What did doctors have to say at the time Jenner first convinced them to vaccinate their patients? Here is some Vaccine history: people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S536.htm This brief statement of the early history of vaccination has been introduced here in order to give what seems to be a probable explanation of the remarkable fact that a large portion of the medical profession accepted, as proved, that vaccination protected against a subsequent inoculation of small-pox, when in reality there was no such proof, as the subsequent history of small-pox epidemics has shown. The medical and other members of the Royal Commission could not realize the possibility of such a failure to get at the truth. Again and again they asked the witnesses above referred to to explain how it was possible that so many educated specialists could be thus deceived. They overlooked the fact that a century ago was, as regards the majority of the medical profession, a pre-scientific age; and nothing proves this more clearly than the absence of any systematic control experiments, and the extreme haste with which some of the heads of the profession expressed their belief in the lifelong protection against small-pox afforded by vaccination, only four years after the discovery had been first announced. This testimony caused Parliament to vote Jenner £10,000 in 1802. Ample proof now exists of the fallacy of this belief, since vaccination gives no protection whatever, as will be shown later on. But there was also no lack of [[p. 10]] proof of this failure to protect in the first ten years of the century; and had it not been for the unscientific haste of the medical witnesses to declare that vaccination protected against small-pox during a whole lifetime--a fact of which they had not and could not possibly have any evidence--this proof of failure would have convinced them and have prevented what is really one of the scandals of the nineteenth century. These early proofs of failure will be now briefly indicated. Only six years after the announcement of vaccination, in 1804, Dr. B. Moseley, Physician to Chelsea Hospital, published a small book on the cow-pox, containing many cases of persons who had been properly vaccinated and had afterwards had small-pox; and other cases of severe illness, injury, and even death resulting from vaccination; and these failures were admitted by the Royal Jennerian Society in their Report in 1806. Dr. William Rowley, Physician to the St. Marylebone Infirmary, in a work on Cow-pox Inoculation in 1805, which reached a third edition in 1806, gave particulars of 504 cases of small-pox and injury after vaccination, with seventy-five deaths. He says to his brother medical men: Come and see. I have lately had some of the worst species of malignant small-pox in the Marylebone Infirmary, which many of the faculty have examined and know to have been vaccinated. For two days he had an exhibition in his Lecture Room of a number of children suffering from terrible eruptions and other diseases after vaccination. Dr. Squirrel, formerly Resident Apothecary to the Small-pox and Inoculation Hospital, also published in 1805 numerous cases of small-pox, injuries, and death after vaccination. John Birch, a London surgeon, at first adopted vaccination and corresponded with Jenner, but soon, finding that it did not protect from small-pox and that it also produced serious and sometimes fatal diseases, he became one of its strongest opponents, and [[p. 11]] published many letters and pamphlets against it up to the time of his death in 1815. Mr. William Goldson, a surgeon at Portsea, published a pamphlet in 1804, giving many cases in his own experience of small-pox following vaccination. What made his testimony more important was that he was a believer in vaccination, and sent accounts of some of his cases to Jenner so early as 1802, but no notice was taken of them. And his conclusion: The successive Vaccination Acts were passed by means of allegations which were wholly untrue and promises which have all been unfulfilled. They stand alone in modern legislation as a gross interference with personal liberty and the sanctity of the home; while as an attempt to cheat outraged nature and to avoid a zymotic disease without getting rid of the foul conditions that produce or propagate it, the practice of vaccination is utterly opposed to the whole teaching of sanitary science, and is one of those terrible blunders which, in their far-reaching evil consequences, are worse than the greatest of crimes.
Posted on: Mon, 02 Jun 2014 06:38:59 +0000
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