March. "I have always," he said, "felt the value of vaccination in every possible way. I go farther than most defenders of the practice, because I believe that some of the evils attributed to it are owing to other causes. If however the experiment recommended by Mr. Michael of taking the child out of the hands of the mother and putting it into the hands of a public official or policeman for vaccination were adopted, it would create such a revulsion of feeling in the minds of the public, that Vaccination would be doomed." That such would be the issue is obvious, and therefore when the prescription is advised we always say, "Try it." The measure of compulsion under which we now suffer is working wonderfully in exciting inquiry and resistance to the practice, and will inevitably terminate in its complete exposure and overthrow. Dr. Richardson has promised to deliver a lecture on small-pox and vaccination, and we have little doubt that he will at least place the matter in which we are so deeply concerned in a new light. We cannot have too much discussion, and whoever helps to bring the public mind into close and vivid relation with the realities of the question does true service.

RE-VACCINATION is the cry, and the walls of London continue to be studded with posters imploring the public to avail themselves of the proffered salvation. The dodge is being overworked, and will ere long fall into contempt. Meanwhile the Registrar-General reports that the metropolitan mortality is below the average, in spite of fifty or sixty deaths weekly from small-pox, or one in every 60,000 Londoners. The Times continues to distinguish itself by its extravagant treatment of the epidemic. The Hampstead Hospital having been closed as a common nuisance, the Editor goes on to say, "The one practical lesson to be learnt from the dismal business is the importance of vaccination and of re-vaccination," and relates the standard fable of the re-vaccinated nurses who "all escape the contagion." Then comes an anecdote of eight unvaccinated children from one family, ranging from fifteen years to two, who were admitted a week or two since into one of the hospitals, all with small-pox, and at least one of them has died. The parents of these eight children were people who had resisted vaccination by every device in their power, and had resisted it successfully. The result of their disobedience to the law is that some of their children perish miserably, and that all become

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sources of danger to the rest of the community." Observe the trick in the words italicised: how one at least died developes into some who perish miserably. It would be interesting to have the name and address of these anti-vaccinating parents, who resisted the law so successfully; for particulars in such cases usually lead to the detection of more or less fiction. Nevertheless

it is not to be supposed that we maintain that not to be vaccinated is to be secure from smallpox, though it is often assumed that such is the contention of anti-vaccinators. What we say is, that other conditions being equal, the unvaccinated have the better chance of recovery. As for the power of vaccination to prevent smallpox, Dr. Tripe of Hackney reports sixty-eight cases of which fifty-seven were vaccinated, and thereon proceeds to enforce the necessity of revaccination! What would these fanatics have? The great majority of cases of small-pox occur in the young in whom the whole virtue of primary vaccination is present. If the young are to be re-vaccinated, is it intended that vaccination be an annual performance? That seems to be the point at which some vaccinators are driving, but have not the courage to say so.

WE are glad to note the appearance of a third and enlarged edition of The Fable of the SmallPox Hospital Nurses saved from Small-Pox by Re-Vaccination, and we commend it to wide circulation. Whoever raises the question of Vaccination is told, "Yes, but you forget that nurses who are re-vaccinated never take smallpox. You cannot get over that fact." We reply, the large immunity of nurses from infection is not limited to small-pox, nor did it begin with the introduction of vaccination. A Physician who in 1801 published Instructions relative to Self-Peservation during the prevalence of Contagious Diseases observed, "Nurses, being generally advanced in years, habituated to fatigue, and little liable to hurry of spirits, do not readily receive infection; yet it is requisite for them to keep their clothes and persons clean, not only on their own account, but for the sake of others also." Small-pox is predominantly a disease of the young, and nurses are not young. Then we have to take into account what the writer of The Fable designates "the common law of seasoning." If a woman introduced to a smallpox hospital as a nurse withstands infection for a week, she may be regarded as "seasoned" and safe, but if she succumbs to the variolous

atmosphere, she is taken for a patient, and is not reckoned among nurses until her recovery. Many of the nurses employed in small-pox hospitals have entered as patients; and some of the most trustworthy and efficient have thus been introduced to their vocation. Women who have any choice in their lot are not likely to seek employment in fever or small-pox hospitals; and thus limited in age, character and condition, we see how by a perfectly natural process of selection, nurses are a class of women little likely to be subjects of infection. As to the protective influence of re-vaccination, we have the testimony of Mr. Porter, who had superintendence of the Dublin Hospital. "I have no faith in it," he says. "Not one of the 36 attendants at the South Dublin Union sheds has taken small-pox. Only 7 of the number were re-vaccinated, and as the remaining 29 enjoyed the same immunity, wherein is the necessity of the operation? These, and kindred facts, are perfectly familiar to medical men. They no more expect nurses to catch small-pox than to catch it themselves. But they allow the Fable about the Nurses to circulate among the ignorant and vulgar because it contributes to the credit of vaccination!

DR. NEILD of Plymouth has written to the British Friend to complain of the want of charity displayed in ascribing to the love of fees the favour shown by medical men for vaccination. He thinks small-pox epidemics would pay better than vaccination. We fear Dr. Neild is not strong in arithmetic. Every child is a customer for vaccination, and for revaccination where the parents are sufficiently docile. How could the transient gains from the severest epidemic compare with so steady a revenue? An outbreak of small-pox in Plymouth might furnish Dr. Neild with three or four patients, but with their recovery his profit would cease. Vaccination is a constant source of income, and to some practitioners it is their chief means of livelihood. It is, we allow, unfair to identify the defence of vaccination with a concern for fees; but at the same time we have to remember that no profession ever surrenders a source of gain, however discreditable, unless by external compulsion; nor can we forget how last year the medical profession was stirred to its depths by the mere proposal to reduce the severity of the persecution for non-vaccination. Human nature is the same in doctors as in other men, and whilst it is well to be charitable, it is

not necessary to be blind, or to pretend to be blind.

MR. W. J. COLLINS, M.R.C.S., delivered a lecture entitled, "Ought Vaccination to be Enforced?" before the Abernethian Society at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, which was followed by discussion that extended over two evenings. The lecture is to be printed, and, we trust, with a report of the discussion; for it would be interesting to know how such a question is regarded by the young men and students of a great medical school. Mr. Collins, at the solicitation of the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination, repeated the lecture at their monthly Conference, where it afforded great satisfaction. The matter was attractive and well arranged, the tone temperate, and the conclusion irresistible.

MR. DODSON has announced that arrangements are nearly completed for the issue of pure lymph from the calf for primary vaccination, and that Dr. Cory has been constituted head of the new Department, for which a liberal allowance has been made by the Treasury. We are puzzled to account for the transaction. The majority of the Medical Conference on Animal Vaccination held in London in December, 1879, were clearly of opinion that "pure lymph from the calf" was a mere whimsey, advocated in ignorance, and calculated to discredit the existing system of arm-to-arm practice; and no vote of the House of Commons has been

taken on the subject. Yet here we see а change initiated, new offices created, and expenses incurred, and at whose instance and by what authority? We shall not go far wrong if we ascribe the transaction to the weakness and cowardice of the Medical Department of the Local Government Board. Whilst avowedly without faith in the assertions and pretensions of the Animal Vaccinators, they are afraid to imperil the vaccination fabric by encountering their opposition, and have there fore yielded to their demands. As anti-vaccinators we have no reason to complain that the Evil House is divided against itself, and that first and second class vaccination is established-one warranted safe and the other open to suspicion. Who are to be vaccinated with the safe lymph, and who with the doubt ful? The question will presently demand an answer, and there is therefore a pleasant controversy for Mr. Dodson to look forward to.

A FATHER'S EXPERIENCE. [We owe the following interesting family history as concerns small-pox and vaccination to our able and energetic friend, Mr. A. E. Giles. We may premise, for the benefit of English readers, that Mr. E. Wright holds an honourable place in the record of the American anti-slavery movement, and is now President of the National Liberal League, and an actuary of the first eminence in New England.]

Boston, 23rd December, 1880. MY DEAR SIR,-I have at last found time to examine the anti-vaccination papers you were so kind as to leave me. I did not need them to convince me of the wrong of compulsory vaccination. But I find they make a strong case against vaccination anyway. I was brought up to place unbounded faith in it. Was vaccinated myself in babyhood. My late wife, born in Boston, 1810, was repeatedly vaccinated without even raising a pustule. In 1837, while visiting in New York, I was exposed to smallpox, and suffered what the doctors called varioloid, and my wife variola. She suffered severely, but recovered without marks. It was about the third month of her pregnancy, and the child, though large and apparently healthy, was always defective in his locomotive power, till his death by drowning at the age of 21.

In 1841, while I lived in Dorchester, Mass., we had a baby vaccinated by Dr. Mulliken, the pustules being pronounced by the doctor all right; but she never recovered, and died after three years of suffering, the most pitiable object I ever beheld. The death occurred in Boston, while we had Dr. Walter Channing as our physician. His opinion was clear that the deplorable disease was caused by the bad lymph used; but as he believed in vaccination, and thought good and "pure" lymph could be obtained, we had other children vaccinated, down to 1847, by him. About that time I began to have serious doubts of the value of vaccination, and I think Dr. Channing had some too, for in communicating mine to him he no longer pressed the matter of vaccinating the babies he helped into the world in my family, and the four youngest were not vaccinated. In 1860, when we had ten living, in the most crowded part of the city, all the younger and some of the older were exposed to a bad case of small-pox. All the children, except the oldest boy, were taken down at nearly the same time, and the two youngest, twins, at the age of seven, died, within a week of each other. Two of the unvaccinated recovered, one very badly marked and the other not perceptibly.

Though I am not prepared to say that the artificial disease may not, on the average be milder than the natural, I am decided that no words can be too strong against a compulsory enforcement of the former. The great question is, Cannot wise sanitary precautions make even voluntary vaccination inexcusable ?

I am quite aware that the value of my experience is infinitesimal, and only give it because you so kindly asked it.-Yours truly, ELIZUR WRight.

To ALFRED E. GILES, Esq.,
Hyde Park, Mass.

THE STORY OF A GREAT DELUSION. CHAPTER XXV.

MOSELEY, ROWLEY, AND SQUIRRELL. It is time to leave the early records of vaccination, but it may be well to devote a chapter to those antagonists of the practice who, though right in their contention against cow-pox, 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 which vaccination encountered, but it is constantly forgotten how intense was their provocation, and how the bad on one side was matched by the bad on the other. was a contest between small-poxers 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 small-poxers of the uselessness and harmfulness of cow-pox must have been exactly and painfully true, though persistently and ferociously denied.

It

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 is said to have been written by Sydney Smith (though not included in his collected writings), and may pass for 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 small-pox 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 cow-pox in the first instance, and that in others, they had not had the genuine small-pox 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 cow-pox, 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 cow-pox,' and attracted customers by two coloured engravings at the head of his work of the cowpoxed, ox-faced boy,' and 'cow-poxed, mangey girl.'

The battle now became general. The Reverend Rowland Hill thundered in defence of vaccination -Dr. Squirrell leaped from his cage upon the whole herd of vaccinators-Mr. Birch insisted upon stating his serious reasons for objecting to cow-pox-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 cow-poxers and the small-poxers. The cow-poxers set out with the absolute assertion that whoever submitted to their prescription would be secure from small-pox 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 souls would live."*

People thus enchanted do not like to be brought to their senses; and medical men, who in 1800 attested the perpetual prophylaxy of cow-pox, were naturally very unwilling to be proved deceivers and deceived. When cases of small-pox were reported as following vaccination, they at first denied the possibility, saying that either there had been no vaccination, or

that the small-pox was not small-pox. On the other hand, the small-poxers who had been snuffed out by the cow-poxers, revived in presence of the discovered impotence of the new demonstrated that unquestionable vaccinations practice, and stoutly maintained, and cruelly were followed by unquestionable small-pox. 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 cow-poxers and thus contradicted were the small-p -poxers.

The Edinburgh reviewer described Dr. Moseley's treatise on cow-pox as blending "the ravings of Bedlam with the tropes of Billingsgate. Some Billingsgate we concede, but Bedlam not 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 small-pox,* resistance thereto might appear, as Carlyle observes of creatures under enchantment, as "malignantly insane."

Dr. Moseley's book,t it is to be allowed, was singularly exasperating. He had spoken against cow-pox 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 of 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 small-pox, 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 cow-pox from the cow, and had subsequently suffered from small-pox 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 small-pox who had apparently passed through the cow-pox in a regular way."

"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.

t A Treatise on the Lues Bovilla or Cow-Pox. By Benjamin Moseley, M.D. Second Edition. London : 1805. Pp. 142.