaser. Whilst Jenner was judiciously holding his tongue about Horsegrease in England, he wrote to De Carro congratulating him on his success in conveying Cowpox to the East, and ascribing the failure of the English attempts to the absurd prejudice against Horsegrease, which Dr. Loy had, however, completely annihilated. Here are his words under date, 28th March, 1803--
I am confident that had not the opponents of my ideas of the origin of the disease been so absurdly clamorous, particularly the par nobile fratrum [Pearson and Woodville], the Asiatics would long since have enjoyed the blessings of Vaccination, and many a victim been rescued from an untimely grave. The decisive experiments of Dr. Loy have silenced the tongues of these gentlemen for ever.[146]
How the clamorous opposition to Horsegrease had deprived Hindoos of the earlier blessing of vaccination, we are left to conjecture. Perhaps he meant that Horsegrease would have borne transit to India better than Cowpox, or that the Hindoos themselves might have resorted to horses with greasy heels.
In reply, 22nd April, 1803, De Carro wrote to Jenner commending his moderation in maintaining silence toward his antagonists--little apprehending the motives of that silence. Pearson’s conduct, he thought, bordered on insanity. “I am extremely glad,” he continued, “that you have treated it with the contempt it deserves, though I am happy to see that your friends have exposed his ridiculous and malevolent designs.”
De Carro was intimate with Sacco of Milan, and from him received virus derived from Horsegrease, which he used indiscriminately with Cowpox, until in Vienna it was unknown who were vaccinated and who equinated.[147]
De Carro was also in correspondence with Dr. La Font, a French physician, established at Salonica, who was likewise a Horsegreaser. He discovered that the Macedonian farriers recognised three sorts of grease in horses, called in general javart, and discriminated as l’écrouelleux, le phlegmoneux, et la variolique.[148] With the variolous grease, La Font inoculated two boys, and from them other children, reproducing the experience of Loy of Whitby and Sacco of Milan. De Carro in communicating La Font’s success to Jenner, 21st June, 1803, observed, “These particulars, I hope, will silence all those who still doubt the truth of your doctrine as to the connection of Grease, Cowpox, and Smallpox”--Jenner holding that Smallpox was a malignant variety of Cowpox, whilst Cowpox came out of Horsegrease.
Notwithstanding these confirmations and his boast that the opposition of Pearson and Woodville was silenced for ever, Jenner suffered judgment to go against him. He recognised that it was expedient that the connection between Horsegrease and Cowpox should be denied. He had his bill to settle with the English public, and it was not for him to make difficulties. A curious evidence of how thoroughly the unpopular truth was suppressed is furnished by Dr. Willan’s treatise On Vaccine Inoculation, published in 1806. There is not a word or hint in it concerning Horsegrease. The treatise was the work of a competent physician, who set forth what was known of vaccination (from the standpoint of belief) with fulness and clearness, accompanied with an appendix of letters and reports from Jenner himself, from Pearson and other experts in the new practice--but as to Horsegrease, the silence was absolute. How the disagreeable truth was so effectually covered up is more than I can account for. It was not mentioned in the debates in Parliament, nor was it referred to in the reports of the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, nor did the opponents of vaccination use it with the force that might have been expected. One explanation is, that Jenner’s Inquiry never entered into general circulation, that no popular edition ever appeared, and that it was chiefly known at second hand. The leading representatives of vaccination, moreover, so boldly disowned Horsegrease and Jenner’s authority in ascribing Cowpox to its parentage, that there was little use in charging them with it; whilst all the while Jenner offered no open resistance to those who contemned him for one mistake, but exhausted the language of adulation on his imputed merit. Thus we suppose it came to pass that at the end of twenty years Dr. Mason Good, as the exponent of orthodox medical faith, felt justified in asserting that there was no foundation for the opinion that Cowpox originated in Horsegrease, nor that any connection existed between the diseases, and that it was fortunate for Jenner and the triumph of his discovery that the fact was so.
Jenner was silenced, but was he convinced? How could he be convinced? Horsegrease as the origin of Cowpox might be voted detestable and impossible, but there was the evidence of the country folk, confirmed by Tanner, Loy, Sacco, De Carro, and La Font; and though a weak man may be put down, or think it worth while to be accounted mistaken, yet, in the stillness of his mind, he knows that facts are facts whatever may be said to the contrary. When, therefore, Jenner had filled his purse, obtaining all he could expect from public favour, and was clear of London, and the oppression of its savants, he reverted to his first opinion as true--true and untrue, true with a distinction, which I shall presently define. Writing to James Moore, Director of the National Vaccine Establishment, from Berkeley, on 23rd July, 1813, he observed--
You seem not perfectly satisfied that the origin of vaccine is clearly made out. For my part, I should think that Loy’s experiments were sufficient to establish it, to say nothing of Sacco’s and others on the Continent. However, I have now fresh evidence, partly foreign and partly domestic. The latter comes from Mr. Melon, a surgeon of repute at Lichfield. He has sent me some of his equine virus, which I have been using from arm-to-arm for two months past, without observing the smallest deviation in the progress and appearance of the pustules from those produced by the vaccine.[149]
And in a subsequent note of 1st August, he repeated--
DEAR MOORE,--I have been constantly equinating for some months, and perceive not the smallest difference between the pustules thus produced and the vaccine. Both are alike, because they come from the same source.[150]
To Moore again he wrote from Cheltenham, 27th October, 1813--
I am sorry you have not succeeded in infecting a cow. I have told you before that the matter which flows from the fissures in the horse’s heels will do nothing. [Note the observation placed in italics.] The virus is contained in vesicles on the edges and the surrounding skin.
Did I ever inform you of the curious result of vaccinating carters? From their youth these men have the care of horses used for ploughing our corn lands; and great numbers have come to me from the hills to be vaccinated, but the half have proved insusceptible. On inquiry, many of them have recollected having sores on their hands and fingers from dressing horses affected with sore heels, and being so ill as to be disabled from work; and on several of their hands, I have found the cicatrix as perfect and characteristically marked as if it had arisen from my own vaccination.[151]
Then we have a memorandum of Jenner’s, dated 1st April, 1817, wherein he thus traces the course of the virus--
Rise and progress of the equine matter from the farm of Allen at Wansell. From a horse to Allen; from Allen to two or three of his milch cows; from the cows to James Cole, a young man who milked at the farm; from James Cole to John Powell by inoculation from a vesicle on the hand of Cole; and to Anne Powell, an infant; from Powell to Samuel Rudder; from Rudder to Sophia Orpin, and to Henry Martin; from H. Martin to Elizabeth Martin. All this went on with perfect regularity for eight months, when the virus became intermixed with other matter, so that no journal was kept afterwards. Proof was obtained of the patients being duly protected[152]--
Which was to say, that they were subsequently inoculated with Smallpox without effect. Among Jenner’s papers, there were other entries to the same purpose, thus--
17th May, 1817.--Took matter from Jane King (equine direct) for the National Vaccine Establishment. The pustules beautifully correct.[153]
This equine virus from Jane King was extensively diffused. It was, we see, sent to London; it was also sent to Edinburgh;[154] and Dr. Baron says he had supplies of it for use in the Gloucester Infirmary. Baron relates that in the following year he was able to return the gift, having obtained virus from the hands of a boy infected directly from the horse. Here is Jenner’s acknowledgment of the present, dated 25th April, 1818--
My Dear Baron,--Yesterday H. Shrapnell brought me the equine virus and your drawing, which conveys so good an idea of the disease, that no one who has seen it can doubt that the vesicles contain the true and genuine life-preserving fluid. I have inserted some of it into a child’s arm; but I shall be vexed if some of your young men at the Infirmary have not done the same with the fluid fresh from the boy’s hand.[155]
It is surely unnecessary to adduce further evidence of what was Jenner’s mature faith and deliberate practice. Further, it is manifest that to the end of his career he held that pox in the cow was not only derived from grease in the horse, but that it was exclusively derived from the horse, and, that apart from the horse, Cowpox would cease to exist. Owing to the multiplication of vaccination failures, it began to be conjectured that vaccine might be worn out by transmission from arm-to-arm, and that a reversion to the cow might be expedient; and discussing the question in a letter to Moore, dated 5th March, 1816, Jenner advanced the objection--
If there were a real necessity for a renovation, I know not what we should do; for the precautions of the farmers with respect to their horses have driven the Cowpox from their herds.[156]
Why did not Moore rejoin, Where is the difficulty? Suppose pox driven from the herds, what conceivable reason was there for anxiety when the cow had become a demonstrated superfluity?--when, in Jenner’s own words, “the true and genuine life-preserving fluid” might be drawn direct from horses’ heels? Except for the perpetuation of imposture, the cow in the case had ceased to have any value whatever. But, as so often happens with quacks, their minds become so saturated with their own humbug that there is nothing left of common-sense.
Having thus proved my assertions concerning Jenner, it may be reasonably asked, How was it that some got Cowpox by means of Horsegrease when others could not? for, it may be argued, that if Cowpox issued straight and invariably from inoculated Horsegrease, not even the most resolute prejudice against Horsegrease could have permanently kept back the truth.
The answer is, that Cowpox never came out of what is commonly known as Horsegrease. The statement made by Jenner in his Inquiry of 1798 that--
The limpid fluid which issues from the small cracks or fissures in the inflamed and swollen horse’s heel--
infected cows and begot pox was a blunder, which he explicitly reversed fifteen years afterwards in his letter to Moore of 27th October, 1813, already cited--
I am sorry [he wrote] you have not succeeded in infecting a cow. I have told you before that the matter which flows from the fissures in the horse’s heel will do nothing. It is contained in vesicles and the surrounding skin.[157]
Jenner, we have always to remember, was a slovenly investigator, not apt to take pains, but apt to eke out observation with invention. His friend, “honest Jack Baron of Gloucester,” who himself inoculated with horse virus unmodified by the cow, actually wrote Jenner’s life in two volumes, and not until the work was ready for the binder did he discover that he was in error in common with his master in ascribing Cowpox to Horsegrease! Such was the intellectual muddle in which these prophets of vaccination operated! In a note stuck at the end of the second volume, we have the following amazing confession, made, remember, in 1838, fifteen years after the chief conjurer’s death--
I take this opportunity of expressing my regret that I have employed the word Grease in alluding to the disease in the horse. Variolæ Equinæ is the proper designation. It has no necessary connection with the Grease, though the disorders frequently co-exist. This circumstance at first misled Dr. Jenner, and it has caused much misapprehension and confusion.[158]
Here we have the secret and desired explanation. It was out of Horsepox, and not out of Horsegrease, that Cowpox was derived, and in confounding grease with pox, Jenner mystified himself and others, and obscured the whole doctrine of vaccination. The Macedonian farriers who in 1803 informed La Font that they recognised three sorts of grease, and one of them variolous, were more accurate observers than the Gloucestershire farriers and farmers whose opinion Jenner lazily retailed. Whether he had any clear apprehension of his own blunder is not apparent. We have seen how long it took his biographer, Baron, to find it out. This is certain, that he made no public attempt to set right what he had so egregiously set wrong, nor to withdraw the statement in his Inquiry that Horsegrease only acquired its efficacy against Smallpox after inoculation on the cow.
Lastly, we may inquire what is the present state of opinion as to Horsegrease and Cowpox? When difficult questions are asked, we usually turn to our cyclopædias, and taking down Hooper’s Lexicon Medicum, 8th ed. 1848, Art. Cowpox, we read--
It is now ascertained that the horse and the cow each furnish, independently of the other, a virus capable of communicating genuine Cowpox to the human subject.
Genuine Cowpox communicated by a horse is surely a bull of the first magnitude! The Encyclopædia Britannica, 8th ed. 1860, Art. Vaccination, illuminates us thus--
It is now to be regarded as an established fact, that Horsegrease and Cowpox are the same complaint, modified by the constitution of the animals in which they occur.
An established fact, indeed!--established in quicksand!
Some say the Gloucestershire farmers and Jenner were correct in attributing Cowpox to Horsegrease, and that they can only he charged with mistake in nomenclature. When they said Horsegrease, they meant Horsepox, not discriminating between maladies that sometimes occurred together. No one now believes that the affection recognised by veterinarians as “grease” ever originated Cowpox. The same rural authorities, including Jenner, held that where there was no Horsepox, there could be no Cowpox; but, so far as I can make out, that conclusion is surrendered. Pox on the horse may generate pox on the cow, but the cow may have pox without the horse.
In this respect only was Jenner in error [says Mr. George Fleming, Army Veterinary Inspector]. The two diseases are perfectly independent of each other. Cowpox appears where there are no horses, or possible contact with horses; and may affect a number of cows in a dairy while the horses are entirely free from Horsepox.[159]
At this point comes the tug of war. If cows have pox, how do they contract the malady? Speaking at the London Conference on Animal Vaccination in December, 1879, Professor J. B. Simonds, Principal of the Royal Veterinary College, said--
My contention is, that the existence of Cowpox has to be proved. Jenner’s account of the disease was an illusion. In my experience among animals for forty years, I have never seen a case of Cowpox, and I do not believe that any form of variola belongs to the bovine race. Sheep are afflicted with pox, but not cattle. We hear of Cowpox, but who ever heard of Bullpox? And is it credible that a disease should be confined to cows and never attack bulls and steers? Let any one point out an affection of females that does not extend to the males of the same species.
Professor Simonds and others believe that Cowpox as described by Jenner was a parasitic affection of Smallpox, probably communicated by milkers; and that Ceely, Badcock, and others did intentionally, what milkers had done inadvertently, when they inoculated cattle with Smallpox in order to create virus for vaccination. On the other hand, those who assert the independent existence of Cowpox, hold no terms with this heresy. As Dr. Cameron says, “We can no more make Smallpox into Cowpox than by stunting an oak-tree we can make it a gooseberry bush.” Fortunately I have no call to pronounce judgment on the controversy. The more it rages, the better I like it, and if the combatants disposed of each other as did the Kilkenny cats, I might not be very sorry.
A last word as to Horsepox. There seems to be little doubt that when inoculated on man it gives rise to vesicles indistinguishable from those raised by Cowpox. In 1863 Professor Bouley of Alfort produced pox on a cow by inoculating it with pox from a horse, and children were successfully vaccinated with the virus. In the Transactions of the Clinical Society, Vol. X., Mr. John Langton, describes the case of a groom who came to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, 20th March, 1877, with an eruption caught from a horse exactly like that induced by vaccination; and there could be no question, says Mr. Langton, that the disease was the same as that described by Jenner as grease.
There is much virus in currency as vaccine that is equine, and many of us are equinated who suppose ourselves vaccinated; and it might be argued that we have been saved from Smallpox by reason of our equination. Why with all the notorious failures of vaccination, and of re-vaccination, some of the more audacious medical quacks do not recommend Horsepox as an infallible alternative, is not easy to understand. It would be a Napoleonic stroke; nor is it improbable that before vaccination is surrendered the attempt will be made. How easily it might be asserted that vaccination is a failure in so far as it has lost the original virtue of equination, that the remedy is to dismiss the cow and revert to the horse, from whose poxy heels, as the immortal Jenner observed, there issues “the true and genuine life-preserving fluid.” The oracle might be worked thus--
“Let us hear no more of pure lymph from the calf, too often, alas! an illusion. Sure and certain salvation from Smallpox can only be guaranteed to those inoculated with pure pox from the horse. Come then to the horse, the horse with pox! Come quickly! Come yourselves! Come with your wives! Come with your children! Come and be saved by Horsepox from the loathsome pestilence that decimates the human race and brings myriads to untimely graves!”
FOOTNOTES:
[142] As tradesman, however, Jenner was not honest. He took to market what was not his to sell. The introduction of Cowpox for inoculation (stigmatised in The Inquiry as spurious, not being derived from Horsegrease) was effected by Pearson, and Jenner’s claim to it was an act of piracy.
[143] Study of Medicine, vol. iii. p. 59.
[144] Life of Jenner, vol. i. p. 248.
[145] Treatise on the Cowpox. By John Ring. P. 336.
[146] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. i. p. 428.
[147] Copeland’s Medical Dictionary.--Art. Vaccination.
[148] Histoire de la Vaccination. Par Jean de Carro. Vienne, 1804.
[149] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. ii. p. 388.
[150] Ib. p. 388.
[151] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. ii. p. 390.
[152] Ib. p. 226.
[153] Ib. p. 226.
[154] Account of Varioloid Epidemic in Edinburgh. By John Thomson. London, 1830.
[155] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. ii. p. 227.
[156] Ib., p. 399.
[157] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. ii. p. 390.
[158] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. ii. p. 456.
[159] Lancet, 29th May, 1880, p. 834.
XIX. JOHN BIRCH
It is part of the Jennerian legend that the introduction of vaccination was resisted by prejudice, fury and fanaticism, and that the practice made its way by sheer force of its proven efficacy. The statement is widely at variance with facts. Vaccination was accepted with instant acclamation by the medical profession, the royal family, and the public as an infallible and harmless preventive of smallpox; and the subsequent course of experience was to disprove alike its harmlessness and infallibility. That in some cases vaccination was encountered with absurdity and violence lay in the nature of things, even as it was advocated with absurdity, violence and prevarication. It is always easy to raise a laugh by the exhibition of the extravagance of either side in a hot dispute, but to what purpose? It would have been no cause for surprise if some had been moved to scorn by the facile credulity with which Jenner’s magical prescription was so rashly accepted, but the world to which he appealed had no scientific acquaintance with the laws of health, and it was in nowise marvellous that, convinced of the prophylaxy of inoculated smallpox, they should have been overcome by the plausibility of inoculated cowpox. Yet were not all overcome, nor were all who resisted the popular craze furious. There was John Birch, for example, surgeon to St. Thomas’s Hospital, who with calmness and cogency steadily protested against the introduction of “the new disease styled cowpox;” and we may read his letters and pamphlets and fail to note a fiery epithet or unkindly imputation. People who talk as if all who opposed Jenner were steeped in ignorance and perversity can know nothing of John Birch.
Although satisfied with variolous inoculation, he had no objection to vaccination in itself. He thought it fair that experiments with cowpox should be tried, and the verdict of experience submitted to; but he complained that experience was anticipated and success proclaimed ere it was possible for the truth to be known, whilst every objector was overwhelmed with abuse. As an illustration of the unwarrantable persuasion that prevailed in favour of the new practice before there was time to justify it, Birch mentions that at the anniversary dinner at Guy’s Hospital in 1802, he was surprised to find the usual business set aside to secure signatures to Jenner’s petition for a vote of money from Parliament, and that after dinner toasts, songs, and compliments in honour of Vaccinia were the order of the day. Booksellers, he relates, declined to publish anything against vaccination, and editors of newspapers and magazines would not suffer a word to appear to its disparagement. Even the Post Office carried the cowpox and correspondence of the Royal Jennerian Society gratis until the collapse of the concern in 1806. Those who resorted to doctors and hospitals for inoculation with smallpox got cowpox instead in spite of assertions to the contrary. Church vied with chapel in recommending the new practice. The Archbishop of Canterbury was called upon to issue a letter directing the clergy to recommend vaccination from the pulpit, but, with the wariness of office, sent his chaplain to Birch to hear the other side, and the chaplain retired with the judicious observation, “His Grace must not commit the Church.” Many clergymen, however, not only preached vaccination, but practised it with restless assiduity. Erasmus Darwin was not without hope that baptism and vaccination might be associated. He wrote to Jenner from Derby, 24th February, 1802--
As by the testimony of innumerable instances, the Vaccine Disease is so favourable to young children, in a little time it may occur that the christening and vaccination of children may always be performed on the same day.
The Vaccine Disease so favourable to young children! The assertion affords a vivid glimpse of the prevalent enchantment. “The idea of connecting religious services with vaccination,” says Baron, “had occurred to several individuals in this country as well as on the Continent.”[160]
I viewed with indignant scorn [wrote Birch], the ungenerous artifice adopted by the Jennerian Society of sticking up in every Station House, in the Vestries of fanatical Chapels, and in Sunday Schools, that false Comparative View of the effects of Smallpox and Cowpox representing to the gaping multitude a frightful picture of Inoculation with the supposed misery attendant on it; and exhibiting representations equally false and exaggerated of the blessings of Vaccination.
The women were not behind the clergy in diffusing vaccine salvation. They were Jenner’s most devoted allies. He took pains to teach ladies to operate with “a light hand” so as not to draw blood, and boasted that one of his pupils had ten thousand patients to her credit, rescued from the terror and peril of smallpox!
As Birch observed, it was not a question of medicine or of surgery that he and others had to deal with, but an outburst of enthusiasm in which the methods and arguments of science were swept heedlessly away. Any testimony to the credit of vaccination was accepted with alacrity, whilst the facts to its discredit were denied or explained away. This recklessness of procedure was most painfully manifest in the conduct of the Committee of the House of Commons which sat on Jenner’s first petition for money in 1802--
The number of witnesses in support of the application [wrote Birch] was 40, but out of the forty 28 spoke from mere hearsay, and not from knowledge acquired in practice; while the three who spoke against it were heard impatiently, though they corroborated their evidence with proofs.
Birch wished to know what cowpox was. Jenner had said it was derived from horsegrease, but “that origin is proved to be erroneous, and is now given up, even by his best friends. On all hands it is admitted,” Birch continued, “that it is not a disease of the cow, but communicated to the cow by the milker. No cow that is allowed to suckle her own calf ever has the complaint.” What, then, is the disease in the milker? asked Birch. Is it smallpox? Is it lues venerea? Is it itch? A man came to St. Thomas’s Hospital from an adjacent dairy with a hand and arm covered with ulcerations. He said several of the milkers and the cows’ teats were affected in the same way, and he was told they had got cowpox. Birch called one of his country pupils and asked him what was wrong with the man. “It is itch--rank itch,” was his reply. A box of Jackson’s ointment for the itch was given to him, and at the end of a week he reappeared at the Hospital cured. If cowpox be itch, argued Birch--
Then if a patient be inoculated with the disorder, though it may suspend the capacity for Smallpox for a season in the constitution, it will ultimately prove no security--
Which was to say, that it was not probable that smallpox and itch could occur together, and that a person inoculated with itch would pass through the variolous test successfully. In this connection we may recall the fact that Jenner found it impossible to vaccinate a regiment at Colchester, the men with their women and children all being afflicted with itch.
Still farther to complicate the mystery of cowpox, Jenner began to describe it as genuine and spurious, but which was the one and which was the other he left in bewildering uncertainty. Said Birch--
Though Dr. Jenner could not tell us what Cowpox was, he soon came forward to inform us that it was of two sorts--the one genuine and harmless, the other spurious and hurtful.
Spurious Cowpox is a term I do not admit of. I know of no such thing as spurious Smallpox, spurious Measles, spurious Lues Venerea, spurious Scrofula.
Birch’s objection to spurious cowpox was forcible, but what in the innocence of his heart he took for a blunder was proved out of Jenner’s own mouth to be a deliberate dodge in 1807. Pressed by the Committee of the College of Physicians to explain what he meant by Spurious Cowpox, he had to own that he knew nothing of such a malady, and that he had only meant to describe irregular effects of cowpox on the arms of the vaccinated! In other words, when vaccination turned out badly, he had found it convenient to ascribe the disaster to spurious vaccine! The policy revealed in this shameless avowal was cynically justified by Dr. Maunsell, who, in a well known volume, wrote--
The term imperfect or Spurious Vaccination is frequently to be met with in books, and has been the cause of no small degree of confusion in practice, although, at the same time, it has frequently afforded the practitioner an excellent asylum against the storms now and then arising out of failures in the protective power of the vaccine disease.[161]
From out the muddle as to the origin of cowpox and its genuine and spurious varieties, Birch demanded, What had Jenner discovered? It is not that cowpox prevents smallpox; for that has been asserted by dairy-folk for generations, and has been disregarded by physicians because proved to be untrue. What then is it? Let him define his discovery that we may know how to respect it. Let him explain why it is forbidden to inoculate direct from the cow. Is genuine cowpox invisible and to be taken on trust? Or is the disease so virulent on its first communication that it has to be meliorated in the body of some victim ere it is fit for public use? Birch asked these questions as we continue to ask What is cowpox? Is it a disease of the cow? Or is it communicated to the cow by man or by horse? However definite the answers, the contradictions are equally definite, and the authorities equally trustworthy.
Practical men answered for Jenner, as they presume to answer at this day, “Whatever may be the origin of cowpox, we know that vaccination is harmless, and that it prevents smallpox; and more we neither demand nor care to inquire.” The credulity and conceit of such practical men is that stupidity against which, says Goethe, even the gods are powerless. It was practical men who “on the mere show of reason” accepted vaccination before it could be tested, and on most superficial evidence, said Birch--
Recommended Dr. Jenner to the munificence of Parliament for a discovery in practice which was never to prove fatal; which was to excite no new humours or disorders in the constitution; which was to be, not only a perfect security against Smallpox, but would, if universally adopted, prevent its recurrence for ever.
The harmlessness of the practice was soon belied--
It gave rise [wrote Birch] to new and painful disorders. It was sometimes followed by itchy eruptions; sometimes by singular ulcerations; and sometimes by glandular swellings of a nature wholly distinct from scrofula, or any other known glandular disease. Eruptions of the skin are most frequent, and may be heard of in every parish of London; and whether Vaccination shall be called the Cow Evil, or the Jennerian Evil, posterity will have to determine.
The non-fatality of the practice was also speedily confuted. The disorders it excited caused numerous deaths--from erysipelas especially. It was then said, as it continues to be said to this day, “Yes, but it was not vaccination, but erysipelas the patient died of”--a form of words that seems to satisfy many minds accounted rational. Birch mentioned three or four cases of death resulting from vaccination, and adds--
These cases were as favourably palliated and ingeniously excused as they could be; but it is admitted that each patient was punctured by a lancet infected with what is called Cowpox; each arm so punctured became inflamed and ulcerated, and each patient died.
The Variolous Test, used so unscrupulously to win converts to vaccination, was proved by the Inoculators to be untrustworthy. They had no difficulty in variolating the vaccinated. When it was discovered that vaccination was no guard against smallpox, many of the vaccinated resorted to inoculation with smallpox, and they “took” as readily as did their unvaccinated acquaintance. Five in one family, the Hignells of Cheltenham, vaccinated by Jenner were variolated by Mr. Freeman, and smallpox resulted in the ordinary course. Nothing indeed became plainer than that the vaunted Variolous Test was a mere conjuring trick, and the more judicious vaccinators ceased to refer to it.
The promise that the vaccinated would remain for ever secure from smallpox Birch had no difficulty with. Londoners vaccinated by the most approved operators caught smallpox, and died precisely as did the unvaccinated. “Every post,” said Birch in 1804, “brings me accounts of the failures of vaccination.” As the failures multiplied, so did the excuses. There was the prime excuse of genuine and spurious cowpox. If vaccination failed, it could only be through the inadvertent use of spurious vaccine. Jenner had taught that one puncture was all-sufficient for protection, but as one was not found effective, it was asserted that two or three were requisite for absolute safety. Many, it was alleged, had been imperfectly operated upon, and the practice of the women and clergy and other busybodies was thrown into discredit, although at the outset their services and testimonies had been blazoned abroad as indisputable; but Birch made this conclusive answer--
It cannot be meant to class Mr. Wachsel, Apothecary to the Smallpox Hospital, or Mr. Bing, the Accoucheur, among ignorant and equivocal practitioners; and yet from the patients vaccinated by these two persons I could bring instance of more failures, more deaths, and more diseases than have occurred in the practice of any other two persons who have come within my knowledge.
Many, moreover, who had been vaccinated by Jenner fell victims to the disease, and he was so pestered with awkward questions, says Birch, “that to avoid the perplexing appeals that were made to him daily, and the messages that were perpetually sent requiring him to visit untoward cases, he retired from London.” Subsequently he had to forsake Cheltenham for the same reason. The convictions of quackery were too numerous for his endurance.
Having proved that vaccination did not prevent smallpox, whilst it was a frequent cause of illness and death, Birch held up to derision the fine promises wherewith its advocates had beguiled the people--
Were an architect to undertake to build an edifice which should be firm in its foundation; all its rooms wind and water tight; and such as might be inhabited with perfect security; if, before the edifice were well finished, the foundations were discovered to be rotten; and if in less than seven years, several apartments had fallen in and killed those who occupied them, while in a great number of rooms, the wind or rain was continually beating in, could I be blamed for declaring that the architect had broken his contract, and that the edifice ought no longer to be inhabited? Certainly not. Why then am I to be told that I am acting perversely when I remonstrate against the practice of Cowpox? for such an edifice as I have described, so rotten in its foundations, so ill built, so ruinous, is Vaccination.
Those who take success as the test of truth may say that Birch was unsuccessful in his contention; but he was not unsuccessful. Vaccination in London was discredited, and the imposture abated, as the report of the College of Surgeons in 1807 attests. Where retained, it was not so much as a preventive as a mitigator of smallpox, its advocates being content to occupy the safe position that it made milder a disease the severity of which was unknown.
Birch died in 1815. His sister reprinted his papers against vaccination (from which have come my citations[162]), and erected a monument to his memory in St. Margaret’s, Rood Lane, Fenchurch Street, the inscription on which is noteworthy.
SACRED To the Memory of JOHN BIRCH, Esquire, Many years an eminent Surgeon of this Metropolis; who died on the 3rd February, 1815, Aged 69 Years, and whose earthly remains lie deposited under the Pulpit and Desk.
_In his professional Character, As humane as he was skilful, He permitted not the daily sight of wounds and sores, Afflictions and wretchedness of every kind, To blunt the edge of his natural feelings, For the sufferings of his Fellow creatures: But, contemning a too hasty reliance on vaunted Theories, Sparing of the Knife--abhorring unnecessary Torture-- A foe to wanton, cruel, or dangerous experiment, Averse from rash operation, and the destruction of parts, Redeemable by patient and judicious care-- He erected for himself a high and distinguished reputation, On the solid, and only secure Basis of ENLIGHTENED EXPERIENCE: Stimulated throughout Life by a wise and Christian-like Ambition, to_ cure, not maim--preserve, and not destroy.
_Mankind is indebted to him For a more intimate acquaintance with the powers Of MEDICAL ELECTRICITY; By his own ingenious and improved application of which He performed many remarkable and almost unhoped-for cures. But the Practice of COW-POXING, Which first became general in his Day, Undaunted by the overwhelming influence of Power and Prejudice, and the voice of Nations, He uniformly, and until Death, perseveringly opposed; Conscientiously believing it to be a_ Public Infatuation, _Fraught with peril of the most mischievous consequences to Mankind. Whether right or wrong, Time will most surely determine:-- MAN’S MERE OPINIONS MUST EVER BE LIABLE TO ERROR; BUT BY THE MOTIVES THAT SWAY HIS HEART SHALL HE ALONE BE JUDGED._
To perpetuate the remembrance of Qualities so excellent, PENELOPE BIRCH, His affectionate and only surviving Sister, Hath raised this Monument: Not out of a worldly and vain-glorious Pride of Affinity; But in order to hand down an Example worthy of Imitation To succeeding Ages.
Jenner recognised Birch as a dangerous antagonist, and behaved toward him with his usual meanness. Writing from Berkeley, 11th October, 1812, to Moore in London, where smallpox was prevalent, he observed--
I have not heard lately whether the fury of the Smallpox is abated in town. I trust it is. Had I power to exercise vaccination as I liked, in one fortnight this dismal work of death should entirely cease. What a sad wicked fellow is that Birch! Moseley I hear nothing of now, but Birch is still employing his agents to spread the pestilence.[163]
Birch a sad wicked fellow employing agents to spread pestilence in London, whilst the good Jenner, capable of arresting the dismal work of death, sat impotent at Berkeley! Comment is superfluous. Quack, malicious and impudent, is written at large.
FOOTNOTES:
[160] Life of Jenner, vol. i. p. 541.
[161] A Practical Treatise on the Management and Diseases of Children. By Richard T. Evanson, M.D., and Henry Maunsell, M.D., Professors in the Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland. Dublin, 1838.
[162] An Appeal to the Public on the Hazard and Peril of Vaccination, otherwise Cowpox, by the late JOHN BIRCH, ESQ., together with his Serious Reasons for uniformly objecting to Vaccination: and other Tracts by the same Author. 3rd Edition. London, 1817.
[163] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. ii., p. 382.
XX. GOLDSON AND BROWN
William Goldson, member of the London College of Surgeons, practising at Portsea, published a pamphlet in 1804[164] wherein he set forth a number of instances within his own experience of smallpox following vaccination by infection or inoculation. He did not turn against vaccination, but suggested that its prophylaxy might neither be so certain nor so enduring as at first asserted. Vaccination, he pointed out, had been carried into practice on a wave of enthusiasm, and it was not unreasonable to expect that on closer acquaintance some of the claims made for it should be subject to modification. Indeed so much was already admitted; for failures had led to the discrimination of spurious from genuine cowpox, and to the issue of new instructions as to the period of taking vaccine, “on which point, it was now said, depended the whole success of the operation.” Thus what was originally set forth as an operation for which any novice was competent, had developed into one of considerable delicacy with serious liability to miscarriage. Goldson, therefore, had fair reason to believe that his own observations and suggestions would meet with candid consideration, and, if verified, serve for general guidance in the practice of vaccination.
It is unnecessary to recite Goldson’s cases. Interesting at the time, they are now commonplace. He found that inoculation with smallpox was possible at an interval after vaccination, and that infection with smallpox was equally possible under the like circumstances. One case is noteworthy for its connection with Jenner. A seaman, named Clarke, was successfully vaccinated on 4th November, 1800, and, returning from a voyage to the West Indies was put to the variolous test on 24th March, 1802, when he sickened with smallpox and was sent to Haslar. To prove that his malady was really smallpox, several persons were variolated from him. The Committee of the House of Commons was sitting on Jenner’s first claim for public money, and Goldson wrote to Jenner to come to Haslar and see Clarke for himself; but Jenner was too astute to cumber himself with difficulties at a time when so much cash was in question. The case was mentioned to the Committee, but was treated as of no moment in presence of what they were pleased to regard as overwhelming evidence as to the perpetual virtue of vaccination.
Goldson’s was a modest pamphlet--conjectural rather than demonstrative. He ventured to think it was possible that the efficacy of vaccine might be weakened by transmission from arm to arm, and that security might be restored by reversion to the cow--
The casual Cowpox is produced by virus immediately from the animal; while the inoculated disease is the effect of new matter generated by the action of the other on the human subject. Whether that new matter be possessed of the power to produce the same permanent properties as the parent virus, time alone can decide.
He likewise suggested that horsegrease might be inoculated on the nipple of the milch mare, and the virus used for equination. These and other points were advanced with a philosophic grace that ought to have commanded respect; but, on the contrary, his pamphlet was received with a howl of fury, and its author denounced as an ill-conditioned fellow--ignorant, prejudiced, pig-headed. It was safer to be pronounced anti-vaccinist than a vaccinator and harbour doubt as to any article of the Jennerian faith. Ring plied his bludgeon over the heretic, and Jenner wrote of him with malicious insolence--“All his reasoning is erroneous;” “his arrogance is increased by attention;” “he obstinately holds a veil before his eyes, and will not behold the vaccine light;” “one might as well contend with a blind man on the nature of a prism;” and so on. Goldson’s offence was that he laid his finger on some of the weaker points of vaccination; that his sight was too keen, and his reasoning too cogent. At this day the questions between him and Jenner are decided by vaccinators themselves in Goldson’s favour.[165]
Perhaps the most able attack on the practice of vaccination was delivered by Thomas Brown, surgeon, Musselburgh; and it is much to be regretted that his book, published in Edinburgh in 1809,[166] is so little known at this day. Brown had accepted vaccination, carried away, he admitted, by the common enthusiasm, and the unqualified audacity with which its claims were asserted--
The practice was introduced and recommended to the public by its Author as a perfect antidote and security against Smallpox without any exception or reserve, and capable of banishing Variola from the catalogue of human misery. I have no hesitation in confessing that I became an early convert and advocate of the new practice; and it is now eight years and a-half since I have uniformly advised and practised Vaccination, in which period I may safely say, I have vaccinated upwards of twelve hundred patients, and have only inoculated three at the positive request of parents. This course I persevered in until the present time, notwithstanding I met with several instances where it appeared to fail in giving security; some about three years after the introduction of the practice; a few more about two years ago; and those which make part of the present volume within the last six months.
An epidemic, in which his own perfectly vaccinated patients fell victims to smallpox, at last opened his eyes to the delusion in which he was walking, and to the perversity with which he and others had resisted the light of truth--
I am convinced from what has passed under my own observation for the last three or four years, that we have been all guilty of rejecting evidence that deserved more attention, in consequence of the strong prepossessions which existed, from the very persuasive proof of Vaccination resisting inoculation and exposure to infection, and from our judgments being goaded and overpowered with the positive and arbitrary opinions of its abettors. I am now perfectly satisfied, from my mind being under the influence of prejudice and blind to the impression of the fairest evidence, that the last time Smallpox was prevalent, I rejected and explained away many cases which were entitled to the most serious attention, and showed myself as violent and unreasonable a partisan as any of my brethren in propagating a practice, which I have now little doubt we must ere long surrender at discretion.
When Brown first saw the vaccinated prostrate with smallpox, he concluded that there must have been some mistake about their vaccination; “for after Vaccination it was impossible to contract Smallpox;” but the evidence of his senses gradually overcame the phantasy imposed upon him, and like an honest man he proclaimed his error, and verified the experiences whereby he had been reluctantly corrected. He set forth with all particulars forty-eight cases of smallpox following vaccination within his own immediate cognizance, and though aware of many cases outside that cognizance, he limited himself to what he could attest with personal assurance. He knew he would be told that the vaccinations had been imperfect, or that what he took for smallpox was some other eruption--
It is strenuously contended [said Brown] by nearly every author, and by almost every practitioner, that Vaccination is a perfect antidote against Smallpox, if the disease be properly communicated; and Dr. Jenner and his relative, Mr. G. Jenner, positively assert, that they have had not one instance of failure in their own practice. They all therefore, and without hesitation, refer the whole series of failures that have been brought forward to the sweeping power of imperfect Vaccination, or to the blindness and stupidity of the medical practitioner who cannot distinguish between Smallpox and Chickenpox, a rash, or bug-bites.
Nor did Brown rest satisfied with proving that vaccination did not prevent smallpox. He also showed the fallacy of the variolous test. He adduced twelve cases in which vaccinated persons had been variolated as if they had never been vaccinated. Also four cases in which vaccination and variolation were effected simultaneously, the diseases running their courses concurrently, proving there was no antagonism between them; and since they could occur together, what reason was left for supposing that one might not succeed the other?
Having found liberty in the truth, he reverted to Jenner’s writings, and reading them with opened eyes, he was not slow to detect and to demonstrate the laxity of statement, the contradictions, and absurdities with which they were pervaded. No reply was attempted: no reply, indeed, was possible. The surgeons of the Edinburgh Vaccine Institution issued An Examination of Mr. Brown’s Opinions and Statements,[167] but they merely carped over non-essential details, and left the main issues wholly unaffected. What they had to show was that Brown’s patients were either unvaccinated, or had not had smallpox; and unable to do this, they were unable to do anything.
Brown remained victor. He did not overthrow vaccination, nor restore variolation, but he did make an end in Scotland of confidence in vaccination as an omnipotent safeguard against smallpox. The rite continued to be practised on humbler terms: “it did no harm”: even Mr. Brown allowed that it might keep off smallpox for a time: and “there was reason to believe that it tended to make the disease milder when it did occur.” Thirty years after his first publication, in 1842, Brown reaffirmed his position in a series of letters[168] to Dr. George Gregory, a sympathetic friend, and advised a return to variolation in view of “the acknowledged defects of the Jennerian practice”--a dismal alternative. But it is in vain to expect any man to be much in advance of his time: it suffices for honourable distinction that he be in advance. When Brown commenced practice, smallpox and other fevers were regarded as inevitable as storms and earthquakes, and the knowledge with which we are now so familiar, that they are engendered in foul habits and habitations, was for practical purposes unknown. Our reproach is, that knowing so much better, we surrender ourselves to a superstitious observance conceived in days of darkness.
FOOTNOTES:
[164] Cases of Smallpox subsequent to Vaccination, with Facts and Observations read before the Medical Society at Portsmouth, 29th March, 1804: addressed to the Directors of the Vaccine Institution. By William Goldson. Portsea, 1884.
[165] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. ii. pp. 338, 346, 348.
[166] An Inquiry into the Anti-Variolous Power of Vaccination; in which from the state of the Phenomena and the Occurrence of a great variety of Cases, the most Serious Doubts are suggested of the Efficacy of the Whole Practice, and its Powers at best proved to be only temporary. From which also will appear the Necessity of and the proper period for again submitting to Inoculation with Variolous Virus. By Thomas Brown, Surgeon, Musselburgh. Edinburgh, 1809. Pp. 307.
[167] Report of the Surgeons of the Edinburgh Vaccine Institution, containing an Examination of the Opinions and Statements of Mr. Brown of Musselburgh on Vaccination. Edinburgh, 1809.
[168] An Investigation of the Present Unsatisfactory and Defective State of Vaccination, and the Several Expedients proposed for removing the now Acknowledged Defects of the Jennerian practice. In a Series of Letters addressed to Dr. George Gregory, Physician to the Smallpox and Vaccination Hospital, London; which also are intended as an Answer to the Queries of the Academy of Science in Paris, proposed as the subject of a Prize Essay. By Thomas Brown, formerly Medical Practitioner in Musselburgh. Edinburgh, 1842, pp. 139.
XXI. MOSELEY, ROWLEY AND SQUIRREL
It may be well to devote a chapter to those antagonists of Vaccination who, though right in their contention against cowpox, did more or less to discredit their cause by scurrility and extravagance. The faults of these men are frequently adduced as evidence of the absurd and brutal resistance with which Vaccination was encountered, but it is forgotten how intense was their provocation, and how the bad on one side was matched by the bad on the other. It was a contest between Smallpoxers and Cowpoxers, alike ignorant of the conditions of physical well-being. It is plain, however, in the light of our later experience, that much that was asserted by the Smallpoxers of the uselessness and harmfulness of cowpox must have been exactly and painfully true, though persistently and ferociously denied.
In the Edinburgh Review for October, 1806, appeared an article entitled “Pamphlets on Vaccine Inoculation,” which may be taken as a reflection of the state of the controversy at that date, and as an index to the chief offenders against propriety. The article was written by the editor, Francis Jeffrey, and was a product of that perspicuous intelligence, which reduced to order whatever was subjected to its action, in much the same way that a housemaid “sets to rights” a library by ranging the books according to their sizes and bindings, and assorting the papers so that they lie neatly disposed. As is the habit of able editors, a view of the variolous controversy was evolved that might be comfortably accepted and confidently repeated by his readers--the evolution of such rational mirage being regarded for the time as veracious matter-of-fact.
First we may take the reviewer’s evidence as to the extent and fury of the controversy--
The ample and public testimony offered in favour of Vaccination seemed for a while to set the question at rest; and, except in a few obscure pamphlets and communications to the medical journals, little was heard in opposition to it, till 1804, when Mr. Goldson of Portsmouth published six cases of Smallpox occurring after Vaccination, accompanied with observations, calculated to shake the confidence which was now very generally placed in the security of the Jennerian inoculation. These were answered by Mr. Ring and others, who endeavoured to show that, in some of his cases, Mr. Goldson’s patients had not had the genuine Cowpox in the first instance, and that in others, they had not had the genuine Smallpox thereafter. This part of the controversy was conducted with temper, and with a reasonable degree of candour. In the end of the same year however, Dr. Moseley published his treatise on the Cowpox, in which the ravings of Bedlam seemed to be blended with the tropes of Billingsgate. Dr. Rowley followed on the same side, and in the same temper, with 500 cases of “the beastly new diseases produced from Cowpox,” and attracted customers by two coloured engravings at the head of his work of “the Cowpoxed, ox-faced boy,” and the “Cowpoxed, mangey girl.” The battle now became general. The Reverend Rowland Hill thundered in defence of vaccination--Dr. Squirrel leaped from his cage upon the whole herd of vaccinators--Mr. Birch insisted upon stating his serious reasons for objecting to Cowpox--Drs. Thornton and Lettsom chanted pæans in its praise--Mr. Lipscomb strutted forward with a ponderous, wordy dissertation on its failures and mischiefs; and Messrs. Ring, Merriman, and Blair answered everybody; and exasperated all their opponents by their intemperance and personality. Charges of murder and falsehood were interchanged among the disputants without the smallest ceremony; the medical journals foamed with the violence of their contention; it raged in hospitals and sick-chambers; and polluted with its malignity the sanctity of the pulpit and the harmony of convivial philanthropy.
In the whole course of our censorial labours, we have never had occasion to contemplate a scene so disgusting and humiliating as is presented by the greater part of this controversy; nor do we believe that the virulence of political animosity or personal rivalry or revenge ever gave rise, among the lowest and most prostituted scribblers, to so much coarseness, illiberality, violence and absurdity as is here exhibited by gentlemen of sense and education discussing a point of professional science with a view to the good of mankind. At one time, indeed, we were so overpowered and confounded by the clamour and vehement contradictions of the combatants, that we were tempted to abandon the task we had undertaken, and leave it to some more athletic critic to collect the few facts and the little reasoning which could be discerned in this tempest of the medical world.
Furious was the controversy, but why was it furious? There are often great fights over little matters, but the reason is that the little matters are vitally related to the self-love of the combatants; and thus it was with the Cowpoxers and the Smallpoxers. The Cowpoxers set out with the absolute assertion that whoever submitted to their prescription would be secure from smallpox for life. Without proof, or with powerful sham proof, the assertion was endorsed by the mass of the medical profession, and there followed the conversion of the community in that sort of faith-panic which is described by Carlyle as Swarmery--
All the world assenting, and continually repeating and reverberating, there soon comes that singular phenomenon called Swarmery, or the gathering of men in swarms; and what prodigies they are in the habit of doing and believing when thrown into that miraculous condition! Singular, in the case of human swarms, with what perfection of unanimity and quasi-religious conviction the stupidest absurdities can be received as axioms of Euclid, nay, as articles of faith, which you are not only to believe, unless malignantly insane, but are (if you have any honour or morality) to push into practice, and, without delay see done, if your soul would live.[169]
People thus enchanted do not like to be brought to their senses; and medical men, who in 1800 attested the perpetual prophylaxy of cowpox, were naturally very unwilling to be proved deceivers and deceived. When cases of smallpox were reported as following vaccination, they at first denied the possibility, saying that either there had been no vaccination, or that the smallpox was not smallpox. On the other hand, the Smallpoxers who had been snuffed out by the Cowpoxers, revived in presence of the discovered impotence of the new practice, and stoutly maintained, and cruelly demonstrated that unquestionable vaccinations were followed by unquestionable smallpox. It needs little acquaintance with human nature to see unlimited elements of bitterness in these conditions. To be convicted of imposture does not beget equanimity, nor contradiction as to plain matter-of-fact; and thus convicted were the Cowpoxers and thus contradicted were the Smallpoxers.
The Edinburgh reviewer described Dr. Moseley’s treatise on cowpox as blending “the ravings of Bedlam with the tropes of Billingsgate.” Some Billingsgate I concede, but not Bedlam at all. Much however depends on the point of view. Vaccination if regarded as a blessing in which the inspiration of heaven was consummated in the salvation of the human race from smallpox,[170] resistance thereto might appear, as Carlyle observes of creatures under enchantment, as “malignantly insane.”
Dr. Moseley’s book,[171] it is to be allowed, was singularly exasperating. He had spoken against cowpox from the outset, and was charged with condemning that of which he knew nothing; to which he cogently replied that he could scarcely know less than the gang of medical men who attested its perpetual efficacy in the newspapers in 1800 before they had any proper experience of it whatever. If his scepticism was premature, what was their credulity? Moseley had patience: no argument could be heard in the rage that set in for the new salvation. “Cowpox, I admit, is not contagious,” he said, “but cow-mania is.” When, however, in process of time it was seen in hundreds of cases that cowpox conferred no immunity from smallpox, he published in 1804 Lues Bovilla--a somewhat pompous treatise, with frequent touches of superfluous learning, and permeated with the irritating superiority of the true prophet--“You see it has turned out just as I predicted.” Nor was he content to make general assertions: he specified the names and addresses of those who had been correctly vaccinated, or had taken cowpox from the cow, and had subsequently suffered from smallpox with their neighbours; also of cases of severe illness, injury, and death resulting from vaccination. Bluster was idle in presence of such facts. Even the Royal Jennerians had to eat humble pie, for in their Report, dated 2nd January, 1806, we read--
It is admitted by the Committee that a few cases have been brought before them of persons having the Smallpox who had apparently passed through the Cowpox in a regular way.
With so much admitted by such furious fanatics, what might not be inferred!
Moseley was held in high esteem alike by the profession and the public, and his judgment enforced by so much serious evidence contributed heavily to the discredit of vaccination, and unfortunately to the resumption of variolous inoculation. That the reaction was extensive, especially in London, appears from numerous contemporary testimonies, which Moseley confirms in saying--
The people at large are not to be reproached for putting their faith in this splendid imposition on humanity; and to the credit of their discernment and parental feelings, the middle and inferior classes have taken precedence in renouncing the delusion. At this moment, unless attacked by surprise, or with threats, or cajoled by artifice (all of which have been practised on them) there are now none among them in London and the adjacent villages who will expose their children to Cowpox Inoculation.
Rowland Hill was a religious and philanthropic notable in those days, and in common with many of his kind, was an enthusiastic vaccinator. A leading spirit in the Royal Jennerian Society, he had the school-room of Surrey Chapel constituted a vaccination station whereat Dr. Walker officiated. Nor was he content to patronise the practice, but was himself an energetic operator. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Jennerian Society, 17th May, 1806, he said--
“With my own hands I have vaccinated upwards of 5000 persons,” and, lifting up his eyes to heaven, exclaimed, “I solemnly declare before God, I have not had a failure in a single instance. What then shall we say of the false and daring publications of those who denounce the benign practice, and how shall they answer for their conduct to their King, their Country, and their God!”
Hill and Jenner were great friends. Hill visited Jenner at Berkeley, and Jenner heard Hill when he preached at Cheltenham. Introducing Jenner to a nobleman, Hill remarked--
“Allow me to present to your Lordship my friend Dr. Jenner, who has been the means of saving more lives than any other man.”
To which Jenner, being of a pious turn, sighed with meek effusion--
“Ah! would I, like you, could say souls.”[172]
So committed and so possessed, Hill naturally resented the growing distrust of vaccination. It cut him deeply to be supposed a quack; and in 1806 he issued a pamphlet[173] relating his experiences as a Jennerite, defending his practice, and denouncing those who treated it despitefully. Moseley especially was subjected to severe and contemptuous condemnation. Hill’s sanctimony and virulence, his vigour and venom compose a piquant mixture, and if we could tarry for amusement we might produce it abundantly from a variety of elegant extracts. Consider, for instance, this his adjuration, and its pitiful object--
Oh, the blessing of the Jennerian inoculation! Did ever man stand as Jenner so much like an Angel of God, an instrument in the hands of Divine Providence between the living and the dead till the plague was stayed!
Hill’s latent assumption throughout his discourse was--
First, that all must have smallpox; and
Second, that all the vaccinated who escaped smallpox, owed their salvation to their Jennerisation.
It never apparently occurred to him that before Jenner was heard of, many passed through life exempt from smallpox; nor, consequently, did he inquire how they escaped; nor why, when vaccination was introduced, escape should be placed to its credit.
The belief in the vicarious influence of vaccination comes out strongly, too, in Hill’s pamphlet. Of Londoners there were then over 1,000,000, and of these, he says, at least, 100,000 had been vaccinated, and with this effect--
Vaccination reduced the deaths from Smallpox in London to 10 per week; but after the Inoculators had been making their clamours, the applicants for Vaccination diminished, and the deaths soon rose to 100 per week.
Now can effrontery itself deny that the introduction of Vaccination was the sole cause of reducing the fatality on the Smallpox list?
Thus one in ten being vaccinated, smallpox was reduced throughout the unvaccinated 9-10ths; and as soon as the vicarious operations dropped, up went the rate of mortality! Nor was Hill singular in this persuasion. He cited his friend Dr. Lettsom as writing to him, 25th March, 1806--
Vaccination was gradually lessening the mortality in 1804, when about the middle of 1805 false reports against Vaccination gained very general credit, and Vaccination was nearly suspended; the consequence was the death of 1286 children in four months (September to December) or ten every day, each of whom might now have been alive had the blessing of Vaccination been accepted.
And again I find Lettsom wrote to Moseley, November, 1808--
The increase of births and decrease of deaths has added 3000 lives annually to the population of London during the period that Vaccination has been practised.
Talk evidently sincere, and widely repeated, but with how little consideration for truth!
To return to Moseley. He was not the man to endure Hill’s aggression submissively, and in a pamphlet entitled An Oliver for a Rowland,[174] he made a terrific reprisal. The public were delighted with it, and in the course of a few months it ran through ten editions. Hill was generally regarded as a clerical mountebank, with more impudence than piety, and to see him knocked over, kicked, and rolled in the mire, was sport that carried many sympathisers. Moseley’s opening address gives the key to the whole performance--
ROWLAND,--I bought your pamphlet, entitled Cowpox Inoculation Vindicated, dated the 25th of March, 1806.
I paid a shilling for it. Rowland,--it is not dear. The same quantity of folly, falsehood, and impudence, could not have been bought for twice the money of any other Cowpoxer from the Ganges to the Mississippi.
But let me ask you, Rowland, what could induce you to take up your pen to attack me on the subject of Physic, who never attacked you on the subject of Religion? Would it not have been more prudent in you to have continued to expose yourself in your own trade in your own shop?
As to my learned friend Dr. Lettsom (who is never out of the way when there is good to be done) being moved to instigate you, a Methodist parson, to enter into a medical controversy--that can only be accounted for by supposing he owes you a grudge, and put you into my hands for payment.
Paid he was with interest--gross and Rabelaisian; and Hill, when he had picked himself up and recovered his senses, discreetly retired from the combat.
Spite of his pomposity and buffoonery, there was good sense and humour in Moseley, and his resistance to the Jennerian mania was not ineffective. As he wrote in 1808--
It is ten years since I began this Trojan war against Vaccinia; and if it be not yet ended, I have at least the satisfaction to see that her original troops are no longer able to defend her throne; and that the mobled Queen with “a clout upon her head where late diadem stood,” has fallen to a new dynasty of mercenaries.[175]
In Dr. Munk’s Roll of the Royal College of Physicians we read, that Dr. Moseley was appointed physician to Chelsea Hospital in 1788, “an office which he filled with the highest éclat for more than thirty years”--until his death in 1819--
Though a shrewd practitioner, and undeniably a man of extensive mental capacity and very considerable attainments, Dr. Moseley was a violent opponent of Vaccination, on which his communications to the press were incessant. They did little credit to his medical penetration, or his qualifications as a dispassionate searcher after truth, and, happily for his reputation, are now well nigh forgotten.[176]
Are they? For what else is Dr. Moseley remembered? So that a man does his duty in the world, whether he be forgotten or remembered is not worth a thought; but Moseley’s early and steadfast resistance to the Cowpox Imposture will long constitute his title to grateful recollection.
Dr. William Rowley, Physician to the Marylebone Infirmary, also left his mark in medical history as a determined opponent of vaccination. He had seen the profession and the public go mad about so many absurd novelties, that it did not surprise him that they should go mad about cowpox: and after due experience and investigation he delivered judgment on the craze and its pernicious effects in a pamphlet entitled Cowpox Inoculation no Security against Smallpox,[177] containing two coloured engravings representing the Cowpoxed Ox-Faced Boy, and the Cowpoxed Mangey Girl. Much ridicule was expended on these pictures, and to this day whoever wishes to be funny and create giggle over the early resistance to vaccination tells how one Dr. Rowley maintained that Jenner’s benign virus induced the face of an ox on a boy; but like the majority of comic anecdotes, it is untrue. The engraving represents a comely lad with a swelling on the upper part of his left cheek, which was thought to give that side of his face an ox-like expression. Many a medical practitioner among the poor would at this day have little difficulty in presenting living examples of affliction answering to Rowley’s pictures--and worse. It was, moreover, the fear or fancy of many at the time that inoculation with cowpox might beget bovine characteristics in the human species, and the fear or fancy was turned to inevitable account in jest and earnest. The jest is visible in some of Rowlandson’s caricatures, and stories like this got into circulation--
A child at Peckham, after being inoculated with Cowpox, had its former natural disposition absolutely changed to the brutal, so that it ran upon all fours like a beast, bellowing like a cow, and butting like a bull.
In order to discredit Rowley, it is thought fair policy to connect him with such nonsense, and to have it supposed that he rested his case upon “the cowpoxed ox-faced boy:” it was far otherwise. He diligently tracked the vaccinators, and accumulated 504 cases of smallpox and injury after vaccination with 75 deaths, particulars being accurately specified. Nor was he content merely to report what he had ascertained. “Come and see,” was his forcible argument. “I have lately had under my care,” he wrote, “some of the worst species of malignant smallpox in the Marylebone Infirmary, which many of the faculty have examined and know to have been vaccinated.” His trust in “Come and see,” he still more powerfully exemplified in an exhibition of the injuries inflicted by vaccination in his Lecture Room in Savile Row in October, 1805. “Knowing,” he said, “the caviling character of the Cowpoxers, I determined to leave them no hole for retreat”; and therefore he brought together Joules, “the ox-faced boy, who also had a terribly diseased elbow-joint”; Marianne Lewis, the mangey girl, “who was covered with blotches like a leopard”; “a load of children in a cart from the south of London,” and others accompanied by their parents, and displaying their various maladies, said, “Behold the effects of the new disease that has been taken from the cow and implanted in humanity!” This painful exposition was continued over two days, and as he records, “the scene was truly affecting and distressing to all who witnessed it.” An antagonist like Rowley is a serious factor in any controversy, and we may estimate the havoc he wrought by the extreme anxiety of the Jennerites to have him estimated by the supposed absurdity of the ox-faced boy.
To a man of practical temper like Rowley, the enthusiasm with which vaccination was at first advocated appeared akin to delirium--
I have been in some vaccination storms, and have had the buttons torn off my coat, cloth and all, to convince me of the great and infallible excellence of Cowpox. I have seen some of the vehement vaccinators redden like a flame with fury, their lips quivering, their eyes starting out of their heads, their mouths foaming, their tongues dropping hard words, and their fists clenched like pugilists, ready to accompany their violent wrath with other knock-down arguments. In such circumstances, mild, investigating Philosophy quits the scene and leaves the field of battle to the Bedlamites.
The fury had subsided in 1805, and Rowley held that many medical men were deeply ashamed of the extravagance into which they had been committed, but lacked courage to make frank confession.
Rowley died in 1806, and the regard in which he was held was manifest in the crowds who flocked to his funeral. In the Roll of Physicians, Dr. Munk observes--
Dr. Rowley was a determined opponent of Vaccination, and obtained an unenviable notoriety by his association with Dr. Moseley in opposing every conceivable obstacle to the reception and progress of that invaluable discovery.
The obstacles interposed were matters-of-fact, and as matters-of-fact were recognised and prevailed.
The controversy that followed the introduction of Vaccination “gave birth,” says the Edinburgh reviewer, “to an infinite number of publications of all descriptions” from which he could only select the most characteristic. Among these we find Dr. Squirrel, whose book is described “as the most entertaining of the whole”--
We will venture to say, though we know it to be a bold assertion, that there never was anything so ill-written, or so vulgar and absurd, produced before by a person entitling himself a Doctor of Medicine. There is a certain nimbleness and agility about him, however, which keeps us in good humour, and he whisks about with such a self-satisfied springiness and activity, that it is really enlivening to look on him.
Turning up Squirrel’s pamphlet[178] I find little or nothing to warrant this description. It is not ill-written, if judged by the standard of medical literature, and the “springiness” is a conceit of the reviewer’s to sport with the Doctor’s name. My own impression is that Squirrel was a dull fellow, jealous of cowpox as injurious to the trade in smallpox inoculation, and that he availed himself of the depression in the vaccination business to assert its superiority. He admits, indeed, that he kept silent during the Jennerian furore, “but the overwhelming torrent being gradually reduced to a feeble current,” he reckoned that he “might now promulgate his opinion with a reasonable hope of success.” He cites Jenner’s account of the origin of cowpox in the greasy heels of horses, and proceeds to argue that the disease is scrofula, which its inoculation is certain to diffuse, whilst affording no protection from smallpox. He then adduces a number of cases in proof that inoculated cowpox had not averted smallpox, and had in several instances brought on serious and fatal ailments.
Jenner in a letter to Moore from Berkeley, 28th February, 1810, thus refers to Squirrel--
John Gale Jones, I see, has at length succeeded in obtaining the situation for which he has long been a candidate. This fellow had once the impudence to desire a man to call on me in Bedford Place to say, that he, Jones, would advise me immediately to quit London, for there was no knowing what an enraged populace might do. He was the writer of Squirrel’s book, the long anti-vaccine columns in the Independent Whig, and many of the most violent papers in the Medical Observer. I was held up in his Forum for several nights as an object of derision; but I silenced him by the same weapon as I have others--contempt.[179]
Jenner’s contempt was of a miraculous quality, operating insensibly upon those to whom it was applied. Some might fancy it was his idleness and others his cowardice; but he knew that it was his contempt, and that it blasted his adversaries in much the same way that vaccination blasted smallpox.
There is the woeful monotony of truth in these old pamphlets, not merely in the occurrence of smallpox after vaccination, but in the sadder stories of acute and chronic blood-poisoning. We recognise the narratives as true, for they are reproduced among us continuously by the same means, with the same miseries and agonies, and with the same death for grateful release.
It is clear from the testimony of Moseley, Rowley and Squirrel, confirmed too by others and by the Jennerites themselves, that the extension of vaccination met with a decided check in London. It was proved to many in a fashion that did not admit of dispute, that vaccination conferred no security from smallpox, whilst it was attended with dangers to health, certain if as yet undefinable. Variolous inoculation was again reverted to, but by diminished numbers; for that practice never had prevailed with popular good-will, but through sedulous medical persuasion as duty of dire necessity. Vaccination afforded excuse for hesitation, and, between rival claims, many contrived to elude either form of pollution. Thus indirectly as it were, vaccine inoculation set aside variolous, and when in 1840 the latter was forbidden by law, there was little of the practice left, whilst at the same time the majority of the population existed without Jennerian protection.
It is not to be forgotten that the early resistance to vaccination proceeded entirely from inoculators with smallpox. It was as yet unimagined that smallpox and other fevers were preventible, that their causes lay within control, and that health was the best defence of health. The world as yet lay in darkness as to those truths which we now recognise as laws of health, hygiene, and sanitary science; nor has the darkness rolled away, but is rolling away, and the time is not distant when to be vaccinated in order to be safe from smallpox will be accounted the drollest of absurdities.
Going back to the Edinburgh Review, we remark with curious interest how the chief position then asserted was the abiding efficacy of vaccination. Inoculators were ready to concede that it might possess a temporary prophylaxy, inasmuch as until one blood fever had subsided another was unlikely to supervene; but this view Jeffrey declined to entertain--
It seems contrary to all analogy, and all rules of reasoning to suppose, a priori, that an immunity which is found to subsist for a certain time in the usual and healthful state of the system, will gradually and insensibly wear away without any apparent cause, or any sensible change to indicate its extinction; and the facts which bear at all upon the question, so far from suggesting or supporting such a supposition, seem, in our apprehension, completely to refute and discredit it.
Yet what in 1806 was accounted “contrary to all analogy,” and “completely refuted and discredited by facts,” is precisely what vaccinators now admit. Hence their cry for re-vaccination--septennially, triennially, annually. Dr. Lionel Beale, a great authority in the matter, recently owned to having been vaccinated ten times, and in terror of an epidemic was about to be vaccinated once more--a striking exemplification of contemporary theory and practice. To have foreseen such an issue would have confounded the early vaccinators. When re-vaccination was mentioned to Dr. Pearson, he denied its possibility; “for,” said he, “Vaccination is equivalent to smallpox, which cannot recur. If a child can be re-vaccinated, then it can take smallpox; ergo vaccination is not an equivalent for smallpox; and where then is the good of it?” Where indeed!
The Edinburgh reviewer was sufficiently impartial to recognise violence alike among Cowpoxers and Smallpoxers, and specified John Ping, Jenner’s bully, as an offender, describing his Treatise on Cowpox as “one thousand and forty chaotic pages in defence of the new practice.” Ring verified the criticism by issuing a pamphlet, The Beauties of the Edinburgh Review alias the Stink-Pot of Literature; reminding us of the man who writing to his wife from an inn-parlour remarked, “I must conclude, for an unmannerly Irishman is looking over my shoulder and reading every word I write;” an observation that was immediately clenched with, “You are a liar, sir; a liar!”
FOOTNOTES:
[169] Shooting Niagara.
[170] “Neglect not, I exhort you, such proffered blessing. Secure yourselves from danger; preserve your children; and render most grateful thanks to Almighty God who has so providentially permitted to man this means of defence against the pestilence that walked in darkness, and the sickness that destroyed in the noon-day.”--Address of the Rev. T. A. Warren to his Parishioners, reprinted by the Royal Jennerian Society, 1803.
[171] A Treatise on the Lues Bovilla or Cowpox. By Benjamin Moseley, M.D. Second Edition. London, 1805. Pp. 142.
[172] Sidney’s Life of Hill, p. 225.
[173] Cowpox Inoculation Vindicated and Recommended from Matters of Fact. By Rowland Hill, A.M. London, 1806. Pp. 72.
[174] _An Oliver for a Rowland; or, a Cowpox Epistle to the Rev. Rowland Hill under the wing of Surrey Chapel._ By Benjamin Moseley, M.D. Tenth Edition. London, 1807. Pp. 102.
[175] A Review of the Report of the Royal College of Physicians of London on Vaccination. By Benjamin Moseley, M.D. London, 1808. Pp. 86.
[176] The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians comprising Biographical Sketches. By William Munk, M.D. London, 1878.
[177] Cowpox Inoculation no Security against Smallpox Infection. To which are added the Modes of treating the Beastly New Diseases produced from Cowpox, explained by two coloured copper-plate engravings, as--
Cowpox Mange Cowpox Evil or Abscess Cowpox Ulcers Cowpox Mortification.
With the Author’s certain, experienced and successful mode of Inoculating for the Smallpox which now becomes necessary from Cowpox Failure, etc. By William Rowley, M.D., Member of the University of Oxford, the Royal College of Physicians, London, and Physician to the St. Marylebone Infirmary. London, 1805. Pp. 82. The first edition appeared 4th October, 1805, and a third 27th January, 1806.
[178] Observations on the Cowpox showing that it originates in Scrophula, commonly called the Evil; illustrated with Cases to prove that it is no Security against the Smallpox. Also pointing out the dreadful Consequences of this new Disease, so recently and rashly introduced into the Human Constitution. By R. Squirrel, M.D., formerly Resident Apothecary to the Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital. London, 1805. Pp. 76. A Second edition appeared in 1806.
[179] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. ii., p. 367.
XXII. WILLIAM COBBETT
Everybody appeals to common-sense, but what is common-sense? It is a question difficult to answer; and yet, as I propose to show that Cobbett’s opposition to vaccination was justified by common-sense, I am bound to give some definition of the term.
Common-sense is reason as evolved from common experience. What the multitude of men have found to be true in the course of life, that is common-sense, which to question or resist is folly or fanaticism. This vulgar and vigorous rationality is often summoned to service where it has no vocation. For example, when it was first taught that the earth was a sphere and that its inhabitants had antipodes, the revelation was denounced as contrary to common-sense; but it is obvious that in such a case (which represents myriads) it was wrongly invoked; the form of the earth being at the time outside common cognisance. As soon, however, as it was realised by experience that the earth was spherical and inhabited in all its quarters, then its rotundity became incorporated in the constitution of common-sense.
The realm of common-sense I therefore hold to be limited by its origin in common experience, and in matters above or beyond that experience, its dicta are illegitimate, and synonyms for presumption and prejudice.
William Cobbett was essentially a man of common-sense. His power lay in his community with the experience and reason of his countrymen; and, like all of us, he had the defects of his virtue. He continually applied his vulgar judgment to the criticism of men and matters beyond the range of his competence, and the result was a luxuriance of arrogance and contempt for which at this day we must resort to Mr. Ruskin for a parallel.
Such being the case, we have to inquire, What was the worth of Cobbett’s opinion in the matter of vaccination? The attempt is sometimes made by vaccinators to withdraw their practice from popular discussion. They say it is a medical question for medical men; but the assertion provokes suspicion rather than confidence, for mystery is an invariable note of imposture. It is fair, I allow, to say of any abstruse knowledge that it can only be apprehended by those whose faculties are trained for its apprehension; but what is there abstruse about vaccination? With little trouble, everybody may know as much about it as anybody. It is the simplest of surgical operations. It is almost as easy as taking pills--instead of putting poison down the throat it is inserted into the skin. The operation may result in any number of pathological complications, but whether such complications be admitted or denied, what vaccination is prescribed for, namely, the prevention of smallpox, comes within the range of common observation. What, therefore, I have to answer is, that Cobbett’s common-sense was competent to deliver judgment upon vaccination.
Moreover, the circumstances of the time compelled an opinion: silence or neutrality was impossible. England was swarming with vaccinators. All the fussy folk who had a taste for doing much good at little cost were plying the cowpox lancet. Encouraged by Jenner, they got vaccine, inoculated a victim, and propagated the virus from arm to arm. Here I may let Cobbett speak for himself--
This nation is fond of quackery of all sorts; and this particular quackery having been sanctioned by King, Lords, and Commons, it spread over the country like a pestilence borne by the winds. Speedily sprang up the Royal Jennerian Institution, and branch institutions issuing from the parent trunk, set instantly to work, impregnating the veins of the rising generation with the beastly matter. Gentlemen and ladies made the commodity a pocket companion; and if a cottager’s child was seen by them on a common (in Hampshire at least) and did not quickly take to its heels, it was certain to carry off more or less of the disease of the cow. One would have thought that half the cows in the country had been tapped to get such a quantity of stuff.[180]
Nor was vaccination merely forced on Cobbett’s attention as a popular craze. He had to deal with it as a possible compulsory infliction. At a public meeting in 1803, Wilberforce and Dr. Clarke advocated the prohibition of smallpox inoculation and the enforcement of vaccination; and Cobbett, in a letter addressed to Wilberforce, rebuked the arbitrary project in a strain impressive and dignified as that of Burke himself. He wrote--
It seems there are prejudices against cowpox which it is necessary to destroy by force. That there are prejudices, and very strong ones too, I am ready to allow, but I cannot agree that these prejudices should be eradicated by force; nor is it perhaps fair to use the degrading term as expressive of the dislike which so large a portion of the community entertain to the practice you are so anxious to compel them to adopt. The charge of prejudice has been preferred but too often, and with but too fatal success against every one opposed to change. The truth is that whoever has been found to object to innovation, however wild in itself, however destructive in its consequences, has constantly been accused of prejudice; and as prejudice thus used implies a mixture of ignorance and perverseness, and as few persons are willing to be thought ignorant and perverse, the imputation is employed to coerce assent where reason hesitates.
He then aptly applied the repudiated recommendation of inoculation with smallpox as cause for hesitation in assenting to inoculation with cowpox--
There was, you must well remember, a strong and general objection, which for a long time prevailed, against Inoculation with Smallpox; and you cannot have forgotten that this objection was termed prejudice, and the persons entertaining it were regarded as illiterate, ignorant, or perverse; yet it now appears from the Address of your Royal Jennerian Society that it would have been well for the human race if the prejudices of those illiterate, ignorant, or perverse persons had universally obtained; for you now tell us that “Inoculation by spreading the contagion has considerably increased the mortality of Smallpox.” With an example like this before our eyes, Ought we not to be very cautious how we adopt your new system of Inoculation with Cowpox?
Then turning upon Wilberforce in his favourite character of constitutional Englishman, he proceeded--
Give me leave to ask you, Sir, how you reconcile a proposition to enforce this novel practice with the spirit of that Constitution of which you profess to be so great an admirer, and with that freedom of which you wish to be regarded as one of the principal supporters? What I am opposed to, and what I am alarmed at, is the proposition to obtain an Act of Parliament which would in its operation be nothing short of compulsion on every man to suffer the veins of his child to be impregnated with the disease of a beast--a measure to be adopted in no country where the people are not vassals or slaves.
Lastly came these remarks which at this day have force and application greater even than when written--
I like not this never-ending recurrence to Acts of Parliament. Something must be left, and something ought to be left, to the sense and reason and morality and religion of the people. There are a set of well-meaning men in this country, who would pass laws for the regulating and restraining of every feeling of the human breast, and every motion of the human frame: they would bind us down, hair by hair, as the Liliputians did Gulliver, till anon, when we awoke from our sleep, we should wonder by whom we had been enslaved. But I trust, Sir, that Parliament is not, and never will be, so far under the influence of these minute and meddling politicians as to be induced to pass laws for taking out of a man’s hands the management of his household, the choice of his physician, and the care of the health of his children; for, under this sort of domiciliary thraldom, to talk of the liberty of the country would be the most cruel mockery wherewith an humble and subjected people were ever insulted.[181]
Cobbett, be it observed, thus addressed Wilberforce in 1803, when vaccination was as yet imperfectly tested, and its advocates were in the full blast of enthusiastic persuasion that to be Jennerised was to be made proof against smallpox for ever. When Cobbett had again occasion to write about cowpox, six years had passed away, bearing with them the phantastic certainty with which vaccination had been imposed upon public credulity. Nevertheless the practice was not abandoned: quackery once alive and lucrative, dies hard: but it was discredited, and its apologists exercised their ingenuity in devising explanations and excuses for its manifest failures. The Royal Jennerian Society had split between Jenner and Walker, and application to Parliament was resolved upon for two purposes--first, to save Jenner from poverty; and second, to provide funds for the maintenance of vaccination, voluntary subscriptions having fallen off irretrievably. In short, vaccination had broken down, and the House of Commons was called upon to save it from extinction. There were wire-pullers in the House and out of the House who were compromised by their patronage of Jenner and his imposture, and they had the craft and the power to transfer the responsibility of which they were sick to the national exchequer. With this explanation, we shall understand the following article from the Register of 18th June, 1808. Cobbett wrote--
This experiment with Cowpox, which has cost the nation £30,000 to Dr. Jenner, is now, it seems, to have an Act of Parliament to give it currency. Mr. Rose has brought in a bill for the purpose of establishing a central institution in London for the distribution of Cowpox matter, which bill in all appearance will pass; and this disgusting and degrading remedy will cost the nation another £4,000 or £5,000 annually, though it has been clearly proved not to have answered the purpose intended. This, however, I regard as cheap when compared with the menace of Mr. Fuller, who, in the debate, proposed a compulsory law on the subject. He took up the old idea of Mr. Wilberforce, who was for a law to prevent parents from having their children inoculated with Smallpox unless they chose to send them to pest-houses, or to some place at a considerable distance from any other habitations. This cruel and tyrannical proposition I opposed at the time; and I am happy to perceive that it is now almost universally exploded.
Whilst Cobbett could not arrest the action of Parliament, he was short-sighted in considering that the proposed endowment of vaccination was merely a question of the loss of a few thousands a year. We are saddled with vaccination at this day, its costs and mischiefs, by reason of the vote for the National Vaccine Establishment in 1808. As soon as an annual subsidy is placed on the estimates, interests are created, which not only perpetuate themselves, but constantly tend to enlargement; and such interests, once created, can only be got rid of when proved useless by agitation out of doors and persistent pressure on the House of Commons.
Referring to a notorious outbreak of smallpox among a vaccinated population at Ringwood in Hampshire, Cobbett continued--
I should like to have heard Mr. Rose’s statement of the circumstances at Ringwood, whence, he says, it is evident that the failure arose “from the use of improper matter.” That many persons, who had been inoculated with Cowpox, caught Smallpox and died at Ringwood, is a fact that even the Royal Jennerian Society cannot deny; and this being the case, what man in his senses will put any faith in the efficacy of Cowpox as a preventive of Smallpox? The thing is done. It has failed, and it is vain to endeavour to prop up its reputation; for, in a few years, it will become proverbial as humbug.
A prophecy, it will be said, that has not been fulfilled. True: but in Cobbett’s time it advanced far to fulfilment. All the unqualified promises under which vaccination was brought into practice, were one by one surrendered under the compulsion of experience. The mass of the people remained unvaccinated; the zeal for vaccinating the poor abated; and the practice continued among the middle and upper classes on the humblest pretexts--as something that might hinder or mitigate smallpox, and in any case do little harm. We have to recollect that the mania for vaccination which now prevails is a revival of a prescription which our forefathers had tested and found wanting. Vaccination fell into neglect, not because there was indifference to smallpox, but because it did not prevent that disease.
The excuse for the first failures of vaccination was, that spurious cowpox must have been employed--spurious cowpox being the artful invention of Jenner to cover disasters; artful, and yet absurd, for how could cowpox exist spuriously any more than smallpox? The precise fact, that spurious cowpox was the dodge of an unscrupulous quack was unknown to Cobbett, but he was sharp enough to recognise imposture, and thus wrote--
The pretext of spurious matter is the weakest defence that ever was set up, because it is evident that such will always be an excuse. The Methodist pike who told his shoal of gudgeons that if they had faith, they might jump into a chalk pit without so much as spraining their ankles, answered all their reproaches with saying, that their broken bones were owing to their own sin in not having faith, and referred, for proof, to one among them who had accidentally escaped unhurt. All who catch Smallpox and die have been Cowpoxed with spurious matter, and all who have not yet caught Smallpox, after the Cowpox operation, have had the pure matter; and so it will be, to be sure, to the end of the chapter.
Who is to collect this genuine matter, and whence is it to come? Who shall tell whether he inoculate with Cowpox or King’s Evil? Or with many other disorders, one of which I will not name, but which I do hope, that fathers and mothers who have given their children that greatest of blessing, a pure stream of blood, will not forget when they are about to cause that blood to be impregnated with matter taken from the ulcerous bodies of others.
In this latter warning, we have to remark Cobbett’s prescience. He knew that it was impossible to transfer organic virus from arm-to-arm without transferring more than was intended, inclusive of the dreadful disease he indicated. Vaccinators naturally denied the possibility of such extra transmission; for if they had admitted the possibility, they must have ceased to vaccinate. M. Ricord has put the alternative plainly--
The obvious fact is, that if ever the transmission of this disease with vaccine lymph is clearly demonstrated, Vaccination must be altogether discontinued.
The clear demonstration demanded by M. Ricord has been abundantly supplied; and what at one time was conveniently considered questionable, is now openly confessed. Mr. Brudenell Carter, writing in the Medical Examiner, 24th May, 1877, testifies--
I think that syphilitic contamination by vaccine lymph is by no means an unusual occurrence, and that it is very generally overlooked because people do not know either when or where to look for it. I think that a large proportion of the cases of apparently inherited syphilis are in reality vaccinal; and that the syphilis in these cases does not show itself until the age of from eight to ten years, by which time the relation between cause and effect is apt to be lost sight of.
And we have Sir Thomas Watson’s memorable declaration in the Nineteenth Century, June, 1878--
I can readily sympathise with, and even applaud, a father who, with the presumed dread or misgiving in his mind, is willing to submit to multiplied judicial penalties rather than expose his child to the risk of an infection so ghastly.
Thus belated, thus after infinite mischief to the public health, the Nestor of Medicine appears and solemnly allows that the warning of William Cobbett, given seventy years before, was a true warning, and that worthy of praise are the wise parents who give it heed.
Cobbett, grateful for escape from compulsory vaccination, overlooked, I said, the danger perpetuated through the endowment of the practice. He was overjoyed at Canning’s emphatic declaration, that “he could not imagine any circumstances whatever that would induce him to follow up the most favourable report of the infallibility of vaccination with any measure for its compulsory infliction.” Hence he continued--
I am glad to perceive that the Ministry took care to intimate their decided hostility to any law for propagating Cowpox by force, by the aid of pains and penalties. This being the case, I care little about Mr. Rose and his Cowpox Institution. Those who choose to have their children impregnated from that shop, will be at liberty to do so; and those who wish to avoid it, may. This is all right; though it may be very foolish for Government to interfere in such a matter. I think we may thank the events at Ringwood for the ministerial protest against compulsory measures. It would have been curious enough to see people paying penalties for being so obstinate as not to consult their own health, or that of their children.
What Cobbett thought would be “curious enough” we witness daily. English liberty, if it has advanced in some directions, has gone back in others since Cobbett wrote. Parents are now haled before magistrates, fined and imprisoned, because (knowing that vaccination cannot avert smallpox, whilst it may seriously injure the health of their children, and even cost them their lives) they refuse to submit to the infliction. Never, perhaps, was there a more impious invasion of liberty than compulsory vaccination, and yet we have free and enlightened Englishmen who excuse and defend it! These are the Pharisees of Liberalism, blatant over tyranny, extinct or foreign, but dull to similar tyranny within their own domain. They garnish the sepulchres of the prophets of freedom, but (in their petty measure) repeat the deeds of those who persecuted and slew them.
Lastly, in the article from which I have been quoting, Cobbett assumed that the resort to the House of Commons for money was evidence that the enthusiasm for vaccination was abating. He wrote--
The present application to Parliament is a pretty good proof that Cowpox is beginning to be blowed upon. The Royal Jennerian Society wants funds. The subscribers have fallen off; and so application to the public purse has become necessary. Why have the subscribers fallen off? Their humanity has not waxed cold. It were slander, indeed, to suppose that. But I suspect that their faith has waxed cold; and when that is the case, zeal soon slackens its operations, more especially when these operations consist chiefly in the expenditure of money.
The fact was, that as vaccination failures multiplied, Jenner tried, more suo, to make a scape-goat of Walker, the Resident Inoculator of the Royal Jennerian Society. There was a dreadful row, and a secession of the better part of the members with Walker, who set up the London Vaccine Institution. Those who adhered to Jenner were not of the philanthropic and subscribing order, but they had political influence, and used it to get rid of their liabilities, first in obtaining a vote of £20,000 for Jenner, and second in the establishment of a National Vaccine Establishment with a subsidy of £3,000 a year.
So far Cobbett in his Register, where he had no occasion to discuss vaccination again; but toward the end of his life, 1829-30, he produced a series of papers entitled Advice to Young Men, in which he reiterated and enforced his protest against the Jennerian imposture--
I contend [he wrote] that the beastly application could not, in nature, be efficacious in preventing Smallpox, the truth of which assertion has now been proved in thousands upon thousands of instances. For a long time, for ten years, the contrary was boldly and brazenly asserted.... But Smallpox, in its worst form, broke out at Ringwood, and carried off, I believe (I have not the account at hand), more than a hundred persons, young and old, every one of whom had had the Cowpox “so nicely.” And what was then said? Was the quackery exploded? Not at all: the failure was imputed to unskilful operators: to the staleness of the matter: to its not being of the genuine quality. Admitting all this, the scheme stood condemned; for the great advantages held forth were, that anybody might perform the operation, and that the matter was everywhere abundant and cost free.
But these were paltry excuses: the mere shuffles of quackery; for what do we know now? Why, that in hundreds of instances, persons Cowpoxed by JENNER HIMSELF, have taken the real Smallpox afterwards, and have either died from the disorder or narrowly escaped with their lives! I will mention two instances. The first is Sir Richard Phillips, whose son, several years after Jenner had given him the insuring matter, had a very hard struggle for life, under the hands of the old-fashioned, seam-giving, and dimple-dipping Smallpox. The second is Philip Codd, Esq., of Rumstead Court, near Maidstone, whose son had a very narrow escape under the real Smallpox, and who also had been Cowpoxed by Jenner himself. Mr. Codd I have known, and have most sincerely respected, from the time of our both being eighteen years of age. When the young gentleman, his son, was very young, I, having him on my knee one day, asked his kind and excellent mother whether he had been inoculated. “Oh, no!” said she, “we are going to have him vaccinated.” Whereupon I, going into the garden to the father, said, “I do hope, Codd, that you are not going to have that beastly cow-stuff put into that fine boy.” “Why,” said he, “you see, Cobbett, it is to be done by Jenner himself.” What answer I gave, what names and epithets I bestowed upon Jenner and his quackery, I will leave the reader to imagine.
Now, here are instances enough; but every reader has heard of, if not seen, scores of others. Young Mr. Codd caught Smallpox at a school; and if I recollect rightly, there were several other vaccinated youths who did the same at the same time. Quackery, however, has always a shuffle left. Now that Cowpox has been proved to be no guarantee against Smallpox, it makes it milder when it comes! A pretty shuffle, indeed, this! You are to be all your life in fear of it, having as your sole consolation, that when it comes (and it may overtake you in a camp or on the seas) it will be milder! It was not too mild to kill at Ringwood, and its mildness, in the case of young Mr. Codd, did not restrain it from blinding him for a suitable number of days.
I shall not easily forget the alarm and anxiety of Mr. and Mrs. Codd on this occasion--both of them the best of parents, and both of them punished for having yielded to fashionable quackery. I will not say justly punished; for affection for their children, in which respect they were never surpassed by any parents on earth, was the cause of their listening to the danger-obviating quackery. This, too, is the case with other parents; but parents should be under the influence of reason and experience, as well as under that of affection; and now, at any rate, they ought to set this really dangerous quackery at naught.
Such was Cobbett’s case against vaccination, and I ask, Was he not justified in his opposition? He saw vaccination introduced to the world as an infallible preventive of smallpox, and he lived to see the claim gradually minimised until reduced to that of making smallpox milder! Even thus abated, he had to stigmatise the claim as a last shuffle of quackery. It is asserted to this day, that vaccination makes smallpox milder, but the pretence is exploded whenever we demand, How do you know? In any case, or in any number of cases of smallpox, Who can define the severity that has been reduced by vaccination? any more than if I were to assert that vaccination intensifies smallpox, it would be impossible to confute me. We can only meet unverifiable assertion with indifference or contempt. If it pleases people to believe in metempsychosis or the constitution of the moon in green cheese, the wise leave them to the enjoyment of their humour. On the other hand, I have to remark, that smallpox is a disease of wide range of intensity, from an ailment almost trivial to one invariably fatal; and this wide range of intensity was as characteristic of the disease before as since the introduction of vaccination. On what pretext then are mild cases of smallpox attributed to the influence of vaccination? There are mild and malignant cases of smallpox alike among the vaccinated and unvaccinated, and not unfrequently when the vaccinated and unvaccinated are found in approximate conditions, as in the same household, it is the unvaccinated who are most lightly afflicted, or who make the better recovery.
It often helps to a clearer apprehension of a position if we endeavour to conceive its opposite. We have seen Cobbett as an opponent of vaccination: let us try to think of him as its advocate. Suppose he had joined with the polite and educated mob in hailing Jenner as the saviour of mankind from smallpox, and assured the readers of the Register that they would be secure from the disease for ever if inoculated with cowpox--an easy and harmless operation. Then after a while imagine him reporting that he had been misled--that the operation was not so easy as represented, nor always so harmless. By and bye he would be the bearer of a more serious revelation. Some of the vaccinated, warranted secure, had taken smallpox, but such misadventures, he would explain, were due to the use of a wrong sort of cowpox, of which there was a spurious variety. But the suggestion of spurious cowpox creating alarm and discouragement of vaccination, it would be necessary for him to counteract the declaration with the avowal that by spurious cowpox was not meant spurious cowpox, but simply irregularities in the action of the genuine virus on the arms of the vaccinated. But even these excuses would be insufficient. It was not difficult to ascribe smallpox after vaccination to careless practice, or to virus that was not the right sort of cowpox; but when smallpox was found to occur in numerous instances after Jenner’s own vaccinations and those of the most accomplished practitioners, What was to be said? Why, what was said, that when vaccination did not prevent smallpox, it made it milder!
Imagine, if we can, Cobbett’s honest and vigorous intelligence retreating through this slush of apology and prevarication! Yet through such slush every follower of Jenner had to trudge.
I am not intent on setting Cobbett forth as a model of wisdom. I simply maintain that his common-sense was adequate to the judgment of vaccination, and that it was correctly exercised. Of physiology and hygiene he was as ignorant as his contemporaries; but if a lotion were sold to prevent toothache, and it did not prevent toothache, it would be safe to denounce its vendors as quacks, even though the vendors happened to be the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons. The causes of disease were unconsidered in Cobbett’s days. It was not asked why people suffered from smallpox and other fevers, nor whether fevers were avoidable. Such maladies were accepted like bad weather, and encountered by medical dodges, or by charms like vaccination, the more irrational and nasty being taken for the more effective. Cobbett himself, if he did not believe in vaccination, believed in inoculation with smallpox. He had his children poxed in infancy, and when he argued against vaccination, it was in the confident possession of a surer prophylactic. Taking smallpox for a probable calamity that could only occur once in a lifetime, it seemed to him expedient to incur the disease when convenient, and to have done with the dread of it. How far he was mistaken in this course I need not stay to debate. Suffice it to say, that he thought he could make sure that smallpox was smallpox, whilst what cowpox might be none could tell, especially after transmission through arms and constitution unnumbered and unknown.
The causes of smallpox, I said, were unconsidered in Cobbett’s days. It never even entered into Jenner’s head that the disease might be a consequence of bad conditions of life; nor did he try to explain why the malady was on the decrease ere he appeared with his magical prescription. The decrease was claimed for vaccination, but it had set in before vaccination was heard of, and was continued among those who never received it. No sanitary improvements had been effected to account for the abatement of the disease. To what, then, was it due? I answer, in part at least, to a progressive change in the diet of the people--to the substitution of tea for malt liquors, and to the displacement of arid fare by potatoes. The food of city folk up to the close of last century was closely akin to that of men at sea, and their scorbutic habit of body was notorious--a habit that rendered acute or chronic whatever disorders they were subject to. The remedy came of inclination and necessity rather than of intention. Tea was instinctively preferred by women, and the dearness of provisions compelled resort to the potato, easily grown and grateful to the palate as a mitigant of the saltness of beef, bacon, and fish. If any are disposed to dispute the fact of this revolution in the popular dietary, they may be referred to Cobbett. He witnessed the change, and persistently denounced it. Tea-drinking was to him an abomination. It was a slatternly indulgence, costly to the poor, and innutritious. Potatoes were as detestable. They were trash as compared with bread; wasteful, dirty, and unfit to satisfy a man’s appetite. It is true that tea and potatoes are poor forms of food, but the one as a substitute for beer, and the other as an antiscorbutic, were eminently useful. It is not said that smallpox is caused or prevented by food, proper or improper, but that the character of food may predispose to disease, and intensify it; as is manifest on ship-board. Hence it is (in the absence of other adequate influences) that I am disposed to ascribe the abatement of smallpox which set in toward the close of last century to the better blood of the people ameliorated by that increased consumption of tea and potatoes, against which Cobbett so blindly and vainly testified.
A last word about Cobbett. His prejudices had nearly always a creditable root. He hated potatoes because they were strenuously recommended by Wilberforce and other good and goody people as cheap food for the poor. Cobbett’s contention was, that not cheap food, but political justice was the true remedy for popular misery. It was very nice of Wilberforce and his friends to be kind to the poor, but, said Cobbett, if they were first just, the poor might dispense with their kindness. If the poor had their own, they might have beer instead of tea, and bread and beef and bacon instead of potatoes, with much else besides. Cobbett was often enough in error, but behind all his perversities lay ardent good-will for the welfare of the greatest number of his countrymen; and the consideration now enjoyed by the working classes is largely due to his dauntless spirit and unwearied exertions in presence of what appeared at the time to be omnipotent opposition.
FOOTNOTES:
[180] Advice to Young Men. London, 1837. Sec. 262.
[181] Political Register, 22nd January, 1803.
XXIII. THE GROSVENOR CASE
It may be asked, Why, if Vaccination was proved useless and injurious, was it not entirely discontinued? but the question implies a logical consistency which is rarely exemplified in human experience. Vaccination was discontinued, but it was not entirely discontinued: it was chiefly continued among the upper and middle classes where fees were to be had for its performance. It was admitted that the rite might not prevent smallpox, but it would make it milder. The last thing a medicine man admits is, that he is helpless and can do nothing. Even in presence of that for which there is no remedy, it tends to his importance, and the satisfaction of the patient, and those around the patient, to make believe to do something. Now for smallpox, there was no preventive. Its causes were unknown. It broke out, and it disappeared, none knew how. Jenner’s household was devastated with fever, but he never asked, why? As observed disease was accepted like so much bad weather. Whether fevers were avoidable, or whether they were consequences of ill living, were questions as yet outside cognizance. The predominant thought about smallpox was, that it might be dodged, be it from God or devil. Inoculation with smallpox was a dodge with disagreeable accompaniments: inoculation with cowpox was a dodge on easier terms: by a trick, that left every evil circumstance unaffected, smallpox was to be got rid of. In the nature of things, the dodge was ineffective--mercifully ineffective; for who that is wise would care to have the consequences of evil abated save by the putting away of evil? The dodge proved illusory in the presence of those who recommended it, but whilst a manifest failure as to the main intention, they had the craft to shift its efficacy to rendering the disease milder--a claim as to which no test was immediately available. Moreover, vaccination had the merit of action, which the quack, whether lay or professional, insists on at all hazards. To confess ignorance and inability is self-denial for which the quack’s mind is unequal, as whoever is ailing and has friends may perceive. All come bearing advice and prescriptions for the control of nature, when, with simple quiescence and a right disposition of circumstances, nature is instant to effect recovery.
The failures of vaccination to prevent smallpox were chiefly visible among the poor, smallpox being predominantly an affliction of poverty; but in 1811 a case occurred in aristocratic life which produced more talk and dismay than scores of similar cases among trades-folk and artizans. Robert Grosvenor, son of Earl Grosvenor, vaccinated by Jenner in 1801 when a puny babe of a month old, fell ill on 26th May, 1811; in a few days smallpox developed, became confluent, and the lad narrowly escaped with life. There was no mistake about the vaccination; the mark on the boy’s arm indicated “the perfect disease”; he was attended by Sir Henry Halford and Sir Walter Farquhar, and was visited by Jenner, who happened to be in town; and, in short, the evidence of the impotence of vaccination to avert smallpox was complete and indisputable. The commotion was intense, and in a letter from Jenner to Baron we see how it affected his mind. He wrote--
COCKSPUR STREET, CHARING CROSS, 11th June, 1811.
MY DEAR FRIEND,--It will probably be my lot to be detained in this horrible place some days longer. It has unfortunately happened, that a failure in vaccination has appeared in the family of a nobleman here; and, more unfortunately still, in a child vaccinated by me. The noise and confusion this case has created are not to be described. The vaccine lancet is sheathed; and the long concealed variolous blade ordered to come forth. Charming! This will soon cure the mania. The Town is a fool--an idiot; and will continue in this red-hot--hissing-hot state about this affair, till something else starts up to draw aside its attention. I am determined to lock up my brains, and think no more pro bono publico; and I advise you, my friend, to do the same; for we are sure to get nothing but abuse for it. It is my intention to collect all the cases I can of Smallpox after supposed security from that disease. In this undertaking I hope to derive much assistance from you. The best plan will be to push out some of them as soon as possible. This would not be necessary on account of the present case, but it will prove the best shield to protect us from the past, and from those which are to come.--Ever yours, EDWARD JENNER.[182]
The defence, therefore, was, that as an attack of smallpox did not always avert a second attack, it was not reasonable to expect that vaccination should be more effective; and to make good this position, a diligent search was instituted for cases of repeated smallpox. Many were found, though they were generally regarded as rarities, whilst their reality was frequently disputed; but whatever their number or genuineness, they were insignificant in comparison with the instances of smallpox subsequent to vaccination. Moreover, the Jennerites were taunted with their late discovery of smallpox after smallpox. Why had they not stated from the outset that smallpox might follow vaccination as smallpox followed smallpox? Why, on the contrary, had they asserted vaccination to be an absolute and life-long defence against smallpox? Why had they abused as fools or denounced as liars all the early reporters of smallpox after vaccination? And why did it require evidence, that could not possibly be wriggled out of, to bring them to an acknowledgment of the truth?
But even in presence of such evidence, Jenner persisted in his asseverations as if he had lost the very sense of truth. Writing to Miss Calcraft on 19th June, 1811, he actually claimed that he had foreseen and predicted such disasters as had occurred in the Grosvenor family! Here are his words--
Take a comprehensive view of Vaccination, and then ask yourself what is this case? You will find it a speck, a mere microscopic speck on the page which contains the history of the vaccine discovery. In the very first thing I wrote upon the subject, and many times since, I have said the occurrence of such an event should excite no surprise; because the Cowpox must possess preternatural powers if it would give uniform security to the constitution, when it is well known that Smallpox cannot; for we have more than one thousand cases to prove the contrary, and fortunately seventeen of them in the families of the nobility.
Obviously had such been his uniform testimony, the Grosvenor incident would have excited neither surprise nor alarm; and mark this additional hardihood--
Indeed, I have often said it was wonderful that I should have gone on for such a series of years vaccinating so many thousands, many under very unfavourable circumstances, without meeting with any interruption to my success before. And now this single solitary instance has occurred, all my past labours are forgotten, and I am held up by many, perhaps the majority of the higher classes, as an object of derision and contempt.... What if ten, fifty, or a hundred such events should occur? they will be balanced a hundred times over by those of a similar kind after Smallpox.
Whilst thus he maintained that it was far more extraordinary that young Grosvenor had smallpox after vaccination than that others should have smallpox after smallpox, he went on to assert that vaccination had saved the lad’s life!
The child would have died (that is universally allowed) but for the previous Vaccination. There was but little secondary fever; the pustules were sooner in going off than in ordinary cases; and, indeed, the whole progress of the disease was different. It was modified and mitigated, and the boy was saved.[183]
Such was the mot d’ ordre. If Grosvenor had not been vaccinated, he would have perished! The National Vaccine Board reported on the case to the same effect, and the faithful suffered themselves to be re-assured.
In connection with 1811 and London smallpox, there is a letter to Dr. Lettsom which throws still farther light on Jenner’s temper and philosophy. He wrote--
CHELTENHAM, 22nd November, 1811.
I have considered London as the centre of opposition to the vaccine practice; but even there, in spite of the base and murderous designs of a few bad minded individuals, the Smallpox has wonderfully decreased; and in the provinces its mortality has lessened in a still greater proportion. For the great and grand effects of Vaccination the eye must quit this little spot, and survey it among other European countries, and still more particularly among the vast empires of Asia and America. In Mexico and Peru the disease is nearly extinct. The documents which pour in upon me from these distant regions fill me with inexpressible delight. You shall have copies when I can get them transcribed.
The chief impediments to the general adoption of Vaccination in England are, I am confident, our newspapers and some of our magazines. Whenever a case of what is called failure starts up, in it goes to a newspaper, with all the exaggeration with which envy and malice can garnish it.[184]
Was there ever a more delicious bit of self-revelation! The wicked newspapers! The base, murderous and bad minded enemies of vaccination! The smallpox of London reduced by vicarious vaccination in spite of its ingratitude! The consolation derived from the survey of the countries of Europe and the vast empires of Asia and America with inexpressible delight from Mexico and Peru! Not Mrs. Jellyby herself lost in an atmosphere of Borrioboola-Gah is more piquant.
FOOTNOTES:
[182] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. ii. p. 161.
[183] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. ii. p. 158.
[184] Pettigrew’s Memoirs of J. C. Lettsom, M.D. London, 1817. Vol. iii. p. 405.
XXIV. DR. JOHN WALKER
Jenner’s references to the good effects of vaccination in London were curiously inconsistent. That vaccination in which he professed to rejoice was chiefly the work of Dr. John Walker, whose practice he had denounced as so widely at variance with what he considered correct, that even the wreck of the Royal Jennerian Society was not thought too heavy a price to pay for deliverance from complicity with him. The London Vaccine Institution, established in 1806 by Walker and his friends, was responsible for the large majority of vaccinations effected in the metropolis. Walker was a pure enthusiast, of boundless energy, with a craze for vaccinating. Adverse results had no effect upon him: he did not deny, but simply did not recognise them, and held on prophesying and practising with mechanical persistency. Nevertheless, he ran aground. The income of the Institution had dwindled to less than £100 a year when Andrew Johnstone, a Cumberland man, a school-fellow of Walker, came to his assistance. With a commercial eye he surveyed the situation. He perceived that though vaccination had fallen into disrepute, there remained many believers who only required stirring up and solicitation to provide funds to keep Walker going and to yield the collector a satisfactory commission. As the Royal Jennerian Society had ceased to exist for any active purpose in 1810, nothing remaining “but a Patronage, a Presidency, and an unorganised body of Subscribers and Governors,” it occurred to him that it would be good policy to annex these to the revived enterprise, and in due course a union was effected, and the LONDON VACCINE INSTITUTION AND ROYAL JENNERIAN SOCIETY became the title to conjure with. An attempt was made to secure Jenner for President, but that was too bold a stroke. He thus answered the application--
CHELTENHAM, 3rd September, 1813.
Although it must be evident that every institution which has for its object the extension of Vaccine Inoculation, must have my best wishes for its success, yet, for reasons which on reflection must be obvious, you must see the impossibility of my accepting the offered appointment.
Highly impressive were the Reports of the reconstituted Institution under the patronage of the Corporation of the City of London with the City Arms on the covers. Subsequently the King, George IV., appeared as patron, and the City Arms gave place to the Royal Arms. Among the presidents were the Archbishop of Canterbury, four or five Dukes (one of them Wellington), half a dozen Marquises and as many Bishops, about a score of Earls, with M.P.’s and pious and philanthropic notables many. So much was due to the tact of Andrew Johnstone, who understood the use of names, who never dropped one of the least influence, and, spite of Jenner’s ill-will, dealt with his honours and countenance as though they belonged to the Institution. Business is business, he would have said, and holds no reckoning with pique and dislike. Nevertheless the financial results did not correspond with the overpowering patronage. The income of the Institution never attained £1000 a year, whilst the bills for advertising and printing sometimes approached £500. In the Report for 1827 we find the operations thus summarised--
Vaccinated during 1826 by Dr. Walker, 4,217 From the beginning, 1803, 65,750 By appointed Inoculators in London and environs in 1826, 16,999 From the beginning, 237,119 By appointed Inoculators in the country in 1826, 21,261 From the beginning, 548,430
The income of the Institution in 1826 was £620 15s., and the expenditure £715 12s., leaving a deficit of £94 17s.
The figures are interesting, for they afford some idea of the extent of London vaccination during a quarter of a century. The operations of the Vaccine Institution lay chiefly among the poor--the vast majority in London as in every city; and if we allow that in the course of five-and-twenty years, 350,000, in a population of upwards of 1,000,000 in the flux of life and death, were operated on, we give a liberal estimate in favour of vaccination. That even so many could have much effect on the prevalence of smallpox (except for aggravation) is incredible, unless the vicarious action of vaccination be seriously asserted. Turning over Walker’s report it is amusing to observe how any abatement in London smallpox was attributed to vaccination, and any increase to its neglect--an ingenuous exemplification of the fable of the Fly and the Wheel.
The appointed inoculators of the Institution were a numerous body--250 names and addresses are given in one of the Reports. They were chiefly London tradesmen with a taste for doing what they thought “good.” As vaccination came to be regarded as professional work, these “unqualified practitioners” gave cause for offence, but Walker held stoutly to his opinion, which he shared with Jenner, that vaccination might be performed by any man or woman. In Walker’s words, “It is easier to perform the whole business of vaccination than it is to thread a needle--yea, it is easier.”
The annexation of the remains of the Royal Jennerian Society by Walker was much disliked by Jenner and his associates; and when the revived enterprise showed signs of prosperity, their dislike developed to open enmity, and John Ring’s services as bravo and satirist were called into requisition. He first tried his hand, anonymously, in a volume of doggerel, published in 1815, entitled The Vaccine Scourge,[185] in which Walker is represented as singing--
I am a jolly beggar, From Cockermouth I came; I do pretend to be a Friend, John Walker is my name; And a-begging we will go, will go, will go, And a-begging we will go.
The verses, extending over a hundred pages, are wretched stuff, vulgar and malevolent, and a few extracts from the Preface will indicate the animus of the entire performance. Ring’s assumption was, first, that Walker was a rogue from whom the public required to be protected; second, that his Institution was superfluous; and third, that if greater facilities for vaccination were wanted in London, it should be left to the Government to provide them--
These hints may serve to warn the public. Dr. Walker is an artful, avaricious, and ambitious man; but let him be cautious how he acts when he tries to exercise his art, to glut his avarice, and to gratify his ambition. Let him recollect what was inscribed on the tombstone of an infamous scoundrel--
“Lie still if you’re wise; You’ll be damned if you rise.”
We recommend him and his accomplices not to try to obtain money by false pretences. A Vaccine Institution has long been established by the Legislature, where, as well as at other Institutions, matter may be procured free of expense; and no one who has much zeal in the cause of Vaccination will find much difficulty in procuring it. If farther aid is necessary, let it be granted by Parliament, and not to a set of swindlers. It is not meet to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.
Many of the agents of the London Vaccine Institution were chemists and apothecaries, and these, according to Ring, had an interest in the propagation of smallpox--
To exterminate Smallpox by means of chemists and apothecaries, the greatest friends of Smallpox, is to cast out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils. You might as well expect a foxhunter to destroy the breed of foxes, or a ratcatcher to exterminate the race of rats.
The Vaccine Scourge producing little effect, Ring returned to the charge in the following year, 1816, with A Caution against Vaccine Swindlers and Imposters.[186] The Caution is a series of libels, the puerility and extravagance of which were their own nullification. A motto was taken from the New Monthly Magazine for the title-page, as follows--
The Jennerian discovery has shed a brilliant lustre on our era; but unfortunately, the discovery has been in a great degree rendered abortive by bastard institutions, created for the purpose of filling the pockets of a set of adventurers, without education, and destitute of principle. We could name several wretches who have fattened, and are still fattening, on such jobs.
Ring delivered his mind unequivocally. Walker was an imposter, and the London Vaccine Institution prospered by his frauds--
There is a Society in this Metropolis [he wrote], falsely calling itself the Royal Jennerian Society, which has been collecting subscriptions to a considerable amount under that assumed name; and thus collecting money under false pretences.
An eminent physician speaking of this Society and its successful state, called it a successful villany; and villany is not the less villany because it is successful.
It has also been organising a complete system of quackery, by granting diplomas to persons totally ignorant of the first principles of the medical profession, which will add to the present host of empirics.
No one can now pass along the streets without being annoyed with the inscription, VACCINATION GRATIS UNDER THE SANCTION OF THE LONDON VACCINE INSTITUTION in one pane of glass, MACASSAR OIL in a second, and PATENT BLACKING in a third. In short Vaccination is now quite a drug.
These were words of envy and malice, and came with odious inconsistency from the spokesman of Jenner, who had instructed and encouraged his acquaintances, male and female, to practise vaccination. We may, however, take Ring’s evidence as to Walker’s activity in London--
Dr. Walker glories in his chemical, galenical, pharmaceutical, and dentrifical inoculators; and boasts that they exceed in number those of any other vaccine institution; but he glories in his shame. Non numerentur, sed ponderentur. They are springing up under every pestle and mortar, and barber’s pole, like mushrooms in a hot-bed, from Hyde-Park Corner to Whitechapel, and from Whitechapel to Blackwall. It is the duty of every regular practitioner to expose such imposters, and to encourage such exposure. It is, in fact, the rescuing of life from fraudulent and rapacious hands.
One of his inoculators is Mr. Campbell, who cures all sorts of incurable diseases with Elephants’ Milk. He says he recently sent 20,000 bottles to Russia at 11s. each. He also sells the Milk in pills at 2s. 9d. a box. The poor have the Milk at half-price; and strict secresy is preserved.
In Walker’s Plan for 1814, it appears that he grants his diplomas to those who are not, as well as to those who are, of the medical profession, and that Inoculators in the country are requested and authorised to put up a board with the following inscription, PROTECTION FROM SMALLPOX UNDER THE SANCTION OF THE LONDON VACCINE INSTITUTION. Then is to follow the name of the farrier, cobbler, barber, barber-surgeon, apothecary, man-midwife, tooth-drawer, druggist, chemist, oil-man, cheesemonger, drysalter, or grocer, who dispenses the blessing of Vaccination gratuitously.
The motley crew thus appointed are directed to make an Annual Return of the numbers inoculated by them in order to swell Dr. Walker’s list; and such inoculators are not in general very nice in their calculations. Many of them will, in all probability, like other quacks, pretend to a hundred times more than they really perform.
Those who continued to believe that Vaccination was an easy and harmless operation, could see nothing but good management in the multiplication of Walker’s agencies, nor anything but meanness in Ring’s sneers at tradesmen. His assertion that the use of the title of the Royal Jennerian Society was fraudulent, had no justification, yet it was his persistent reproach--
Honesty is the best policy. I therefore sincerely advise Dr. Walker and his Board, to assume no more the title of the Royal Jennerian Society, to which they must know they have not the least claim, lest they should be brought before the Lord Mayor as swindlers, and be prosecuted for obtaining money under false pretences. I am informed that they have already been compelled to refund a legacy of £100; and it is to be hoped they will be compelled to refund the rest of their ill-gotten store.
Lastly, he appealed to the members of the Jennerian Society, demanding--
How long will they suffer their names to be prostituted, and the public to be deluded by a set of swindlers and imposters; by men who are neither dignified by their rank, nor distinguished by their talents; by a set of daring adventurers and despicable upstarts! It is a gross insult and indignity, to which no man of the least sense of honour, or of shame, would submit.
But they did submit, and why not? Enthusiasm for Vaccination had passed away. It had been found out; it was everywhere distrusted; and those who held by it had to see it pushed on the same terms as any other quack prescription. What then was there to object to in Walker s procedure? The reason for Ring’s libels lay in Jenner’s jealousy. Walker was Jenner’s abhorrence. He had joined in the conspiracy to oust Walker from the Jennerian Society in 1806, but the operation proved fatal to the Society, whilst Walker conveyed the confidence and subscriptions of the faithful to his new Institution. What wonder, then, that Jenner disliked the eccentric Quaker! Even worse; Walker accurately appraised Jenner’s share in “the vaccine discovery,” which came, he said, from Jenner as a hint, and was developed by Pearson and Woodville in practice--a fact that was as gall and wormwood to Jenner. Moreover, Walker had written a Jenneric Opera in which Jenner was represented as a country apothecary riding up to London on a cow, and going round a-begging among the nobility and gentry. Wherefore says Ring--
As to the calumny and detraction which Dr. Jenner and his friends have received at the hands of that desperate adventurer in his Jenneric Opera and elsewhere, they are content to bear it, provided he will not again use the language of flattery toward them; nor lavish his encomiums on them in that polluted channel, the Medical Journal. His resentment can do very little harm, which is more than can be said of his adulation.
“It is the slaver kills, and not the bite!”
Ring was an awkward champion. He sneered at Walker’s diplomas certifying fitness to act as vaccinator--
They will have the same authority [he said] and the same virtue as a diploma from the University of St. Andrews; and in all probability will in a short time be sold at the same price--
Forgetful that it was from St. Andrews that Jenner purchased his M.D.!
With equal recklessness, he denounced Walker as a vaccinator, saying--
He tells the public in his Address that “Vaccination will shed consolation into the bosom of every family;” but alas! I have known many a family that has had reason to rue the day in which they believed him, when he told them this flattering tale.... It is very necessary that his followers pray that the Lord have mercy on them, if they have no other director than Dr. Walker.
Concerning the consequences of Walker’s operations, Ring, no doubt, testified truly. Many continue to rue the day when they listen to the flattering tale of the vaccinator. But the testimony came strangely from a Jennerite, who was ready to swear that any abatement of smallpox in London was due to the vaccinations effected in great part by “that desperate adventurer,” Walker!
Ring was implacable, the more so, perhaps, as Walker and his friends were apparently indifferent to his abuse. He burst forth afresh in the London Medical Repository for 1821, where among much else we find the following--
HANOVER STREET, 11th October, 1821.
The mock Royal Jennerian Society is extending its impositions and depredations. The emissaries of this bastard institution, as well as the principals, should suffer transportation if there be any public spirit among us.
I beg leave to add that the present Society is disclaimed by Dr. Jenner, who cautioned the Emperor of Russia against it when his Majesty was in London in 1814.
In my Caution against Vaccine Swindlers and Imposters, published in 1816, I related several instances of the ill effects of Dr. Walker’s practice, and some in which it had proved fatal. It was partly for his mal-practice, and partly for his mis-conduct, that he was about to be expelled from the Royal Jennerian Society; and, after his artful and wicked stratagems, was permitted to resign; yet now he has the arrogance to call himself Director of that Society, and to issue his venal diplomas in its name. If Dr. Walker must imitate the universities of St. Andrews and Aberdeen, let him at least have like them some certificate of qualification. If he is determined to grow rich by degrees, let him also endeavour to grow wise and honest.
The diplomas which thus moved Ring’s wrath were imposing documents, certifying that the holder was authorised to vaccinate, intended to be framed and exhibited in the shop or parlour. There was a picture of something like an arch of Waterloo Bridge with London in the background and the Royal Arms overhead; Jenner standing on a pier with a dead serpent hanging in limp folds over his arm, with the inscription, Per omnia littora vincitur variola; a woman milking a cow with a group of children around her, drinking milk out of porringers, as if milk were cowpox; whilst the bed of the Thames was blocked with the names of the great and good who had testified in favour of vaccination--an allegorical style of representation then much in vogue and considered impressive.
In order to create prejudice, Ring had much to say of Walker’s religious and political principles. He was a Quaker of the Thomas Paine pattern, and like Paine had associated with the French revolutionists; but whilst dressing as a Friend, and associating with Friends, he was too unconformable a personality for their Society, and was never received into membership. Ring’s imputations of rapacity and avarice were grossly absurd as applied to Walker. He cared for nothing beyond support in his work as vaccinator. It was said he would take a £5 note, fold it, stick a pin through it, write an address on the back, and post it. He would rarely vaccinate the well-to-do. If they came to his office, he would ask, “Who is thy medical attendant?” and wrapping up some fresh matter on glasses would say, “Take this with my compliments to thy medical attendant, and he will do what is requisite quite as well as myself.” When he did call at a house to vaccinate, he never asked for a fee, and his biographer, Dr. Epps,[187] observes that he was only known on one occasion to express a wish for remuneration. Meeting a merchant in St. Paul’s Churchyard, whose household he had vaccinated at some inconvenience, he observed, “Friend, if thou has sent by thy servant a draft for my services to thy family, he has either robbed me or deceived thee.” When money was brought to him, he usually called his wife to receive it, she having the undivided care of all that pertained to him apart from vaccination. Of this good woman, Annie, he was in the habit of speaking with an admiration and unreserve that constituted one of his numerous oddities. For example, when Dr. Moore in his History of Vaccination observed somewhat maliciously--
John Walker, it is said, procured a medical diploma from the indulgent University of Leyden; and more excellent work than Walker’s has rarely been performed by a humbler instrument--
Walker good-humouredly replied, that Moore as a Glasgow man naturally preferred his own University to that of Leyden, but he too had cause to love Glasgow--
“Glasgow is a bonnie town, and there are bonnie lasses in it.”
There is not any other spot on the surface of the globe where I have experienced a happiness so complete as I obtained in it in 1799. Let any bachelor who cannot divine what this assertion may mean, be informed, that it was then and there I entered into marriage; and the covenant was ratified in the office of the Clerk of the Peace for the county of Lanarkshire.[188]
Walker was obstinate, but not vindictive. Dr. James Sims offered him £1000 in 1806 to prosecute his adversaries for conspiracy, but he left them to their devices, and proved his quality by outworking and superseding them. He replied to Moore’s flippant version of the causes that led to the division and destruction of the Royal Jennerian Society with perfect self-control and manifest truthfulness, but at the same time with a simplicity not of this world.[189] Jenner’s spite, Ring’s abuse, and the sneers of the superfine did him little harm; and, if vaccination were beneficial, I should have nothing but praise for the good people, who, recognising the sincerity of his work, disregarded trivialities of manner, and supported him loyally as a faithful servant.
Walker was nothing but a vaccinator. Day after day, in rain or sunshine, his lank figure, and self-complacent visage under a white broad-brimmed hat were to be seen making the round of the vaccine stations. When he entered a room, he first glanced at the table on which he expected to find his books. If any mothers had placed their children’s bonnets or garments thereon, they were at once swept off. He then ranged the company in order against the wall like a schoolmaster, and delivered a short address on the protection he was about to confer. The children’s names were taken down with a preliminary caution to speak distinctly. When women muttered or gabbled, the Doctor grew irritable, and would sometimes make a troublesome woman spell her infant’s name half-a-dozen times, adding, “Now thou wilt know how to speak plainly.” Having got the names, he had next to look out for virus. The few mothers who had ventured to return with their vaccinated babes for examination, would perhaps lose courage and attempt to escape, when Walker would dart to the door and arrest the fugitive, saying, “Thou foolish woman! If thou wilt not do good to others, I will bless thy little one,” and would proceed to gather what he called his “Vaccine Roses.” He pursued his operations calmly indifferent to the screams of the children and the complaints of the mothers, and as he disposed of each case pronounced the illusory benediction, “Thy child is safe: fear not: fare thee well.”
Walker died in 1830, aged seventy-one, after a short illness, in which “he refused to take any medicine though himself a physician.” In the Report of the London Vaccine Institution for 1831 we read--
He was a man who day after day, month after month, and year after year, watched with the care of a parent the cause of which he was so experienced an advocate; who was willing to know nothing but the object of his early love, Vaccination; who for upwards of a quarter of a century never omitted one lawful day going his rounds to the numerous stations of the Institution; and who, it may be almost said, ended his life with the lancet in his hand, for he went round to the stations two days before he died.
Toward the end of his life, he used to boast that he had performed upwards of one hundred thousand vaccinations. So far as vaccination prevailed in London, it was chiefly through Walker’s exertions; and he was just the character, being set going, to keep going whatever the adverse evidence or obloquy. He had his plans and his methods, and those who tried to modify them took nothing by their pains. He was a man to have his own way, and those who did not like him might leave him. Whether from incapacity or affectation, he made no attempt at politeness, and said precisely what he thought without accommodation. He was a piece of mechanism rather than of genial humanity.
FOOTNOTES:
[185] The Vaccine Scourge containing the New Beggar’s Opera alias the Walkerian Farce, alias the London Vaccine Hoax; in answer to Dr. Walker’s Jenneric Opera. A Rod for the Fool’s Back. London, 1815. Pp. 122. Price 3s.
[186] A Caution against Vaccine Swindlers and Imposters. By John Ring. London, 1816. Pp. 140.
[187] The Life of John Walker, M.D., Graduate of the University of Leyden; Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians of London; and late Director of the Royal Jennerian and London Vaccine Institutions. By John Epps, M.D., London, 1831. Pp. 342.
[188] John Walker’s Reply to James Moore. London, 1818. Pp. 16.
[189] John Walker’s Reply to James Moore on his Mis-Statements respecting the Vaccine Establishments in the Metropolis and their Officers and Servants both Living and Dead. London, 1818. Pp. 114.
XXV. JENNER’S LATER WRITINGS
Jenner’s later writings were chiefly apologies for the failures of vaccination. His position was one of much difficulty, and its peculiarity is rarely, if ever, recognised. For example, how few know that his Inquiry published in 1798, “that master-piece of medical induction,” according to Mr. John Simon, was kept out of print and referred to as rarely as possible after 1801-2.
“Why?”
The answer to the question is so important that at the risk of repetition I give it explicitly.
The Inquiry was suppressed because of its ascription of cowpox to horsegrease.
It was the belief of dairy-maids in Gloucestershire that to have had cowpox was to be secure from smallpox. Jenner was much impressed by the rustic superstition, and brought it so persistently before his medical brethren at their convivial assemblies, that they threatened to expel him if he bored them any longer with the subject. “It is true,” they said, “that the maids believe an attack of cowpox keeps off smallpox, but we know they are wrong; for we are all familiar with cases of smallpox after cowpox.”
Thus frustrated, Jenner’s ingenuity took another turn. It was the belief of farriers that if infected in dressing horses’ greasy heels, they too were secure from smallpox. The area of this conviction was narrower than that of the dairy-maids, farriers being neither so numerous, nor so observant of their beauty: but Jenner entertained their faith and converted it to his purpose.
Horsegrease protected from smallpox, if cowpox did not. But might there not be one sort of cowpox that answered to the dairy-maids’ faith, if another sort did not? Happy thought! The defensive sort was derived from the horsegrease which protected the farriers: the non-defensive originated spontaneously on the cows. Men, fresh from handling horses’ greasy heels, milked cows and communicated to them the horses’ disease. Milkmaids, who in turn contracted from the cows that sort of pox, were like the farriers secure from smallpox, yea securer; whilst milkmaids who contracted pox spontaneously developed on cows were not secure. The milkmaids’ superstition was therefore justifiable: they were right and they were wrong--right when they got pox through the cow from the horse; wrong when they got pox from the cow simply.
Why then, it may be asked, did not Jenner dismiss the cow from consideration? Why did he not base his prescription on the farriers’ experience, and use and recommend horsegrease exclusively for inoculation? The question is an obvious one, but it is not easy to make out Jenner’s answer with precision. His assertion was, that--
The virus from the horse is not to be relied upon as rendering the system secure from variolous infection, but the matter produced by it on the nipple of the cow is perfectly so--
which was to say that horsegrease attained its highest prophylaxy after transmission through the cow.
Such was the doctrine of the Inquiry, “that master-piece of medical induction.”
When the doctrine came to be reduced to practice, difficulties arose. Cowpox was considered wholesome and credible, whilst horsegrease was repulsive and incredible. Still fact was fact; and many were ready to accept horsegrease through the cow, or without the cow, if such indeed were the source of the new salvation. Cowpox proved to be a rare commodity, whilst horsegrease was common, and numerous attempts were made to produce cowpox by means of grease, but ineffectually. At some attempts, Jenner officiated. Marshall records that--
Mr. Sewell, Assistant Professor at the Royal Veterinary College, informs me that he was a witness to a series of experiments, twice repeated, at the College in the presence of Dr. Jenner, Dr. Woodville, Mr. Wachsel, and Mr. Turner, with a view to produce the vaccine disease on the teats of a cow. The matter of grease had been immediately taken from the horse, and variously applied by long continued friction, punctures, scarifications, and by scratching the surface with a needle; but from these trials neither inflammation, nor any affection resembling a pock resulted.[190]
To this discomfiture Jenner had to submit. His ascription of cowpox to horsegrease was stigmatised as an error of which the less that was said the better. It is true that other experimenters were more successful, and that Loy of Whitby and Sacco of Milan dispensed with the cow as a superfluity and used matter direct from the horse for inoculation, passing the virus from arm to arm into general circulation until what was equine was lost sight of and indistinguishable from what was vaccine; but Jenner did not care to be justified at the risk of his popularity and the money on which he had set his heart. He saw how the wind of public favour was blowing, and went with it. Since horsegrease was disliked, he consented to its oblivion. Pearson, the chief promoter and organiser of vaccination, scoffed at horsegrease, and used spontaneous cowpox, which Jenner knew was of no avail against smallpox; but he entered no protest upon that score. On the contrary, he let the futile practice go on; he claimed it as his own; and he set about manufacturing excuses for the failures which were imminent.
Spurious cowpox was one of the most dexterous of these excuses. If injury or smallpox followed vaccination, the disaster was ascribed to spurious cowpox. Jenner’s Further Observations, published in 1799, was designed to teach “how to distinguish with accuracy between that peculiar pustule which is the true Cow Pock and that which is spurious;” and in his Origin of the Vaccine Inoculation in 1801 even greater stress was laid on the distinction. By and bye, however, the excuse worked more harm than advantage. People got terrified with the mischiefs ascribed to spurious cowpox, and as which was genuine and which spurious was only discoverable in their consequences, they began to decline to have either. It then became expedient to deny spurious cowpox, which Jenner did. He confessed to the Royal College of Physicians that there was not a true and a false cowpox; and that by spurious cowpox he “meant nothing more than to express irregularity in the form and progress of the vaccine pustule from which its efficacy is inferred.”
In view of facts like these, there is little cause for surprise that the publication of Jenner’s Inquiry with its two supplements was not continued. What he set forth as essential was treated as illusory, whilst the cowpox in which he had taught there was no security had been brought into use everywhere. Why therefore embarrass himself with proclamations of his own blunders? The believers in vaccination were good-natured and incurious, and he had their homage, which was agreeable and profitable, and why should he dissipate it? The Inquiry was printed for the third time in 1801, but “this master-piece of medical induction” has never been republished; and the probability is, that if ever reproduced, it will be to prove to the world the emptiness of its author’s pretensions.
Jenner’s original promises of immunity from smallpox by inoculation with horsegrease cowpox were absolute. Thus he wrote--
The person who has been affected with Cowpox Virus is for ever after secure from the infection of the Smallpox.[191]
It clearly appears that this disease, Cowpox, leaves the constitution in a state of perfect security from the infection of the Smallpox.[192]
Cowpox admits of being inoculated on the human frame with the most perfect ease and safety, and is attended with the singularly beneficial effect of rendering through life the person so inoculated perfectly secure from the infection of the Smallpox.[193]
Experience was not slow to demonstrate the futility of these assurances. At first the facts were flatly denied: it was impossible for smallpox to succeed cowpox. The evidence, however, grew too strong to be outsworn, and then it was said the cowpox must have been spurious. As failures accumulated over the operations of Jenner himself and his choice disciples (who were naturally presumed to know and avoid spurious cowpox) they began to lay great stress on the fact that smallpox itself did not always avert a subsequent attack; and if smallpox did not save from smallpox, why, they demanded, should cowpox be expected to do more?[194] Why, indeed! Still the cases of smallpox after cowpox were as scores to those of smallpox after smallpox, and then the argument was reduced to a competition between variolation and vaccination. “You inoculators with smallpox,” said the vaccinators, “are continually having smallpox after variolation, and why should we be expected to be more successful?” Why, indeed! The inoculators with smallpox in turn denied that after efficient variolation smallpox ever occurred, or could possibly occur; and thus the wrangle went on. One thing was plain and certain--the original claim of Jenner for the absolute infallibility of Horsegrease Cowpox as a preventive of Smallpox was reduced and surrendered bit by bit until it came to this at last--it made Smallpox milder!
These repeated surrenders were, however, never ingenuous. Mistakes are inevitable, and they are forgiven when frankly confessed; but frank confession was not Jenner’s habit. When vaccination failures had become notorious in 1808, he had the hardihood to assert, that from the outset he had recognised that as smallpox did not always avert smallpox, neither did he expect cowpox to do so; and cited as proof of his prescience this passage from Further Observations in 1799--
It should be remembered that the constitution cannot, by previous infection, be rendered totally insusceptible of the variolous poison; neither the casual, nor the inoculated Smallpox, whether it produce the disease in a mild or violent way, can perfectly extinguish the susceptibility.[195]
Here Jenner made a bold draft on his reader’s ignorance. It was his claim for horsegrease cowpox that it conferred an absolute security from smallpox without any qualification whatever. The assumed prescience in 1799 is completely belied when we refer to his arrogant manifesto of 1801. These are his words--
The scepticism that appeared amongst the most enlightened of medical men, when my sentiments on Cowpox were first promulgated, was highly laudable. To have admitted the truth of a doctrine, at once so novel and so unlike anything that ever appeared in the Annals of Medicine, without the test of the most rigid scrutiny, would have bordered upon temerity; but now, when the scrutiny has taken place, not only among ourselves, but in the first professional circles in Europe, and when it has been uniformly found in such abundant instances, that the human frame, when once it has felt the influence of the genuine Cowpox in the way that has been described, is never afterwards, at any period of its existence, assailable by the Smallpox, may I not with perfect confidence congratulate my country and society at large on their beholding, in the mild form of Cowpox, an antidote that is capable of extirpating from the earth a disease that is every hour devouring its victims; a disease that has ever been considered as the severest scourge of the human race![196]
Cowpox was thus set forth as a prophylactic with powers hitherto unknown and unique; so that Jenner was cut off from the claim of its equivalence with smallpox in character and consequences. He knew in 1799, as we have seen, that infection with smallpox did not render the constitution proof against the subsequent influence of the disease; but in 1801, as we see, it was his express contention that what smallpox failed to do that cowpox did--it protected the constitution perfectly and for ever from smallpox, and nothing to compare with it had ever appeared in the Annals of Medicine. It was only under the pressure of exposure and defeat that he humbled himself to write to Dunning, 1st March, 1806--
The security given to the constitution by Vaccine Inoculation is exactly equal to that given by the Variolous. To expect more from it would be wrong. As failures in the latter are constantly presenting themselves, we must expect to find them in the former also.[197]
To this pass was the infallible preservative from smallpox, with nothing to match it in the Annals of Medicine, reduced within the experience of seven years!
The most thorough-going and far-reaching of Jenner’s excuses for vaccination failures were herpetic affections of the skin. In his journal we read--
Inoculated C. F. a second time. It is very evident that the affection of the skin called red gum deadens the effect of the Vaccine Virus. This infant was covered with it when inoculated four days ago. The same happened with Mrs. D.’s infant.[198]
To Mr. Dunning he wrote from Cheltenham, October 25th, 1804--
How frequently does the Vaccine Disease become entangled with herpes! I see that the herpetic fluid is one of those morbid poisons which the human body generates, and when generated, that it may be perpetuated by contact. Children who feed on trash at this season of the year are apt to get distended bellies, and on them it often appears about the lips. This is the most familiar example that I know. A single vesicle is capable of deranging the action of the vaccine pustule. Subdue it, and all goes on correctly.[199]
And again to the same correspondent, 23rd December, 1804--
My opinion is that the chief interference with the success of Vaccination is herpes in some form or another. I have discovered that it is a very Proteus, assuming as it thinks fit the character of the greater part of the irritative eruptions that assail us.[200]
Having thus detected an all-sufficient explanation of the failure of vaccination to prevent smallpox, he communicated his discovery to the Medical and Physical Journal, August, 1804, in a paper entitled, “On the Varieties and Modifications of the Vaccine Pustule occasioned by an Herpetic State of the Skin,” but he complained to Dunning “that it seemed not to have excited the slightest interest.” In order to call attention afresh to the subject, he had the article reprinted as a pamphlet at Cheltenham in 1806 and at Gloucester in 1819, but in vain. He complained to Baron in 1817 that he could not get the Board of the National Vaccine Establishment to attend to his cautions touching the interference of cutaneous diseases with the progress of the vaccine vesicle. “I am afraid,” he observed, “that the extreme ignorance of medical men on this subject will destroy the advantages which the world ought to derive from the practice.”[201]
What of course medical men with the least common sense perceived was, that the excuse provided for vaccination failures was too liberal to be worth anything. If the least cutaneous eruption was sufficient to frustrate vaccination, what operation could be pronounced efficient? for it could scarcely be intended that every patient should be stripped to the skin and minutely examined for herpetic vesicles. There was nothing transitory in Jenner’s opinion about herpes: he harped upon its mischiefs and omnipresence to the close of his life. William Dillwyn of Walthamstow having asked him for any observations that occurred to him on the practice of vaccination for the benefit of Friends in Philadelphia, Jenner replied in a letter dated Berkeley, 19th August, 1818, in which we find these remarks--
I must candidly acknowledge that I am not at all surprised that a partial prejudice should now and then lift up its head against Vaccination. It is called into existence, not from anything faulty in the principle, but from its wrong and injudicious application. For example, a child, or family of children, may be in such a state, that the action of the vaccine fluid when applied to the skin shall be either wholly or partially resisted. It may either produce no effect at all, or it may produce pustules varying considerably in their rise, progress and general appearance from those which have been designated correct. It was about the year 1804 that I was fortunate enough to discover the general cause of these deviations, and no sooner was it fully impressed on my mind, than I published it to the world. Yet few, very few indeed, among those who vaccinate, have paid any attention to it; yet I am confident, from the review of the practice on an immense scale, that it is a matter which has a greater claim on our attention than any one thing besides connected with Vaccination--indeed I may say than any other thing. What I allude to is a coincident eruptive state of the skin, principally bearing what we call the herpetic or eruptive character. If we vaccinate a child under its influence, we are apt to create confusion. The pustule will participate in the character of the herpetic blotch, and the two thus become blended, forming an appearance that is neither vaccine nor herpetic; but the worst of it is that the patient does not receive that perfect security from Smallpox infection which is given by the perfect pustule.[202]
These complaints of the indifference of the medical world to his prophesying, show how completely the business of vaccination had passed out of Jenner’s hands. The influence of herpes on vaccination, although declared by him to be of the utmost importance, even to the extent of imperilling the advantages of the practice, was disregarded as unworthy of serious attention.
Another of Jenner’s apologetics was a pamphlet in 1808[203] designed to explain away the failure of the variolous test--the test that deceived so many in the early days of vaccination. The inoculated with cowpox were inoculated with smallpox, and when the smallpox did not “take,” it was said, “Behold the perfect protection!” The smallpox inoculators complained bitterly of the hocus-pocus. “No wonder,” they said, “that when the system is in a fever with bestial corruption, that human pox will not ‘take,’ but try after awhile.” And they did try after awhile, and it was found that the vaccinated could be inoculated with smallpox like the unvaccinated. Indeed, when it was seen that the vaccinated fell victims to smallpox, many who had been vaccinated resorted to the smallpox inoculators for their supposed superior protection, and received it without hindrance from their previous vaccination. It therefore became judicious to disown the variolous test; but neither in this case was the surrender frankly made, but with prevarication that deprived it of all grace. What the smallpox inoculators maintained, Jenner had to allow, but after this fashion--
My principal object is to guard those who may think fit to inoculate with variolous matter after Vaccination from unnecessary alarms; a pustule may sometimes be thus excited, as on those who have previously gone through Smallpox; febrile action in the constitution may follow; and, as has been exemplified, a slight eruption.
For the variolous he recommended the substitution of the vaccine test; saying--
At the commencement of Vaccination, I deemed the Variolous Test necessary; but I now feel confident that we have one of equal efficacy, and infinitely less hazardous in the re-insertion of the vaccine lymph--
Which was to say that vaccination immediately after vaccination would be found impossible--the later practice of periodical re-vaccination being unforeseen.
Jenner might have perceived that after his proclamation of the influence of herpes on vaccination, there was nothing to be said for the variolous test. When he consented to run vaccination on the same terms as variolation, and admitted that it would be wrong to expect more from the one practice than from the other, he was bound in consistency to allow that if vaccination was frustrated by eruptions of the skin, it was matter of consequence that variolation should be frustrated by the fever of vaccination. He informed Dillwyn that he destroyed cutaneous eruptions by the application of unguentum hydrargyri nitrati, and then vaccinated with success. The smallpox inoculators did so likewise. When the irritation induced by vaccination had had time to subside, they too variolated with success.
The letter to Dillwyn, 1818, contains some other points which it is instructive to note. For example, the following passage proves two things, first, how notorious had become vaccination failures; and, second, how vaccination, from an easy art that any one might practise, had been converted into a mystery to which even “an eminent surgeon” might be unequal. Jenner says--
One word more with respect to prejudice. How frequently have we seen in the public prints paragraphs of this description--“A gentleman’s family, consisting of three or four or half-a-dozen children, were vaccinated by an eminent surgeon, and all went through the disease in the most satisfactory manner, and were pronounced safe; yet, on being exposed to the infection of the Smallpox, they all had the disease, but happily they all recovered.” Here, Sir, the mind becomes entangled with a false association. The public conceive that an eminent surgeon must be a perfect master of this little branch of our art; but it often happens that he has not stooped to look at anything beyond its outline; and when deviations arise in the progress of the pustules [as from herpes] to that extent which I have pointed out as momentous, they are passed by without attracting any particular attention.
A report having got abroad that Jenner had renounced his faith in vaccination, he replied to Dillwyn--
My confidence in the efficacy of Vaccination to guard the constitution from Smallpox is not in the least diminished. That exceptions to the rule have appeared, and that they will appear, I am ready to admit. They have happened after Smallpox Inoculation; and by the same rule, as the two diseases are so similar, they will also happen after Vaccine Inoculation.
In presence of such a declaration, it is easy to understand why the Inquiry with its supplements was kept out of print, and never referred to. His confidence in vaccination not in the least diminished! In the words cited, he surrendered afresh the claim with which he started, and for which he was paid, namely, that inoculation with cowpox rendered the constitution proof against smallpox for life, and that the protection thus afforded was without precedent in medical experience.
Having thus, under stress of necessity, reduced vaccination to the level of variolation, and tried to shelter the failures of the one practice under those of the other, the spirit of the old quack surviving, he went on to prophesy in the familiar strain--
It is a curious and most delightful fact that Smallpox is flying before Vaccination in all directions. In a wide district around me, embracing the most populous part of the county of Gloucester, the Smallpox is scarcely heard of; and if it does happen to appear from infection brought by the wandering pauper, it either finds itself insulated, or is rendered incapable of spreading by giving immediately the vaccine security to those within its atmosphere who may happen to remain unprotected.
With Jenner’s turn for romance, there is no need for dealing with a statement like the foregoing seriously, else we might ask what was the prevalence of smallpox in Gloucestershire before vaccination? and to what extent had it been cultivated by inoculators? Throughout England there was a remarkable subsidence of smallpox precedent to the introduction of vaccination (for which vaccination obtained the credit), which subsidence was no doubt accelerated by the cessation of variolation. Jenner resumes--
Wherever Vaccination has been universally practised, there the Smallpox ceases to exist. It matters not how wide the district, or how populous the city, the result is, and, from the nature of things, must be the same. There is scarcely a part of the civilised world that cannot bear testimony to the truth of this position. For extent of territory, we may turn our eyes to our possessions in the East, and to various parts of South America; and to towns and cities, many of the most conspicuous in Europe.
In the island of Ceylon, the ravages of Smallpox were dreadful, although many efforts had been made to lessen its fatality by Variolous Inoculation. This, wherever it was practised, produced a spreading of the disease, and made a bad matter worse; so that the people would have nothing to do with it. But after a little time they took to Vaccine Inoculation very readily, and Smallpox became totally extinct.
From Sweden, too, we have a report that proves the extinction of Smallpox throughout the kingdom. Now as the good sense of the Swedes brought about this happy event, why should not Britain avail herself of the great gift, and employ it to the same effect? Here the Boon is distributed with a partial and a sparing hand, and consequently Smallpox still exists in several parts of our island.
There was no checking Jenner when he rose into rhodomontade about the myriads of Asia and the vastness of America, but descending to the definite in Ceylon and Sweden we can test him with precision, and as to both we shall find his statements at wide variance with facts. For the present, however, let us keep to our own country, and note especially what he had to assert of London in 1818--
Nevertheless I have the happiness to say, that since the first promulgation of my discovery in 1798, the deaths of Smallpox in the British Realms, according to the best estimates I can form, are reduced from more than 40,000 to less than 6,000 annually. The metropolis for the last ten or twelve years exhibited a reduction of about one half only; but during the last two years, Vaccination has been more extensively practised than ever, both from the benevolence of private individuals and the faculty, and by public institutions; and this year, 1818, promises a far greater reduction in the number of deaths than any that has preceded it.
In London in 1818 the deaths from smallpox were low (421); but a single year is of little account, and must be viewed in relation to preceding years. Here we have a statement for the decade, 1811-20, taken from the metropolitan Bills of Mortality.
Burials from From From From YEARS. all diseases. Smallpox. Fevers. Measles. 1811 17,043 751 906 235 1812 18,295 1287 783 427 1813 17,322 898 714 550 1814 19,783 638 908 817 1815 19,560 725 1309 711 1816 20,316 653 1299 1106 1817 19,968 1051 1299 725 1818 19,705 421 1170 728 1819 19,228 712 1150 695 1820 19,348 792 1156 720 ------- ---- ------ ---- 190,568 7928 10,694 6714 1801-1810 185,737 12,534 16,204 5680 1791-1800 196,801 18,477 19,880 2707
From this statement we see that the decrease in London smallpox that set in toward the close of the 18th Century was maintained; but that vaccination had aught to do with the decrease there is no reason to believe--unless in so far as the new practice discouraged variolation. How, we ask, could the vaccination of one-tenth of the Londoners (if so many) reduce the smallpox among nine-tenths? We have also to observe that mortality from fevers abated in common with smallpox; and it cannot be pretended that that abatement was also due to vaccination! The rational assumption is, that what diminished fevers in London, likewise diminished smallpox. Nor should we overlook the fact, that as the deaths from smallpox declined, those from measles increased; nor the probability that many deaths formerly ascribed to smallpox were derived from measles, and that part of the decline in one column is accounted for by the increase in the other.
Jenner’s assertion, that the national mortality from smallpox had been reduced from more than 40,000 to less than 6000 annually, had no basis whatever in reality. As we know, the 40,000 deaths were got by multiplying the deaths of a bad year of London smallpox by the population of the United Kingdom--as if London were the standard of England, Ireland, and Scotland! How he obtained the reduced number of 6000 we are left to conjecture. In reviewing Jenner’s writings we are startled with his inconsistencies, and scarcely less with the carelessness and credulity of his adherents. He set out with the common knowledge that cowpox did not prevent smallpox, and for that reason he substituted pox generated by horsegrease on the cow. Horsegrease cowpox could not, however, be procured on demand; and was, moreover, disliked on the score of its origin; and cowpox was resorted to by Pearson and Woodville, and diffused everywhere with acclamation; and Jenner did not only not object, but took credit, and actually was allowed to take credit for the pox he had described as ineffective for the purpose designed! By and bye cowpox from horsegrease, or horsepox, according to the original recipe, was obtained and brought into circulation with Jenner’s sympathy, if without his open approval--he discerning that praise and pay were not to be had from that notion. After a while, horsegrease, or horsepox, was used for inoculation without the intervention of the cow; and that too entered into currency as vaccine, Jenner himself employing and distributing it, although according to his Inquiry it was not to be trusted to prevent smallpox.
I repeat these facts, even at the risk of tedium, because it is essential to have them clearly apprehended. For at least three descriptions of virus Jenner stood responsible, namely--
I.--Horsegrease Cowpox--the virus warranted in his Inquiry.
II.--Cowpox, known by Jenner to be ineffective in preventing smallpox, but favoured by the medical profession and the public.
III.--Horsegrease (said to have been horsepox), also described by Jenner as ineffective, but latterly used and diffused by him.
To which of these did he attribute the success claimed for vaccination? Apparently to all indifferently; but if one were as good as the others, why did he not say so, and proceed to explain how it was that cowpox did not save the Gloucestershire milk-maids, nor horsegrease the farriers from smallpox? Was it that the power to put such questions, and to answer them, does not consist with the quack’s intelligence; and that in his lucre he rests content? Observe, too, how when credit was to be had for London vaccination, Jenner took it, though at mortal enmity with the chief agent in the work, repudiating Walker’s practice as subversive of principles he considered essential to success.
Jenner’s final publication in 1822 had nothing to do with vaccination, but was a bid for fame in a new direction.[204] It was an attempt to originate a new method of cure by irritating the skin with tartarated antimony. He had dabbled with the chemical when a young man, and John Hunter had suggested that his preparation should be sold and puffed as Jenner’s Tartar Emetic. In his last years he returned to it, and produced a series of cases to prove how many diseases might be alleviated and removed by using it as a counter-irritant--just as in the Inquiry he recommended cowpox inoculation with the same intention. The matter does not concern us further than to observe that the vesicles and scars produced by tartarated antimony are almost indistinguishable from those of vaccination; and that Hufeland, the German Nestor of Medicine, taught and proved that tartar emetic was every whit as effective against smallpox as cowpox--an opinion from which I see no reason to dissent.
FOOTNOTES:
[190] A Popular Summary of Vaccination with reference to its Efficacy and Probable Cause of Failure. By John Marshall, M.R.C.S. and District Vaccinator of the National Vaccine Establishment. London, 1830. Pp. 96.
[191] Inquiry, 1798, p. 7.
[192] Ibid., p. 58.
[193] Petition to the House of Commons, 1802.
[194] Jenner to Dunning, 23rd Dec., 1804. Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. ii. p. 26.
[195] Facts for the most part unobserved, or not duly noticed respecting Variolous Contagion. London, 1808, 4to, pp. 17.
[196] _A Continuation of Facts and Observations relative to Cowpox._ By Edward Jenner, M.D. London, 1801.
[197] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. ii. p. 28.
[198] Baron’s Life of Jenner, vol. i. p. 449.
[199] Ibid., vol. ii. p. 344.
[200] Ibid., vol. ii. p. 26.
[201] Life of Jenner, vol. ii. p. 223.
[202] Letter from Dr. Edward Jenner to William Dillwyn, Esq., on the Effects of Vaccination in Preserving from the Smallpox. Philadelphia Vaccine Society. Philadelphia, 1818. Pp. 20.
[203] Facts for the most part unobserved, or not duly noticed, respecting Variolous Contagion. London, 1808. 4to, pp. 17.
[204] A Letter to Charles Henry Parry, M.D., on the Influence of Artificial Eruptions in certain diseases incidental to the Human Body; with an Inquiry respecting the probable advantages to be derived from further experiments. By Edward Jenner, M.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.N.I.F., etc., and Physician to the King. London, 1822. 4to, pp. 68.
XXVI. BARON’S LIFE OF JENNER
We owe much to Baron’s Life of Jenner, but as a collection of evidence rather than as an organic biography. It is verbose and loosely put together, and would never be read unless by some one in quest of information, or with nothing better to do. Fortunately Baron was reverent and not critical. Jenner was to him a sacred being, admirable in all relations, whose only contention was with “the blindness and wickedness of his traducers.” Lives written in this temper are often most instructive. Tales are told and letters produced in pious simplicity that biographers of the judicious order discreetly suppress.
Baron made Jenner’s acquaintance in the summer of 1808 when he was living at Fladong’s Hotel, Oxford Street, revelling in a fool’s paradise as to his importance in the formation of the National Vaccine Establishment. Baron had recently come from Edinburgh, and says,--
I was about to commence practice: all the world was before me. In seeking the acquaintance of Jenner I was impelled mainly by a desire to do homage to a man whose public and private character had already secured my warmest admiration. I little thought that it would so speedily lead to an intimacy, and ultimately to a friendship, which terminated only at his death, and placed me in a relationship to his memory that no one could have anticipated. The greatness of his fame, his exalted talents, and the honours heaped upon him by all the most distinguished public bodies of the civilised world, while they made me desirous of offering my tribute of respect to him, forbade the expectation of more than such an acknowledgment as a youth, circumstanced as I was, might have expected. I soon, however, perceived that I had to do with an individual who did not square his manners by the cold formality of the world. He condescended as to an equal; the restraint and embarrassment that might naturally have been felt in the presence of one so eminent vanished in an instant. The simple dignity of his aspect, the kind and familiar tone of his language, and the perfect sincerity and good faith manifested in all he said and did, could not fail to win the heart of anyone not insensible to such qualities. Though more than twenty years have elapsed since this interview took place, I remember it, and all its accompaniments, with the most perfect accuracy. He was dressed in a blue coat, white waistcoat, nankeen breeches, and white stockings. All the tables in his apartment were covered with letters and papers on the subject of vaccination, and the establishment of the National Vaccine Institution. He talked to me of the excellent article which had lately appeared in the Edinburgh Review, relative to the vaccine controversy. He spoke with great good humour also of the conduct of the anti-vaccinists, and gave me some pamphlets illustrative of the controversy then going on. The day before he had had an interview with the Princess of Wales, and he showed me a watch which her Royal Highness had presented to him on that occasion.[205]
The passage is a long one, but it has some value in itself, and exhibits Baron’s habitual attitude toward his hero. In his private relations, Jenner was amiable, but it is with his public life that we are concerned, and find so reprehensible. Mischievous leaders and teachers are frequently distinguished by private graces; and austere personal virtue is frequently associated with bland indifference to conventional immoralities; and we need not go far to discover counterparts of Jenner in ordinary life. Nothing is commoner than suavity combined with self-love that is malignant and mendacious when thwarted. All is pleasant as long as admiration prevails, but with dissent or resistance the sunny temper vanishes, and clouds of contempt and fury overspread the spiritual sky. A sharp test of character is a man’s disposition to his adversaries; and Jenner was never magnanimous. His conduct to Pearson, Woodville, and Walker has been sufficiently described; and similar jealousy and spitefulness were displayed to whoever dared to impugn his infallibility in the prevention of smallpox. No one, for instance, could have brought forward the fact that smallpox occasionally succeeded vaccination with more simple good faith than Goldson; yet Jenner wrote of him with insufferable insolence--an insolence that is thrown into stronger relief by the knowledge that what Goldson testified is accepted at this day, even by vaccinators, as indisputable matter-of-course. His bully, too, John Ring, attacked Goldson, and Jenner, in writing to Dunning, 23rd December, 1804, thus excused his brutality--
You speak of Ring and Goldson. Recollect there was not time to be cool. What lover of Vaccination--what man, well acquainted with its nature, and that of Smallpox, could read Goldson’s book, and lay it down coolly? Ring, the moment he read it, and what indeed was infinitely worse than the book itself, its murderous harbinger--the advertisement, instantly charged his blunderbuss, and fired it in the face of the author. I must freely confess, I do not feel so cool about this Mr. Goldson as you do. His book has sent many a victim to a premature grave; and would have sent many more, but for the humanity and zeal of yourself and others who stepped forward to counteract its dreadful tendency.[206]
In the same spirit he wrote to Baron, 6th November, 1810, of Brown of Musselburgh, who had reported certain cases of smallpox after vaccination in a London newspaper--
Some notice must be taken of Mr. Brown’s communication; but if he thinks he shall be able to draw me into controversy, he will be mistaken. His letter, under the veil of candour and liberality, is full of fraud and artifice; for he knows that every insinuation and argument he has advanced, have been refuted by the first medical characters in Edinburgh and Dublin. But the mild, gentle, complaisant antagonist, is a character more difficult to deal with than one who boldly shows his ferocity.[207]
As applied to Brown, sagacious and sincere, this was the very ecstasy of abuse. Even Brown’s adversaries within his own neighbourhood, ultimately yielded to his contention. In the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal of July, 1818, we read--
Before we conclude, we must in justice to ourselves pay the amende honorable to Mr. Brown of Musselburgh, whose opinions we strenuously controverted in 1809; and to which we now, in 1818, confess ourselves partly converts in consequence of increased experience and observation.
In short, calm discussion of vaccination with Jenner was never possible. Inquiry was borne down with clamour, and scepticism denounced as malevolence. “He could not altogether escape,” says Baron, “from the annoyance occasioned by the blindness and wickedness of his traducers”[208]--and all were traducers who were not believers. Indeed, Baron could only account for the perversity of those who did not recognise Jenner as the saviour of mankind from smallpox by a resort to the doctrine of inbred depravity, saying--
We are compelled to believe that there is a principle in our nature which has too strong an affinity for what is untrue to permit the understanding to discern or acknowledge an opposite principle till both the moral and intellectual vision has been purified and strengthened.[209]
Purified and strengthened, and the affinity with falsehood dissolved, it became possible for the understanding to appreciate the virtue of cowpox and the veracity of its advertiser!
Jenner, it may be said, instinctively resented investigation. He was uneasy in conscious duplicity. He knew there was no safety in vaccination as practised; for the cowpox employed was not the horsegrease cowpox he had commended as efficacious. What he had prescribed was disregarded; what he had condemned was approved; but, strange to say, he was praised and rewarded by the world as if cowpox had been his specific! Jenner accepted the situation, and possibly came to believe (after a fashion) that he was enjoying no more than his own; but under the circumstances it was not surprising that he shrank from criticism, kept his early publications out of the way, and resorted to scolding and shrieking whenever scrutiny appeared imminent.
Worse even than his behaviour to investigators and opponents was his treatment of those who converted vaccination to practice. The Inquiry was no handbook, and Pearson, Woodville, and other early vaccinators, had to make their own way, not only unassisted, but with Jenner ready to appropriate their successes and to reproach them with their failures. Baron avers that nothing in the art of vaccination was due to any one but Jenner himself, qualifying this praise with a slight exception in favour of Dr. Bryce of Edinburgh, who made the discovery that if a subject under vaccination is re-vaccinated, the subsequent inoculation is caught up and brought to maturity with the precedent--a phenomenon that as Bryce’s Test was used to ascertain whether true vaccine fever was operative. But even Bryce received scant acknowledgment, and Baron tries to make out that Jenner was possessed of the fact ere it was announced.[210] Jenner’s meanness toward those who displayed any intelligent independence in co-operation with him is written at large in Baron’s biography, but with such innocence that it would be absurd to describe it as indecent. His good faith is perfect, and it is only a critical reader that finds out how he is identified with Jenner, seeing merit nowhere save in his abject servitors and feminine claque.
Vaccinators at this day allow that the influence of vaccination wears out and ought to be renewed; yet Jenner would not listen for a moment to such a modification of its perpetual prophylaxy. Baron writes--
The year 1804, in Jenner’s estimation, formed an era in the history of the Variolæ Vaccinæ. The assertion, that the Cowpox afforded only a temporary security was then insisted on. Had it been correct, it would have deprived the discovery of nearly all its value. This assertion was very easily made; and in the infancy of the practice could not be well disproved. To these circumstances it was owing, that the crude and unsupported statements of Mr. Goldson acquired any influence. Dr. Jenner himself, from the commencement, perceived that in his cases of failure, Cowpox had never been properly taken.[211]
When in 1813 Lord Boringdon introduced his bill to Parliament for the restriction of variolation, Lord Ellenborough observed--
No doubt Vaccination is of some use, but if the noble lord considers it a complete preventive of Smallpox, I differ from him in opinion. At the same time, I have proved my respect for the discovery by having my eight children vaccinated. I believe in the efficacy of Vaccination to a certain extent. It may prevent the disorder for eight or nine years; and in a large city like this with a large family of children, even this limited protection is desirable.
In this declaration the Chief Justice was not singular, but expressed the general conviction of the public who held by vaccination in spite of the manifest failure of the early promises made for it. Nevertheless Jenner was extremely annoyed: it was to him as the formal deliverance of judgment. Baron says--
I have seldom seen Jenner more disturbed than he was by this occurrence; not certainly because he had any fears that the unsupported assertion of his lordship would prove correct, but because it unhappily accorded with popular prejudices, and when uttered by such a person, in such an assembly, was calculated to do unspeakable mischief by unsettling the confidence of numberless anxious parents, and by attempting to deprive Vaccination of more than half its virtue.[212]
Thorough was Baron in his defence of Jenner: no inconsistency appalled him. He records in capitals (as produced) the following as Jenner’s solemn and final testimony, written, a few days before he expired, on the back of a letter, bearing the post-mark, 14th January, 1823--
MY OPINION OF VACCINATION IS PRECISELY AS IT WAS WHEN I FIRST PROMULGATED THE DISCOVERY. IT IS NOT IN THE LEAST STRENGTHENED BY ANY EVENT THAT HAS HAPPENED, FOR IT COULD GAIN NO STRENGTH; IT IS NOT IN THE LEAST WEAKENED, FOR IF THE FAILURES YOU SPEAK OF HAD NOT HAPPENED, THE TRUTH OF MY ASSERTIONS RESPECTING THOSE COINCIDENCES WHICH OCCASIONED THEM WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN MADE OUT.[213]
Self-deception after this pattern is far from uncommon, and is proof against evidence and death itself; but Jenner was not quite so crazy as his words imply. From his first opinion about vaccination, and its absolute efficacy against smallpox (unlike anything hitherto known in medical experience) he had retreated considerably. Even so early as 1804 he had reduced his claim for vaccination to equality with variolation. In that year he observed--
What I have said on Vaccination is true. If properly conducted, it secures the constitution as much as Variolous Inoculation possibly can. It is the Smallpox in a purer form than that which has been current among us for twelve centuries past.[214]
And again Baron cites him as saying--
Duly and efficiently performed, Vaccination will protect the constitution from subsequent attacks of Smallpox, as much as that disease itself will. I never expected that it would do more, and it will not, I believe, do less.[215]
Jenner presumed freely on the forgetfulness of those he addressed. In a document so well known as his petition to the House of Commons in 1802, he expressly claimed that a person inoculated with cowpox was thereby “rendered perfectly secure from the infection of smallpox through life”; nor would the furore which attended the introduction of the practice have been possible had it been set forth as no more than a milder form of variolation. That cowpox was equivalent to smallpox for inoculation was laughed at by the variolators; but that a vaccinated person was as safe from smallpox as one who had passed through the disease, was true in no other sense than that Jenner wished it to be true, and prophesied accordingly. It was by such contrivances that he broke his own fall, and alleviated the disenchantment of the credulous.
Oddly enough Jenner’s fiction, that vaccination was as good against smallpox as smallpox itself, was revived in the innocence of ignorance by Sir William Gull before a committee of the House of Commons in 1871. “Vaccination is as protective against smallpox as smallpox itself,” said the fashionable physician. Confutation was, however, at hand. Mr. Marson (for thirty-five years resident surgeon of the Highgate Smallpox Hospital) attested that cases of smallpox after smallpox were comparatively rare--not 1 per cent.; whilst 84 per cent. of those admitted to the Hospital in 1864 were vaccinated. An instructive contrast between the logic of fancy and matter of fact!
Baron, with unscrupulous disregard of evidence, complains that vaccination should ever have been represented as an infallible preventive of smallpox; so that as pointed out in the Report of the Royal College of Physicians in 1807, “the fate of the new practice was made to hang on the occurrence of a single case of smallpox”; and goes on to observe--
This, I am sorry to say, was a great misapprehension; the opposers of Vaccination endeavoured to place the fate of Vaccination on such an issue; but if Jenner’s principles be duly considered, he never at any time sanctioned such an idea; and long before the practice of Vaccination became general, he anticipated failures, and explained the circumstances under which they were most likely to occur.[216]
The summary answer to this statement is, that it is untrue. Jenner anticipated no failures. On the contrary, he vehemently denied them; and when denial could no longer avail, he invented a variety of excuses, such as spurious cowpox and omnipresent herpes, to account for their occurrence; though always ready (as we have seen) to hark back to his original assertion that vaccination was “an infallible preventive of smallpox.” Baron did not like the word “infallibility.” He writes--
I am not sure that the expression was ever used by Dr. Jenner himself. If he did use it, he certainly very soon accompanied it with the necessary qualification. He may perhaps at the outset have stated his opinion somewhat too decidedly; but no one qualified to judge can doubt that from the very beginning he was possessed of the gauge by which to measure the virtues of Vaccination.[217]
Whether he did make use of the word “infallible” is of slight importance. There are various modes in which the same meaning may be conveyed, and Jenner’s was unequivocal. It was in 1801 that appealing to the rigid scrutiny that had taken place in the first professional circles of Europe, he deliberately proclaimed it as certain--
That the human frame, when once it has felt the influence of the genuine Cowpox in the way that has been described, is never afterwards, at any period of its existence, assailable by the Smallpox.[218]
When Lord Ellenborough in 1813 described vaccination as affording no more than a temporary security from smallpox, he merely expressed the diminished confidence of the community in the practice; but it is the habit of adventurers to ascribe adverse manifestations of public feeling to petty causes; and thus Jenner held that the Chief Justice was indulging a personal grudge when he threw doubt on the perpetual efficacy of his prescription. On one occasion, so ran the story, Ellenborough was relating in a company at St. James’s how Jenner had so little faith in cowpox that he had used smallpox to inoculate his own child, when he was suddenly confronted by an irate personage, who exclaimed, “I am Dr. Jenner, and what you have stated is not true!” whereupon Ellenborough slunk aside in confusion. The fact of the rencontre in the sensational form, we may credit as we please; but about the variolation of Jenner’s child there is no doubt whatever. We have the circumstance recorded by himself with such explanation as he considered adequate.
Turning to the Inquiry, we find under Case XXII. that Robert F. Jenner, aged eleven months, was vaccinated on 12th April, 1798, and that he did not receive the infection. The operation was not repeated, and he remained unvaccinated. Some time afterwards, whilst Jenner was residing at Cheltenham, Mr. Cother, a surgeon, happened to drop in, and having taken the child in his arms, mentioned in the course of conversation, that he had just left a family suffering from smallpox. “Sir,” cried Jenner, “you know not what you are doing! That child is not protected.” What was to be done? “There was no doubt on my mind,” says Jenner, “that the boy was infected;” and having none of the precious horsegrease cowpox in his possession, he held that he was without alternative, and by Mr. Cother the lad was immediately inoculated with smallpox.
The fact in due course got abroad, and, as Baron relates, was made the most of by the opponents of vaccination--
One observed, “Dr. Jenner may say what he likes about Vaccination, but we know for certain that he has inoculated his own son with Smallpox.” Another repeated this statement with the addition, that he had done so because he mistrusted Vaccination. A third added another tint to deepen the colouring, affirming that he knew that Dr. Jenner had abandoned his confidence in Vaccination, and the proof is incontestable, as he has inoculated his own child with Smallpox. These stories passed from mouth to mouth, and afterwards appeared in print with every malignant interpretation.[219]
Such talk was very natural, nor was it without justification. Jenner ought to have proved his sincerity by the vaccination of his son; and he who denounced variolation and variolators with such bitterness might have accepted the risk of infection from Mr. Cother rather than have compromised himself so injuriously. Moreover (as was asked at the time) if the child was infected, what was the use of inoculation? Variolation and vaccination (it was argued) may be serviceable in keeping off smallpox, but are of no avail after infection.
Vaccination has been described as a remarkable survival of superstition in hygiene--many, who disowning all other dodges for the maintenance of health, holding by it. Of course Jenner knew nothing of hygiene in the scientific sense--it was revealed after his time; but it is noteworthy that in none of his publications or letters is there any anticipation of the truth that has proved so fruitful in our experience, namely, that ill-health indicates ill-living, and that the misery of disease is only remediable in so far as we come out of the conditions of disease. Whilst of such truth he knew nothing, he might have known something. It lay plainly before him that smallpox was an affliction of the poor, and of the prosperous in so far as they shared the conditions of the poor, but he never recognised the fact. On the contrary, he cherished the fantasy that various diseases were derived from association with animals; and that thus smallpox originated in cowpox, which in turn came from horsegrease. “There,” said he to his nephew, pointing to a horse with greasy heels, “there is the source of smallpox.”[220] To entertain such an opinion was to be stone-blind to the true causes of disease, and therefore we have no reason for surprise that the Jenner household lived in chronic ill-health, piously submissive to what they supposed the divine will. Typhus fever was recurrent in the household without a suspicion that anything was amiss on the human side. There was a genius named Dawes Worgan, whom Jenner received into his family as tutor to his son, but ere a year had elapsed the poor fellow had two attacks of typhus, and finally succumbed to pulmonary consumption in 1809, in his nineteenth year. Chantry Cottage, Jenner’s residence at Berkeley, was no temple of Hygeia: on the contrary, such a place at this day would be a terror to a respectable neighbourhood, and subject to the attention of the sanitary inspector.
The principle of vaccination conceded--that health may be purchased by disease, it was not surprising that it was thought that measles and scarlet fever could be extirpated by similar treatment. Sir Humphry Davy suggested that hydrophobia might be anticipated by the inoculation of another animal virus, but Jenner held that cowpox should be tried--“nothing like leather.” It was reported from Constantinople that the plague itself was stayed by vaccination, and that experiments, exactly like those used to demonstrate its power against smallpox, had been repeated with complete success. There was not, however, enterprise in the East for the development of the quackery.
Jenner taught that distemper in dogs was preventible by vaccination, and accumulated a variety of “first-rate evidence” in proof. It was no transitory whim. He vaccinated twenty of the King’s staghounds in 1801, and in 1809 contributed a paper to the Medico-Chirurgical Society on the subject, wherein he expressed the opinion that the disease had only existed in England for the past half century. Several great fox hunters had their hounds vaccinated, and the results were pronounced satisfactory.[221] Why, then, was the practice not continued? Why is not distemper exterminated? May we not say the reason is plain? The first-rate evidence was illusory. Men are apt to create the facts they wish for, but as desire subsides, they recover their normal eyesight. Cowpox, we are persuaded, was as good against distemper in dogs as against smallpox in human beings, and but for extraneous causes, it would have been abandoned for the one as for the other.
For Jenner it has to be said, that if deceived, he had much to excuse his self-deception. There are men possessed of convictions which they maintain in the face of an indifferent or antagonistic world, but Jenner was not such a man. If his Inquiry had gone the way of waste-paper, he would have offered no resistance; but instead, it was proclaimed by Pearson as worthy of universal attention, and the hour being propitious, the middle-aged country doctor suddenly found himself treated as the deliverer of mankind from smallpox, whilst Pearson, his promoter, was swept aside as a half-hearted worshipper of the new divinity. Adulation was administered without measure, and if Jenner took it for true, and was led to imagine that he had more in him than he ever imagined, what marvel! He became the centre of a European craze of a character and intensity that is perhaps without parallel. Emperors and kings, statesmen and philanthropists, men of science, and in short the whole educated world conspired to do him reverence. The craze gradually abated, and the abatement was most decided in the country of its origin, and chiefly in London where cowpox and its advertiser were most closely scrutinised. Jenner abhorred London. There he had proposed to flourish as a West-End physician, and there he had encountered a dismal failure. There, too, his antagonists were active, and their demonstration of the futility of his assertions most conclusive. We see his temper toward London in such a passage as the following from a letter to Dunning, dated Cheltenham, 21st February, 1806--
What havoc the Anti-Vaccinists have made in town by the re-introduction of Variolous Inoculation! It is computed that not less than 6000 persons in the metropolis, and the adjacent villages, have fallen victims to the Smallpox since April last. One would scarcely conceive it possible, but these murders are, for the most part, to be attributed to the absurd productions of Moseley, Rowley, and that pert little Squirrel, to say nothing of Goldson. It is about London that the venom of these deadly serpents chiefly flows.[222]
Whilst the doors of almost every scientific corporation in the world were thrown open to receive him, the Royal College of Physicians of London maintained an honourable reserve; and when in 1814 his claim to admission was strongly urged, the majority insisted that, if received, he should submit to the usual examination--a sufficient check in Jenner’s case.[223] The College has been reproached for its treatment of “the immortal benefactor of the human race,” but it is forgotten how intimately the leading members were acquainted with his immortality, and with what disgust they must have received his confession in 1807 as to the non-existence of spurious cowpox.
Toward the close of his life, Jenner rarely appeared in London. His last visit took place in 1814, when he was presented to the Emperor of Russia. “I am happy to think,” said Alexander, “that you have received the thanks, the applause, and the gratitude of the world;” to which Jenner made answer, “I have received the thanks and the applause, but not the gratitude of the world”--the absent gratitude being a periphrase for absent cash, and a hint to the Czar that he might repeat the superb munificence of his grandmother, Catharine, to her inoculator Dimsdale. The Emperor, however, gave nothing, and Jenner retired keenly disappointed. Whatever the imperial disposition, Jenner did little to render it more propitious by using his audience to denounce Walker and the Friends by whom vaccination was at that time chiefly promoted; for as Alexander said, “I love the good Quakers: they are my friends, indeed;” and whoever slandered them was not likely to advance in his favour.
With all he got Jenner reckoned himself ill-paid; and taking the words of his admirers for sincere, he was ill-paid. Many a successful slayer of his kind had much more from the House of Commons with less fuss than their ideal preserver; but there is often a measure of sincerity within insincerity, and many of those who praised Jenner most rapturously felt that he had not been dealt with illiberally as the advertiser of cowpox.
Jenner’s wife died in 1815, an ailing, pious, affectionate woman, and thenceforth he dwelt in retirement until his death on the 26th of January, 1823, at the age of seventy-four. “Never,” he wrote to his friend Gardner on 13th January, a week before his demise, “Never was I involved in so many perplexities.” Hailed with acclamation in 1800-2 as the saviour of mankind from smallpox, during the remaining twenty years of his life he underwent a steady course of discredit as failure after failure was recorded and attested against vaccination. Appropriate therefore was his farewell to the world in 1823, “Never was I involved in so many perplexities.” There was not enthusiasm left to effect the interment of his remains in Westminster Abbey, and the funeral took place at Berkeley. An attempt was made to obtain a grant from Parliament for a monument, but the proposal fell flat. Baron then set on foot a subscription for the purpose, but it met with little encouragement. The only public bodies which contributed anything were the Edinburgh Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, the first sending £50 and the second £10. With much difficulty sufficient was scraped together to order a statue from Sievier, which was set up at the west end of the nave of Gloucester Cathedral. The front panel of the pedestal originally bore the dates of birth and death, but Baron had them removed, considering the word JENNER all significant.
In latter times, in 1859, a statue was erected to his memory in Trafalgar Square, London, close by the College of Physicians, but it was felt to have an air of possible quackery about it, and by and bye was quietly removed to a corner in Kensington Gardens. There is, as I have remarked, a measure of sincerity even in insincerity; and it is impossible for any one with a lively sense of veracity to know Edward Jenner and entertain for him any respect.
FOOTNOTES:
[205] Vol. ii. p. 136.
[206] Vol. ii. p. 24.
[207] Ibid. p. 47.
[208] Vol. ii. p. 148.
[209] Vol. ii. p. 110.
[210] Vol. i. p. 450.
[211] Vol. ii. p. 18.
[212] Vol. ii. p. 197.
[213] Vol. ii. p. 311
[214] Vol. ii. p. 15.
[215] Vol. ii. p. 135.
[216] Vol. ii. p. 135.
[217] Vol. ii. p. 134
[218] Continuation of Facts and Observations, p. 181.
[219] Vol. ii. pp. 43-49 and 198.
[220] Vol. i. p. 135.
[221] Vol. i. pp. 444, 450; Vol. ii. p. 148.
[222] Vol. ii. p. 352. The London Bills of Mortality record 1685 deaths in 1805 and 1158 in 1806 from Smallpox--numbers in no respect extraordinary.
[223] Vol. ii. p. 191.