An essay on vaccination : its actual value and attendant dangers : containing also A succinct history of vaccination from the year 1796 to the year 1866, and remarks on syphilitic inoculation.

  • Watson, James Henry.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay on vaccination : its actual value and attendant dangers : containing also A succinct history of vaccination from the year 1796 to the year 1866, and remarks on syphilitic inoculation. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Hie Chairman, in opening the proceedings, said the subject they bail met that night to consider was one of great importance to the health and happiness of the community. He did not know why he had been asked to take the chair, unless it was that Iris friends who had got up this meeting thought that he had got some experience in the conduct of public meetings, and would therefore bo able to guide it aright. He had not made up his mind with regard to vaccination, nor had he studied the statistics connected with it sufficiently to come to a conclusion on the question. The advocates of vaccina- tion said there was a certain germ in the blood of the human being which developed itself in the form of small-pox, and that if the blood was impregnated with something of a milder or more benign character that persons would be protected from the small-pox, or at least have it in a milder form. They asserted that vaccination was a prophylactic to the small-pox, and kept the individual from ever having it afterwards. In support of these assertions they state that the number of cases of small-pox has very much decreased, and that it is an ascertained fact that deaths from small-pox are consider- ably fewer than they were before vaccination was discovered. They also allege that persons are very rarely seen now marked with the small-pox, while at the commencement of the present century it was very common. They thus conclude that vaccination greatly mitigates or prevents small-pox, and that the disease is contagious to the whole of the neighbourhood in which a case might occur. Therefore they say that vaccination ought to be made compulsory for the protection of the public. Those who are opposed to vaccination say that there is no such virus in the blood, and that small-pox is caught by persons being in such positions and places as to render them liable to it, and that vaccination cannot be a prophylactic to the small-pox. They assert that in taking the lymph from the aim of one human being and introducing it into the blood of another, they are in danger of introducing some other disease as well, and that the decrease of cases of small-pox are fairly traceable to sanitary improvement. They also maintain that to compel a man to have his child vaccinated when he does not believe in it, to compel him to do that which he does not thinks is right, is to infringe on the sacred right of an Englishman to reign supreme in his own household. He had put both sides before them, and after they had listened to the various speakers, they could then determine whether they would vote for the petition to Parliament or not. “Mr. K. B. Gibbs (honorary secretary of the Anti-Compulsory Vac- cination League) said it was his lot to address meetings under various circumstances. He was at a meeting the other day at Luton, where a letter was read from a gentleman who was to have taken the chair, asking them to excuse his absence through domestic affliction. He