liamentary grant, and involved in grave financial difficulties. He wrote to a friend, 2nd November, 1804

The London smoke is apt to cloud our best faculties. I do not intend to risk the injury of mine in this way, unless occasionally for the transaction of business. The public has not the smallest right to require such a sacrifice of me. I have received no reward for showing them how to remove one of the greatest obstacles to human happiness; but, on the contrary, am loaded with a tax of more than £400 a year!

And to another correspondent

I have now completely made up my mind respecting London. I have done with it, and have again commenced as village doctor. I found my purse not equal to the sinking of a £1000 annually (which has actually been the case for several successive years) nor the gratitude of the public deserving such a sacrifice. How hard after what I have done, the toils I have gone through, and the anxieties I have endured in obtaining for the world a greater gift than man ever bestowed on the world before (excuse this burst of egotism), to be thrown by with a bare remuneration of my

expenses.

It was hard! People who attributed to Jenner the greatest discovery ever made, the preservation of from 36,000 to 45,000 lives annually in the United Kingdom, and the salvation of the human race from smallpox, were indeed entitled to have dealt with him more handsomely. He had sympathisers and candid friends. "Your liberality and disinterestedness every one must admire," wrote Mr. Benjamin Travers, "but you are sadly deficient in worldly wisdom. If you had undertaken the extinction of the smallpox yourself, with coadjutors of your own appointment, I am confident, you might have put £100,000 in your pocket; and the glory would have been as great and the benefit to the community the same." How that £100,000 was used to tantalise him! and yet, as Dr. Pearson pointed out, never any one showed on what practicable terms the immense sum could have been earned by means of cowpox.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE ROYAL JENNERIAN SOCIETY.

JENNER, jealous of Pearson, was anxious to supersede the Institution for the Inoculation of the Vaccine Pock established by him in 1799; but Jenner was what Scots call "a feckless creature," whose wishes rarely issue in fruit. After his success in Parliament, he did not remain in London to improve his opportunities, but retreated to domestic quiet at Berkeley and Cheltenham. His friends, however, were mindful of him, and Dr. Hawes, Mr. Addington, surgeon, Benjamin Travers, and Joseph Leaper met in Queen Street, City, 3rd December, 1802, and resolved to establish a JENNERIAN SOCIETY for the Extinction of the Small-Pox." Mr. Addington transmitted the resolution of the meeting to Jenner, saying—

We look to your direction and assistance, and feel very desirous of knowing when it is probable we may have the pleasure of seeing you in town.

Joseph Fox of Lombard Street, dentist and enthusiastic promoter of the new inoculation, also wrote to him, 4th December, soliciting his co-operation

The plan which is in agitation is of the most extensive and liberal kind. It is even expected that the Royal countenance will be gained; but much depends upon thee. All are looking toward thee as the proper person to lay the foundation-stone. It would be well if this could be done in the course of the present year, particularly as it is the memorable time when the practice received parliamentary sanction.

But the ease-loving Jenner was not to be drawn. He wrote to Mr. Addington from Berkeley, 10th December, 1802

Your very obliging letter found me just returned with my wife and children to our pleasant home, where I promised myself a few weeks of domestic comfort after some years spent in constant anxieties.

This is the pull on one side. On the other is the delightful prospect held up to my view of an Establishment for the promotion of Universal Vaccine Inoculation-an establishment to which I have for years been looking forward with a longing eye.

I need not go farther into explanation, and shall only say, that if it be incompatible with the generous design to suffer me to remain here for the time I had allowed myself, I will certainly comply with the wishes of my friends and go to town. Yet it must be observed that I humbly conceive and ardently hope that my presence will not be absolutely necessary. I have written to my friend Dr. Lettsom and requested him to have the kindness to be (as far as such a thing is admissible) my representative. In his judgment on the present occasion I can place every confidence.

The letter describes the man. He did not like to be troubled-not even when action stood for the advancement of his own glory. As Pearson observed, "If Vaccination had been left to Jenner, it would never have come to anything." Benjamin Travers also wrote to him at the same time urging the necessity of his presence in London, but he was put off with similar excuses and with expectations of assistance from the public purse—

Government, I have no doubt, will give due support to so just and laudable an undertaking. I am warranted in this suggestion by a long conversation I had with Mr. Abbott, Speaker of the House of Commons, who said that after the investigation of the Parliamentary Committee he thought it became a public duty to form Institutions for Gratuitous Inoculation.

As Jenner was not to be had, the promoters set to work without him, and their triumph was complete when at a meeting in the London Tavern on 17th February, 1803, it was announced that his Majesty had graciously condescended to become the patron of "THE ROYAL JENNERIAN SOCIETY for the Extermination of the Smallpox:" that her Majesty had with great benignity acquiesced in the request to become patroness: that his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and their Royal Highnesses the Duke of York, the Duke of Clarence, and the Duke of Cumberland, had evinced, in a most flattering manner, their willingness to accept the office of vice-patrons that his Grace the Duke of Bedford had consented to fill the office of president; and that many prelates, noblemen, and gentlemen of the highest rank and respectability had agreed to be vice-presidents of the Society.

The approval of the Prince of Wales was conveyed in

a letter of the Earl of Egremont, over which Baron, Jenner's biographer (writing when the Prince had blossomed into George IV.), bursts into worship in capitals, as follows

The gracious and beneficent mind of the Illustrious writer is displayed in every line; and the whole is truly characteristic of those great qualities which continue to add lustre to his still more EXALTED STATION and shed so much of real glory on his REIGN.

Subscriptions flowed in freely. The Corporation of London gave £500, the East India Company £100, the Duke of Bedford £50, and guineas ten, five, two and one were contributed with a liberality that attested the fervour of the common credulity. But it was much

easier to get money than to administer it with a nice adjustment of means to ends. The Jennerians, too, were over-organised. There were a Medical Council and a Board of Directors. The Medical Council consisted of twenty-five Physicians and twenty-two Surgeons of the first eminence in London, with Jenner for president and Lettsom for vice-president. Such mechanism could never work, and at the point where real business was to be transacted, an officer was selected of extraordinary character.

John Walker was born at Cockermouth in 1759, and was a school-fellow of Woodville, subsequently physician to the London Smallpox Hospital. After a rambling career as blacksmith, engraver, and school-master, he turned his attention to medicine, graduated at Leyden, associated with French revolutionists in the guise of a member of the Society of Friends; then accompanied Dr. Marshall in a vaccinating cruise to the Mediterranean, from whence, after a variety of adventures in war and weather, he appeared in London in 1802, habited as a Quaker with a long beard-an apparition in a clean shaven community. Joseph Fox, the dentist of Lombard Street, gave him the use of a part of his house, and there, in his own words, "I set up my VACCINIUM for the glorious cause." As soon as the Jennerian Society was initiated, Walker was put forward by Joseph Fox and

other Friends as inoculator-in-chief, and Walker made application in the following terms—

TO THE JENNERIAN SOCIETY.

Friends, Perhaps there is not any individual who has greater reason to be gratified with the interest ye are taking in the Vacciole Inoculation than myself.

Of late years, the practice of it has been the chief business of my life, and I am partly indebted, during some of the last months, to the zeal of individual members of your Society for being enabled to continue it. They have sent patients to me from remote and distant parts of this extensive City, when, for want of notoriety, I might otherwise have been unemployed.

May I offer to you my services in this way: during the infancy of your Institution, you cannot do me a greater pleasure than to increase my number of patients; for where I now vacciolate tens, I could easily do the same for hundreds.

After this declaration, I hope you will consider the present address as neither unseasonable nor intrusive, but rather as a mark of unwavering zeal in the happy cause in which ye are now embarking.

Respectfully,

54 Lombard Street, 29. xii., 1802.

JOHN WALKER.

When the day of election arrived, four, out of many, were selected as candidates, one of them being Dr. Domeier, a German, strongly recommended by the Queen and Prince of Wales; but the Friends stood by their man, and Dr. Walker was appointed Resident Inoculator at the Central House of the Society in Salisbury Square with a salary of £200 a year, coal and candles, and liberty to take fees for private" vacciolation."

The promoters of the Society, operating under the prestige of Jenner's name, resolved to hold their annual festival on his birthday, the 17th of May; and at the first dinner in 1803 he was subjected to flatteries enough to turn any man's head who does not know the reckless insincerity that prevails on such occasions. It was the adulation connected with the formation of this Society that as much as anything induced Jenner to set up as west-end physician. The attempt of the middle-aged country doctor was the occasion of much grim humour, and his consequent embarassments were the concern of