say, six cases of small-pox in the same number) it is hardly fair to look at it in that way. London is a province covered with houses, and small-pox is by no means equally diffused over the province with six cases of small-pox and one death to every 2,500 inhabitants. There are extensive districts in London, and populations of ten, twenty, and thirty thousand without a single case of the disease; whilst on the other hand there are dense populations in certain localities in which the disease has prevailed at tenfold the rate of the assumed and illusory general average. When we are told of the ravages of small-pox among the unvaccinated, we always ask, Who are the unvaccinated? and for judicious reasons are left unanswered-the intention of those who conjure with the phrase being to lead the public to imagine that the unvaccinated are residents in comfortable houses who have been beguiled by the fallacies of anti-vaccinists, and have been overtaken and slain in their unwarrantable security; when the fact is, that the unvaccinated in question (so far as they really are unvaccinated) consist of the very dregs of the population. In like manner we should insist on having the neighbourhoods specified in which smallpox is prevalent, and the status, occupation and habits of the sufferers defined. Were these details duly set forth, thousands of panic-stricken Londoners would recover equanimity, and cease to rush like silly sheep to the vaccinators for safety; but just because the facts would make an end of panic, they will be withheld as far as possible. Vaccination is a trade, and a thriving trade in London, and is prosecuted with all the arts of speculative and unscrupulous shopkeepers.

Ir is against professional etiquette for medical men to advertise or solicit custom, but under cover of the necessity of vaccination and revaccination, this etiquette is breaking down. A hair-dresser told us the other day that one of his medical customers had informed him that vaccination was usually charged 10s. 6d. a head in their neighbourhood, but he might let his acquaintance know that he was ready to vaccinate families with the best lymph from the calf at 3s. 6d. each, including servants. Many parts of London have been systematically visited by officers distributing the lying* pamphlet of the National Health Society with the names and addresses of medical men impressed upon

* We use the word advisedly, and say of the compilers what Dr. Johnson said of similar imposters, "They lie, and they know they lie."

it, and touting for custom with the assiduity of costermongers; whilst doctors with nimble fingers are picking up gold and silver in quarters where an outbreak of yellow fever is as probable as of small-pox. That the limits of metropolitan small-pox should be defined, and the sufferers specified, would be highly inconvenient to these panic-mongers; nor is it likely that Dr. Buchanan will do anything to mar the profitable game. As the Scots say, "Corbies dinna pike oot corbies' een."

"A REGIMENT EMPOISONED" is the heading of an article in Henri Rochefort's paper, L'Intransigeant of 28th June, from which we learn, on the authority of the Petit Colon and the Algerine journals, that on the 30th December last, the young men of the Algerine contingent of the 4th Zouaves were vaccinated by official order. Four children were made use of. Fifty-eight of the soldiers were vaccinated by the regimental doctor from a Spanish child. In a few days the whole of the fifty-eight, without exception, were infected with syphilis. As Boileau says, "Souvent la peur d'un mal vous conduit dans un pire." Under pretence of saving our soldiers from the risk of a dangerous disease, they inoculated into them one more dangerous. There was no possible doubt of the origin of the malady, for it was on the vaccinated arms and around the vaccine punctures that the ulcers developed. For fear of scandal, it was determined to acknowledge no fault; the soldiers themselves of course were to blame. They were left in the barracks; but the ravages of the disease were not so easily concealed. It was then decided to send the men to hospital, but by a few at a time, lest the truth should ooze out. The unfortunate victims poisoned by the official vaccine were placed among the wounded. They addressed their complaints to the medical inspector, and received in return a reprimand. In a few days the men were ordered back to the barracks with the exception of five, who were retained in a frightful state with their hair falling off and their gums rotting. The editor of Le Petit Colon calls for inquiry, bewails the unhappy fate of the young men who, in the performance of their patriotic duties, had been so cruelly stricken, and demands all possible reparation for the unfortunate victims of pretended official science, mortally stricken in their present, their future, and even their generation. In conclusion, the editor of the Intransigeant "associates himself energetically with these just demands," and imperatively demands inquiry.

THE STORY OF A GREAT DELUSION.

CHAPTER XXIX.

BARON'S LIFE of Jenner.

WE owe much to Baron's Life of Jenner, but as a collection of evidence rather than as an or

ganic biography. It is verbose and loosely put together, and would never be read through 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 Institution. 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."*

The passage is a long one, but it has some value in itself, and exhibits Baron's habitual

* Vol. ii. p. 136.

attitude toward his hero. In his domestic and social relations, Jenner appears to have been singularly amiable, but it is with his public life that we are concerned, and find so reprehensible. Mischievous leaders and teachers have been distinguished by private graces; and austere personal virtue is frequently associated with bland indifference to conventional immoralities; but 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 overA sharp test of spread the spiritual sky. character is a man's disposition to his adversaries;

His

and Jenner's was never magnanimous. conduct to Pearson, Woodville, and Walker has been sufficiently described; and similar jealousy dared to impugn the absolute efficiency of cowand spitefulness were displayed to whoever pox in preventing small-pox. No one, for instance, could have brought forward the fact that small-pox 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 small-pox, 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.

In the same spirit he wrote to Baron, 6th November, 1810, of Brown of Musselburgh, who had reported certain cases of small-pox 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."+

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 *Vol. ii. p. 24. t Ib. p. 47.

escape," says Baron, "from the annoyance occasioned by the blindness and wickedness of his traducers "*-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 small

pox 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 "+

Purified and strengthened, and the affinity with falsehood dissolved, it became possible for the understanding to appreciate the virtue of cow-pox and the veracity of its advertiser!

Jenner, it may be said, instinctively resented investigation. He knew there was no safety in vaccination as practised; for the cow-pox employed was not the horse-grease cow-pox 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 cow-pox 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 freely to abuse 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. 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.

Most 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 Variola Vaccinæ. The assertion, that the cow-pox 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; disproved. To these circumstances it was owing, and in the infancy of the practice could not be well 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, cow-pox had never been properly taken."*

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 small-pox, 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 his lordship would prove correct, but because it he had any fears that the unsupported assertion of 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 virtues."+

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 DISICOVERY. 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 ASSER

TIONS RESPECTING THOSE COINCIDENCES WHICH OCCASIONED THEM WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN MADE

And again Baron cites him as saying

"Duly and efficiently performed, vaccination will protect the constitution from subsequent attacks of small-pox, as much as that disease itself will. I never expected that it would do more, and it will not, I believe, do less."

Jenner presumed freely on the forgetfulness of those he addressed. In a document so wellknown as his petition to the House of Commons in 1802, he expressly claimed that a person inoculated with cow-pox was thereby "rendered perfectly secure from the infection of small-pox 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 small-pox for inoculation was laughed at by the variolaters; but that a vaccinated person was as safe from small-pox 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 small-pox 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 small-pox itself," said the fashionable physician. Confutation was, however, at hand. Mr. Marson (for thirty-five years resident surgeon of the Highgate Small-Pox Hospital) attested that cases of small-pox after small-pox 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 fancy and matter-offact!

Baron, with his unscrupulous disregard of evidence, complains that vaccination should ever have been represented as an infallible preventive of small-pox; 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 small-pox"; 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."+

Vol. ii. p. 15. + lb. p. 135.

"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."

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 Cow-Pox in the way that has been described, is never afterwards, at any period of its existence, assailable by the SmallPox."+

When Lord Ellenborough in 1813 described vaccination as affording no more than a temporary security from small-pox, 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 private and 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 cow-pox that he had used small-pox 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 small-pox. "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 horse-grease cowpox in his possession, he held that he was without alternative, and by Mr. Cother the lad was immediately inoculated with small-pox.

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 small-pox.' 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 incontestible, as he has inoculated his own child with small-pox. These stories passed from mouth to mouth, and afterwards appeared in print with every malignant interpretation.'

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 small-pox, but are of no avail after infection.

Vaccination has been described as a remarkable survival of superstition in hygiène-many, who disowning all other dodges for the maintenance of health, holding by it. Of course Jenner knew nothing of hygiène 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 remedial 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 small-pox 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 small-pox originated in cow-pox, which in turn came from horse-grease. "There," said he to his nephew, pointing to a horse with greasy heels, there is the source of small-pox." 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

66

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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 cow-pox should be tried-nothing being 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 small-pox, had been repeated with complete success. There was not, however, enterprise in the East for the development of the quackery.

It

Jenner taught that distemper in dogs was preventible by vaccination, and accumulated a variety of "first-rate evidence" in proof. 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. 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 eye-sight. Cow-pox, we are persuaded, was as good against distemper in dogs as against small-pox 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 small-pox, 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, states

* Vol. I. pp. 444, 450; Vol. II. p. 148.