Vaccine Matter, the produce of the original virus furnished by Dr. Jenner, which has now passed happily through successive generations of subjects in the course of 43 years, and which forms the principal source of our supply, to any which may have been recently taken from the cow.

Here we have "the original virus furnished by Dr. Jenner" set forth as no more than "the principal source of supply." The reports are characterised by many similar inconsistencies

1845.-We regard as erroneous the belief that Vaccine Virus undergoes deterioration by being kept; in proof of which we are prepared to establish, by unquestionable documents, the striking fact, that Lymph which had been conveyed to and from India has retained its protective properties wholly unimpaired after a lapse of 20 years.

Another vexation of the Board was due to the assertion that the protective virtues of vaccination gradually wore out, and that the repetition of the rite was necessary for the maintenance of salvation. In the London Medical Gazette, 2nd August, 1844, it was proclaimedWe are sorry to announce the extensive prevalence of Smallpox at this time among us. REVACCINATE, REVACCINATE, say we.

Such advice was essentially heretical and damnable; for Jenner affirmed and maintained

That the human frame, when once it has felt the influence of the genuine Cowpox, is never afterwards, at any period of its existence, assailable by Smallpox.

If revaccination were possible, smallpox after vaccination was possible; and if so much were conceded, on what ground was vaccination to be defended? Whatever the facts, the members of the Board resolved to stand loyally by the primitive Jennerian doctrine, and in their Report for 1851 thus testified

It may be expedient to remind the public of the established fact which the Board upon former occasions anxiously insisted upon, that the restriction of the protective power of Vaccination to any age, or to any term of years, is an hypothesis contradicted by experience, and wholly unsupported by analogy.

Notwithstanding the prohibition of Variolous Inocula

tion, the Board had repeatedly to deplore its continuance especially in Ireland. Thus we read

1850.-The Board again entreat the attention of the Government to the fact that Inoculation for the Smallpox still continues; and that the disease is communicated by vagrants to those unprotected by Vaccination in town and country. The contagion is carried throughout the land by wandering Irish, and no care, however great, can be successful in eradicating Smallpox, whilst the neglect of Vaccination and the practice of Variolous Inoculation are permitted in Ireland.

It was Jenner's practice to attribute to wilful blindness and innate depravity any scepticism as to the efficacy of vaccination; and throughout the Reports of the Establishment this habit of imputation was maintained. Vaccination was treated as a sort of divine revelation, plenary and manifest, which could only be disputed or resisted from deliberate perversity, or, more charitably, from abject dulness or ignorance; and it would be easy to construct a catena of piquant deliverances under this semi-theological persuasion. Such observations as the following were of the order of matterof-course

1850.-We regret to learn that in our own country the spread of Vaccination is still materially impeded by influences emanating from ignorance and prejudice in the lower orders, and from prejudices in many who cannot plead the excuse of ignorance.

1851-It is lamentable to observe not only the indifference, but the active hostility displayed by the community to Vaccination. Deeply-rooted prejudices and absurd superstitions are ever opposing its adoption.

The Reports of the Establishment year after year displayed in full measure the familiar complacency of official routine-where pay is constant and wheels propelled from office desks revolve smoothly in space-so many Londoners vaccinated, so many charges of virus distributed, and confidence in the sacred prophylactic unabated. A revolution was, however, impending. The attitude of the public mind toward disease had become transformed. Faith in sanitation as a preventive of fevers had been created, and a popular demand for sani

tary improvement had set in. Under cover of this new enthusiasm some of the shrewder advocates of vaccination conjectured that it would be possible to effect its endowment and establishment on a scale hitherto unattempted in England. It was true that vaccination had no relation to sanitation; but the reforming and philanthropic mob were madly in favour of whatever bore the promise of health, and were not likely to show themselves hypercritical or obstructive.

The first movement toward a new advance is discernible in the Report of the Establishment for 1850 wherein we read

The Board have had to solicit the attention of Her Majesty's Government on several occasions to the deplorable fact that a very large proportion of the children of the poorer classes in the Metropolis, and in England and Wales generally, but above all in Ireland, remain year by year without the benefit of Vaccination. Their testimony on this important part of the sanitary condition of the population has been derived from the reports of numerous competent medical witnesses in all parts of the United Kingdom, and from the frequent recurrence of rapid and fatal invasions of Smallpox, to which their attention has been repeatedly called by urgent applications for Vaccine Lymph. It is satisfactory to find that the representations which the Board have made are most unequivocally confirmed by the report of Mr. Grainger, from which it appears that the number of persons under one year who were vaccinated during the year ended 29th September, 1848, in 627 Unions of parishes in England and Wales (exclusive of those vaccinated at the cost of their parents) amounted to no more than 33 per cent., compared with the total number of births registered in the same period.

These figures are worth noting. Dating from 1840, an effort was made to overtake the vaccination of the people by the agency of the poor law; and yet so late as 1848, not more than one-third of the children born were accounted for as Jennerised. Adding to this third the offspring of the upper and middle classes, we may safely conclude that up to 1850 not half the inhabitants of England and Wales were vaccinated; and the unvaccinated half included the lower classes most subject to smallpox-victims of that "distress with which contagious diseases are so invariably associated," to cite the

words of the Report for 1847. The point is especially worth noting because the decline of smallpox, which set in last century, is continually ascribed to vaccination. A true cause however must be commensurate with the effect; and yet here we see the asserted cause of the fall in smallpox did not apply in 1848 to half the English people; in which half, moreover, lay nine-tenths of the field in which smallpox was possible. The Report for 1850 continues

The Board lament that they have no means of adopting or enforcing such measures as are obviously necessary for the prevention of Smallpox. They have no power of instituting domiciliary visits, or house to house visitation; and indeed hitherto such have been deemed too much of an encroachment on the liberty of the subject. They have no power to punish officially the practice of illegal Inoculation, or the exposure of infected persons; and they have only had the means granted to them of prosecuting such offenders in two cases, in order to establish the fact of the illegality of Variolous Inoculation. They can only recommend and aid, but they cannot enforce Vaccination.

The progress of Vaccination is more rapid in Foreign Countries where municipal measures or legislative enactments are adopted to promote its dissemination; and they beg to express their conviction that if England is to be free from Smallpox, the interposition of the Legislature alone, by wise and comprehensive measures, can disarm the Pestilence of its terrors, and realise the fond hopes and prayers of the Friends of Humanity for its extinction.

In these observations is revealed the movement of a new spirit of a revived resolution to obtain for vaccination the force of law. Similar projects had from time to time been advanced by enthusiasts, and swept aside by statesmen. Canning, for instance, had declared that he could not imagine any circumstances whatever that would induce him to consent to the compulsory infliction of vaccination; and, at a later date, Sir Robert Peel expressed himself to like effect, saying, "To make vaccination compulsory, as in some despotic countries, would be so opposite to the mental habits of the British people, and the freedom of opinion wherein they rightly glory, that I never could be a party to such compulsion. But

* Report of Royal Jennerian and London Vaccine Institution, 1853.

Peel died in 1850, and a strong public opinion in favour of sanitary reform had come into existence without much scruple as to methods. Diseases, hitherto regarded as supernatural inflictions, were traced to conditions of life, remediable or avertible; so that the submission and terror which sickness formerly inspired gave place to widely different sentiments-a temper of intolerance with illness, and a determination to extirpate its infectious forms with those who in ignorance or wilfulness should persist in their generation and diffusion.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

VACCINATION ENFORCED-1853.

VACCINATION, it will be objected, had no connection with sanitary reform. True: it had none; but the dull public when possessed with a new enthusiasm is not apt to discriminate; and those who had an interest in pushing vaccination found their operations facilitated by the rising faith in the preventibility of disease; their promise of saving the country from smallpox seeming of a piece with much else that had become credible.

Yet, strange to say, the credit of vaccination had never fallen lower than prior to its enforcement. The proof is written at large in the reports of the National Vaccine Establishment from 1831 to 1850, which it is difficult to peruse without perceiving them to be the testimonies of half-hearted officials to a generation grown sceptical and indifferent. The medical literature of the time reflects the same uncertainty and doubt. Vaccination was admitted to be no sure defence against smallpox: it might, it probably did, mitigate the disease when it occurred; and, in the absence of anything better, its practice was advisable; but on such terms, what scope was there for its advocacy! In the writings of Dr. George Gregory, this scepticism is so pronounced, that he scarcely hesitates to