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COMPULSORY
VACCINATIO
ITS WICKEDNESS TO THE POOR.
J. J. GARTH WILKINSON]
LONDON ■
F. PITMAN, 20, PATERNOSTER ROW.
PRICE ONE SHILLING.
��PREFACE.
It has been thought desirable to reprint the following
pages, in the present stage of the national movement
against Compulsory Vaccination.
The Times newspaper gives recent statistics of the
Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Deaths for London.
Thus:—
December, 1872, and January!
' 1873.
Vaccinated.
December 4 th, 1872
. I 3
December 12th, 1872
.
.4
December 20th, 1872
.
.1
December 25th, 1872
.
.0
January 1st, 1873
.
. 2
January 9th, 1873
.
1 1
January 16th, 1873
January 23rd, 1873
January 30th, 1873
.
.
.
.2
.1
.2
16
Abstract of Deaths from
Small-pox, Times newspaper,
December, 1872, and January,
isEH
UnvaScinated.
December 4th, 1872
December 12th, 1872
December 20th, 1872 .
. 3
December 25th, 1872 I
. 4
January 1st, 1873
R
. 2
January 9th, 1873
R
. 0
January 16 th, 1873
.
. 2
January 23rd, 1873
R
.1
January 30th, 1873
.
. 1
to to
Abstract of Deaths from
Small-pox, Times newspaper,
17
Showing that about 6 per cent, of small-pox cases are
saved by Vaccination in London.
The Blue Book for 1870, pp. 124, 5, records twenty
deaths from erysipelas after Vaccination.
Since my pamphlet was written, the history of recent
1—2
�4
PREFACE.
Vaccination, and of the late epidemic of Small-pox, has
confirmed and magnified its positions.
It has come out that the Compulsory Laws were
enacted, because the evil consequences of Vaccination
to health and infant life were widely spread among,
and well known to, the poorer classes, whose resistance
to medical destruction required fire and prison to check
it. Public events now demonstrate that, if Compulsion
were removed, the mass of the rejoicing working men
and women would spurn Vaccinators and Vaccination
from their doors.
The evil diseases caused by Vaccination have come
more manifestly to the front in the last year. It is
admitted by established Medicine that Syphilis—called
in The Lancet vaccine-syphilis—has been sown broad
cast ; and I never make inquiry of a poor man or woman
without eliciting accounts of cases of injury from Vacci
nation to their own or their neighbours’ families. Vac
cination is more terrible than it used to be. This
depends upon two causes: 1. When Small-pox is
rife, as during these years, Vaccination meets the
leaven everywhere, and its own venom is intensified.
Recent cases prove, beyond a doubt, that it is then a
predisposing cause of Small-pox. A writer in The
Lancet says that it has also the power of evoking*
latent syphilis. 2. The transmission of the Vaccine
poison through system after system gathers up the
taints of the bodies it comes from, until a sheaf of im
purity is in the arms of the medical harvesters, very
different from the disease of the cow from which, per
haps, the first poison originated. The modern Commu
nists of evil do a deadlier work than Jenner could effect
in his day. For the personal pollution of three more
generations is on the points of their lancets.
�PREFACE.
5
It may be added that the legal necessity to vaccinate
all the poor involves, perforce, that they be driven, like
sheep, into the Vaccination-pens, and blood-poisoned
higglety-pigglety, with no power of question or appeal.
They cannot, as Her Majesty did, have a select baby for
their babies, but are all imbrued in each other’s taints,
and carry them into their miserable homes to be deve
loped to the utmost. Vaccination amuses and abuses
the rich; it is palpable obscene murder to the poor.
In the meantime the magistracy and the medical
profession are doing their very worst. Imprisonment
for non-compliance is greatly the order of the day.
Where one child has been killed, ojlmaimed, the case
to the Authorities becomes the more urgent for com
pelling the Vaccination of other children in the same
families. The indignant rebellion of the bereaved
parents must be stamped out. The climax of shame
less evil is reached. Church doors are hung with boards
of command proclaiming the law about this devil’s sacra
ment, Vaccination. And the power of the medical
dragon seems complete in its offences and defences.
Turning to the medical men, they are more than evei'
convinced of the paramount good of Vaccination. As
a rule—Mr. Hutchinson to the contrary—the eminent
ones have never seen or heard of a case of injury from
it. They never can see or hear of Buch a easel Mag
nificent blindness, deafness, and unfeelingness !
The Press of the country, with few exceptions, is in
their power. It is gagged in favour of Vaccination. It
is an engine for suppressing truth and propagating
falsehood oh the subject. Its "temerity betokens its
fears.
The lower classes, however, are less beset by panic of
small-pox than the higher ; therefore are less amenable
�6
PREFACE.
to .voluntary submission to the medical Lie; partly,
perhaps, because they see from continual observation of
them own injured babes that the certain evils of Vacci
nation which they get, far outweigh the merely possible
evil of small-pox, which they have not. A viper on the
hand is worse than two vipers in the bush. But, what
ever the cause, the resistance of the unenfrachisecL
masses, under their leaders, is becoming more compact.
This, with the progress of events in God’s providence,
will abolish Compulsory Vaccination.
While the following pages were passing through the
press, it was asserted that Vaccination had “ stamped,
out small-pox in Ireland and Scotland.” Since then a
malignant and most destructive epidemic of the disease
has raged over Ireland and Scotland, and caused a
frightful death-rate in Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh, and
many other towns. The Vaccination was admitted to
be complete at the commencement of 1872. What has.
been the cause of the enormous death ? The Vac
cination ? In Berlin, a well-vaccinated city, the pro
portional death-rate among Germans has been four
times that of London.
These details give no light to the Medical Profession.
Endowment and Establishment have put it into its.
coffin: as they always put everything else into itscoffin.
Two things are sure. The coffin, though the body in
it is alive with Vaccination fees, must not rule the throne
and the people. 2. Woman, to whose love and insight
all babies first belong by God, must come into all vot
ing power, to be a heart of flesh over the stony heart of
Parliament.
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION;
ITS WICKEDNESS TO THE POOR.
Vaccination is no protection against Small-pox; 80
per cent, of the patients admitted with Small-pox into
the London Small-pox Hospital, and 95 per cent, of
the patients admitted with Small-pox into the Paris
hospitals, are reported vaccinated. Of 227 persons dead
of Small-pox last week, 86 are returned as vaccinated;
and 20 doubtful. “ The Registrar-General tells us that
on an average of four years, only 65 per cent! of the
English people were vaccinated; that is, less than twothirds. The vaccinated two-thirds furnish four-fifths of
the Small-pox cases, whilst the unvaccinated one-third
furnish only one-fifth. That is, the vaccinated are twice
as liable to Small-pox as the unvaccinated.”*
It is mere assumption that re-vaccination protects
against Small-pox; the re-vaccinated take Small-pox,
and you cannot assert of a Se-vaccinated person who
has been free from Small-pox, that he would have had
it but for re-vaccination. You know nothing about
* A similar result is presented in France. See Report by the Im
perial Academy of Medicine respecting Vaccinations in France in 1867.
Translated and abridged with the Arithmetical Proportions of the
Statistics calculated and arranged by George S. Gibbs. Longmans,
1870. Wherever Vaccination was most common, Small-pox was most
rife.
�8
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
that. In all ages the vast majority of mankind have
not taken Small-pox ; in this age an increasing majority
does not take it.
The contagiousness of Small-pox is one thing; the
mortality of it is another. If Vaccination cannot be
asserted to lessen the contagiousness, and if re-vaccina
tion cannot, at least, so the statistics inform us, Vacci
nation and re-vaccination diminish the death-rate of
Small-pox from 42 per cent, to 1 per cent. ; and make
all cases of Small-pox comparatively mild.
Who are the unvaccinated ? and the un-revaccinated ? At present! as a rule, they are the poorest,
most wretched, or sottish, of the population, to whom
all zymotic diseases are more fatal than to other classes ;
enormously and fearfully more fatal. Let the statis
ticians settle how the forces of severity and mortality
are to be apportioned. Non-vaccination has, as com
peting causes of its 42 per cent, of death,—-drink,
poverty, crowding, all final foulness, deep slums only
heard of because Small-pox is there. How much of the
42 per cent, is due Ito non-vaccination ? And how
much to abyssal slumslincluding moral slums ?
There were many mild cases of Small-pox in the
world before Vaccination was heard of. Has the death
rate of unvaccinated persons increased under the present
treatment? Forty-two per cent, of bad cases lost, as a
constant quantity, is an awkward comment on any
mode of treatment. It were well for medical con
sciences to be dissatisfied with it. 'Are the doctors
continually on the move to try means after means, and
to trample orthodoxy after orthodoxy, to abate the
pestilence of that statistic ? It is a disgrace to them.
If the statistic is crazy because it overlooks all
raging causes of disease existing in the slums of the
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
9
people, and alleges all their destructiveness to the fault
of little non-vaccination, it may well be al so suspected
from the historical character and antecedents of the sta
tisticians. When cholera was in London, a HomoeopathicCholera Hospital was opened in Golden Square,
for treating cholera patients. The House of Qommons
moved the College of Physicians to procure statistics of
all the treatment of cholera in all London hospitals.
The statistics were sent in, and respecting those of the
Homoeopathic Hospital, Dr. Macloughlan, the Govern
ment inspector, certified that the Homoeopathic treat
ment was the most successful of all in what he certified
were real cases of severe cholera; and he added that
though not a Homoeopath! he, were he a sufferer
from cholera, would be constrained by the Homoeo
pathic success to become a Homoeopathic patient for
that disease. The Blue Book of all the statistics was
ordered to be printed under the directions of the Col
lege of Physicians. That Blue Book appeared! But
the Homoeopathic !eturn of cases was not in it. The
College of Physicians had vitiated their result, and
voided the good of the book, by turning the one healing
virtue out of their pages. Dr. Paris, then President of
the Boyal College of Physicians, was asked why he
had done this. He said,—Because Homoeopathy is »
quackery. The question was not what Dr. Paris and
the College thought quackery, but what fact proved to
be the best treatment of cholera. That question the
College was clearly not answering in the Blue Book.
It was fighting for medical supremacy with another
body at the bedside of the dying. [The House of Com
mons printed the statistic separately.] This is of a
piece with the historical action of these chartered bodies
wherever medical dissent crosses them? In all such
�10
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
cases, their statistics are vitiated by the love of supre
macy which is the only unvarying fact in their career.
Add then the impurity and want of single eye in
the medical corporations to the abyss of the slums of
London as another factor of the 42 per cent, of deaths
alleged by these corporations to belong entirely to nonvaccination.
Reader, take in the passion with which those statis
tics are engendered^ the clique force which lives in
every figure: they look cold enough in columns and
lines ; but every cypher is white hot if you attempt to
handle it. It has been gathered with tones unmis
takable from the least reliable, poorest creatures in the
town -: beings whose memories from their dire circum
stances drop piecemeal from month to month; and of
whom, in manycases, family ties can hardly be alleged;
whose oath as to whether they, or theirs, have been
vaccinated, is idle wind | and if leading questions are
put, signifies mere falsity; it has been gathered by
powerful medical cliques which for their very life now,
have a case to make out; and which have for a longstream of history shown similar passion, and have for
ages been chased by fact from fortress to fortress of
their own delusions ; and from everything but their
love of supremacy. Reader, take all these factors in, and
deduct them from the figures of death ascribed to nonvaccination, and you will scout the figures ; and be little
liable to be deceived in the future, when you find that
statistical tables of disease and of treatment may be
mere masks of medical passion. As they were in the
cholera tables drawn up by the Royal College df
Physicians.
For the most part in the said 42 per cent, of fatal
cases, the fact of non- vaccination cannot be verified.
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
11
In the majority of such cases, the person is so concealed
hy the disease that it is difficult to tell whether he isold or young; and hence the fact of his Vaccination
rests upon a hear-say gathered by a voice and an ear
determined for only one answer to the question.
The 42 per centlstatistic of deaths alleged to non
vaccination, may therefore be relegated to the limbo of
assertion gathered from the fields of a foregone purpose,
and not from the good grounds of fact. The statistic
itself comes of those thoughts which Lord Bacon charac
terises as “ steeped in the affections,”—in this case, in
the affection or lust of medical rule.
Where are we, then ? Owing to this passion, now
embodied in laws, colleges, in a great profession, and a
corresponding police, and closing in fines and in jails
for the poor, and in threats for all malcontents and dis
senters ; owing to this passion, we do not know, and we
cannot know, whether Vaccination is any protection
against the severity and mortality of Small-pox or not.
Personally, I have no founded conception on the subject,
because no trustworthy data. The buttresses of Vac
cination argument are as flimsy as the castle of Vacci
nation statistics is illusory. They are the weakest
outworks of the medical passion in its war on the health
of the people.
The nurses in Small-pox hospitals are all vaccinated,
and they never take the disease. Some of them, they
tell me, are pitted with Small-pox previous to becoming
nurses ; and the most are of “ a certain age” little liable
to Small-pox. But do not my medical brothers know
that nurses and doctors enjoy a large immunity from the
contagious and infectious diseases which they attend.
Fearlessness in their functions at the beginning, and
afterwards custom with the diseases, protect them ; or
�12
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
■otherwise both, the nursing and medical professions
would be down with the various diseases of London,
continually. Deduct this fact from the immunity of
nurses, and how much of it remains due to Vaccination ?
In Ireland the Small-pox has been stamped out by
Vaccination. The ground here is a little sacred from
the tradition of a similar instance; the toads and ser
pents were stamped out by St. Patrick. The case is
precisely similar® in both cases the stamping was suc
cessful because the stamped object was not there. When
he comes, the stamping mania of Vaccination will wear
out the feet of Old Physic without making any impres
sion upon Irish Small-poM What amount of credulity
can believe that our dear Paddy, with his habits and his
cabins, is a perfectlyl^accinated creature ; that his in
imitable power of non-society, of secret organization, of
resistandb to general orders, is contradicted here; and
that the wolf of generM Irish Ktwlessness is a lamb in
the single fold of Vaccination ?
In the few days since this was written Small-pox
is announced to be making steady ravages in Ireland ;
and the doctors, who accounted for the absence of the
disease by the universal stamping of Vaccination, now
account for its prevalence, and weekly increase, by the
statement that Ireland is “only half vaccinated.”
What ground to go upon is there in such assertions and
statistics ?
The same fact was alleged of Sweden in 1842; of
Sweden, “ the best vaccinated country in Europe only
two deaths occurred from Small-pox; and Old Physic
then said ■“ Lo ! triumph! Vaccination has stamped
out Small-pox !” But again, Lo ! In the next four or
five years the figures rose steadily to an annual death
rate of between 2000 and 3000 in well-vaccinated
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
13
Sweden. Small-pox was easily stamped out when it
was not there; but so soon as it came, its heavy feet
made a football of colleges.
Dr. Lyon Playfair, M.P., in a clever speech traced
the statistics of the decline of Small-pox coincidently
with the terrific frowns of the House of Commons, em
bodied against the monster in the various vaccinatory
laws culminating in the last Act of Universal Compul
sory Vaccination. He made out most beautifully that
every fresh turn of the Parliamentary screw wrung the
withers of the disease 9 and that complete compulsion
would banish it from the earth. Unhappily for the
beauty of his statistics, they were pitted with a few
afterthoughts. In the first place, the diminished death
rate was so immediate on Act after Act of Parliament,
that the effect was clean against time if Vaccination
were supposed to enter into it. The Small-pox might
have been frightened by the Laws, but could not have
been hurt. In the second place, the Acts were at first
coincident with outbursts of Small-pox, after which, decline of the disease is the way of nature : proving that
the coincidence is by a Natural Law. In the third place,
which seams the face of the Doctor’s speech from vertex
to chin, and puts out its eyes,—after the Law of General
Compulsory Vaccination has had time to work, and has
worked, a worse outbreak of Small-pox than before,
occurs ; and has to be accounted for by the statistician
on some grounds quite different to the power of Parlia
ment through Vaccinatory Laws ovei9Small-pox.
Doctor, what are those grounds ? I ask you with
pained interest, as being myself a member of a Special
Commission of the poor men and women of England who
won’t have their children’s blood violated and poisoned
by Acts of Parliament; and who, if even they are as
�14
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
cended from gorillas, refuse to have their natures mixed
again with the disease of beasts. What are those grounds?
You will answer at once,—The Anti-Compulsory Vacci
nation League. But men will know everywhere that
this “ small body of fanatics” has no influence to account
for the fact. You will say secondly, the absence of uni
versal re-vaccination. But neither vaccination, nor re
vaccination is known to check the spread of Small-pox,
however mild the form induced; and when once the
disease is among us, it can spread from the mansion, in
which it does comparatively little death, to the slum in
which it does all death. That, you know, is perfectly
natural. Why, the tenants of our slums are in such a
state physically, that to scratch them each and all with
a pin at fever-time and disease-time, would cause a con
siderable mortality in London.1 And when Small-pox,
ever so mild elsewhere, creeps upon the slum, men and
women and children, they, the proper food of death, die
in shoals. Vaccination, if you; could do it, and watch
the results, would kill shoals of them at once. No
theory of the case is needed. When Small-pox is not
here, it has no death-rate. When it is here, its death
rate has little to do with Vaccination, and almost every
thing to do with bad habits, depressed minds, and filthy
slums. Almost everything to do with the apathy and
somnolence of Parliament.
As soon as this outbreak is done, if you will pass a
tremendous Compulsory Law, and use the military to
enforce it, you will find that the decline of Small-pox,
and the existence and working of the Law, will go side
by side for a time. Simply because, as I told you be
fore, Small-pox always mitigates its ravages after a great
attack has been consummated. After a great scourge,
of cholera, if you will smoke a pipe every day for ten years,
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
15
you will also find that the absence of cholera, and the
smoking of your pipe, are contemporaneous pieces of
history.
But the slums, Doctor,—they are the causes of Small
pox ; and the taking of patients out of the slums through
the various neighbourhoods, the medical taking: that is a
chapter of wide infection. When the Small-pox exists,
move and touch the person as little as you can : let him
or her be, and clear the neighbourhood from about him.
Don’t infect Hampstead* and Haverstock Hill out of
St. Giles, as you are now doing! But how can you clear
out the slums ? Very easily, if you will make war upon
them ; but not if you enter into a treaty of peace with
them, while you make war upon all healthy persons and
places.
At present Parliament is much bent upon Compul
sion : in the present case, the compulsion of Papa Me
dicine upon the thirty-three millions of patients whose
health, failing to come from heaven, comes only through
the channel of papa, who alone knows what is good for
his little ones. But Parliament will discover that this
compulsion has not obvious honesty enough about it, or
results of health, to be borne by the patients, who are
more important to Parliament than Mr. Simon and Papa
Physic. And so Parliament will have to gratify its love
of compulsion by allowing to the people their own pri
vate doctoring, or no doctoring; and by attending to
* Four hundred Small-pox patients gathered in Hampstead !
Patients taken up in open ambulances on the side-walks! Mothers
and nurses, and children, have to run for it to avoid them ! An antwalk of patients going, convalescents returning, and I suppose, coffins
carried somewhere. The very shaking up of London in the Govern
ment bottle of Small-pox 1 And ridiculous Vaccination, Parliament’s
gift per contra. Strain at gnats and swallow camels.
�16
k
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
its own proper business, of national, municipal, and
rural general well-being. Nothing to do whatever with
poisoning people’s arms or opening their bowels. Every
thing to do with the forcible abolition of all buildings
and styles of building that make disease and epidemic
inevitable to the community. Here is room enough for
general officers, field-marshals against disease, working
through surveyors and engineers. But medicine, a
purely private art! has nothing to say or do in the
case.
Take the fact of Westminsteil Out of its square
miles of squalor blossoms a colossal marquis : his sur
veyors and engineers are re-building on a Paris scale
aristocwtic lliondon, because it was not fine enough for
the rich before 9 the palaces were not sufficiently
palatial. Now why not compel here ? Why not enact
that the money crops of Westminster shall be put into
filthy and not into already splendid Westminster ; that
every questionable tenement in it shall be re-built;
that Peabody houses universal, or something better,
shall rise, and be We^minster 9 houses for the poor
with good greensward between them ; and that this
shall be done of compulsion by the landlords of Westminster from one age to another ; they being forced to
improve their estates in this matter ; and to administer
their royal wealth in this manner ? Why not ?
To this compulsion it must come at last. And the
peddling compulsions of vaccinating people whose very
homes and bodies are deathbeds, and of taking them
through healthy neighbourhoods to centres of infection,
must be abandoned. State medicine, that despotic lie,
must be abandoned, State-health, the good of the
people, must be thought of.
A heavy argument is thought to rest in the decline
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
17
of Small-pox since Vaccination was introduced; and
in the few persons one now meets who are pitted
with Small-pox. Since then, however, inoculation has
been forbidden by law, on purpose to limit the propa
gation of the disease ! moreover, the treatment is dif
ferent. In former times, everyone who had Small-pox
was put into the slum-condition at once ! fresh air and
water were sedulously excluded! and crowding and
stifling with bed-things andreurtains was carried out.
That alone accounts for a vast difference in death and
disfigurement. Does it not? But again, cholera has
sensibly declined since it first appeared in India ; has
declined in every country in the world. Why, we do
not know ; but it is certainly not owing to any medical
procedure. Plague has declined!the sweating sickness
has disappeared ; syphilis is constantly on the decline;
the leprosy of the middle ages, with its ten thousand
hospitals, has died away ;but medical prowess is not to
thank for it. Why should it be assumed if Small-pox
declines like all these diseases, that it alone would have
been a fixture but for Vaccination ? You perceive,
reader, that the agency alleged of Wccination in this
result, is a baseless assumption! and that the cases of
numerous other great diseases proclaim loudly that
the assumption is not necessary to account for the
facts.
On the other hand you know again that slums and
hundreds of square miles of landlorded human putre
faction are no assumption as causes of small-pox, scar
latina, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, and nearly every
disease; and therefore I compel you to face this fact,
divine in its truth, and devilish in its matter, and to
draft your compulsion away from the blood of little
children, and direct it by more than German requisi2
�18
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
tional enactment upon those who can be made to grasp
and purify their own Augean slums, out of which their
brazen palaces now rise into our air.
Let every landlord be compelled to sleep for a week
half yearly in the worst room in his dominions ; the
house to be selected by Dr. Farr according to the
death-rate. Let him be vaccinated before he goes
in if he likes. If he decline, let it be recorded as his
testimony about Vaccination. From the cell-germ of
that one room, sweetened by the great fortune,
New London will arise, fair as loving justice, and swift
as an exhalation.
Legislating medical treatment ingeniously takes the
mind away from the true and great problem of fiscal
Sanitary legislation. It opposes some small and most
dubious medical dogma to the common sense of national
and municipal and ■rural cleanliness, air and light uni
versal. But I ask Parliament, do the antecedents of
medicine make the adoption of medical dogma into law,
feasible ? Inoculation, current for some fifty years, has
been forbidden by law. The thoughts and practices of
Old Physic vary with the moons. There is only one
way of fixing any of Bshem; and that is by endowing
and establishing them; and by this method Parliament
has given the fixity of cash and vested interest to
Vaccination. Parliament has made a church out of
cowpox, the smallest and nastiest of churches. This,
and that other foul jakes, the Contagious Diseases Act,
—an edifice in which a Boyal Commission is now asitting,—are, I predict, the two last prescriptions which
Parliament will force upon Great Britain at the bidding
of the medical profession. Before it has done with
Vaccination, and the money power which is its coat of
mail, it will have learnt to rue the day when it went
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
19
out of its own. general path to embody a poisonous
puncture in a law.
Let us hope that in its awakening it will not only
clear the Privy Council of a medical department, but
also discharter all medical bodies ; and disconnect them
from the State.
So far for one side of the case; the side against
Vaccination and Ke-vaccination as preventive of Small
pox, its deaths and its disfigurements. We have seen
that Vaccination does not prevent Small-pox land that
there is no proof that Ke-vaccination prevents it. We
have seen that the diminished death-rate alleged in
vaccinated cases, has in it several other causes more
obviously important than Vaccination, and which pro
bably reduce Vaccination to mimis nil. We have seen
that the decline of Small-pox takes place after out
breaks, just as the decline of all other un-vaccinated
diseases takes place. We have seen Small-pox leap up
again in spite of legislation. We have seen the steady
decline of the disease for one or two centuries, as we
have seen the steady decline of plague and other un
vaccinated pestilences in the same time. We have
seen the common sense hygienic conditions of patients,
their well-being, followed everywhere by an abatement
of the malignity of the symptoms and legacies of Small
pox. We have seen that misery and want are the beds
of Small-pox; and that Vaccination is inevitably also
one of its beds, because every disease—the Vaccine
disease—increases the weakness of the body, and
diminishes its resisting power. And so we have proved
the negative indictment against Vaccination. We have
found that there is no good thing in its bones.
Yet the medical pack hunts on its scent with almost
unanimous voice; it has an endowed and established
2—2
�20
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
smell which pleases them. To me, as a Homoeopath,
their unanimity counts for nothing : I know how unani
mous they are in shutting their eyes, and closing their
ears, to a way more excellent than their own. I know
what they have rejected in the great truth of Homoeo
pathy. And until they are more open-minded and
open-hearted, I cannot value their unanimity as con
taining in it one element of strength, or of love. It
is but the crnelty of routine incarnate in its vul
garity.
The positive indictment against Vaccination is a dif
ferent chapter, and cannot be fully written yet; but the
informations which will instruct it are being prepared
in several journals read chiefly by poor men and women
who are almost out of the ken of the medical profession.
They will form bulky documentary evidence ; and pro
bably will be made the basis of claims for compensation
by the poor in some future and better Parliament, when
the Medical as well as National citadels are all in the
hands of the people. For money payments on a scale
are, I see, to be in the indemnity of all social wrong-doing.
What sum of money will the rich owe the poor for the
deaths and destructions caused by compulsory Vaccina
tion I
The allegation of the best informed is, that Vaccination
widely spreads disease among the people; that erysipelas
immediately, and consumption, syphilis, scarlet-fever,
decline, are sown broadcast by Vaccination. New, cer
tainly, by Vaccination, physic adds one more disease to
human beings. Certainly ■ is a beast’s disease. Cer
tainly there are sensitive people, Specially the mothers
of infants, so framed as to loathe the thought of it, and
to wonder at a large profession not being in the main
sick at the filthy little fancy of it. If this be a prejudice
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
21
it is not an astonishing one. But others allege more
tangible proofs against Vaccination.
There are two parties here to put into the witnessbox. Let the medical profession enter the box first
with the lictors before it, and the State Lancet (only to
think of the State having that abomination of desola
tion, a Zancei) in its hand. The medical profession deposes
that it almost never heard of any ill effects to the health
of children or persons arising from Vaccination. {Mem.
The great lords of the past might depose that they know
no particular evils arising from seduction 1 they see no
more, and want to see no more, of the victims when the
deed is done. They want very particularly
to see
them.) I believe the profession almost. But then, abate
this from their word of truth. They have a dogma that
everything ill that follows Vaccination is not a conse
quence of Vaccination! the converse negative to the
wrong use of post hoc ergo propter 7mc. If a child has
a bad skin disease running from the date of ripe vaccine,
that is said to be a time when children usually have
skin diseases, and consequently the malady in question
is not due to Vaccination! I deny that it rasuch a time.
Does not the public see that with this article of the
Church of Cow-pox regnant in him, a doctor can have
no chance of knowing whether Vaccination causes dis
ease or not. He is out of knowledge, and is well-fenced,
well-feed stupidity. As far as gathering the facts here
are concerned, he is an oaf in livery, and does not know
a hawk from a handsaw, being clique-insane. {Mem.
These are the men whose opinions Parliament makes
into compulsory statutes.) Besides this dogma, that
whatever disease comes after Vaccination cannot be
caused by it, the doctors extend their fortress by pro
claiming that fathers and mother! being not medical,
�22
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
can have no just opinion on any particular case which
arises in their children. The doctor’s word overrides the
mother’s observation coming sharp out of the mother’s
love. He will hear no evidence but that of his own
dogma, which puts its penny-pieces over his own heart
dead eyes.
Here are indeed two incommunicating parties.
What is the relation between them ? The Vaccinator
in many cases, among the pool in the most of cases, per
forms his operation, sees the child a week after, and knows
nothing more of mother or child thenceforth—until she
is brought to him againwvith a second child, to tell him
how ill the first fared after his deed, and to receive
from him a grand pooh-pooh at the end of her mother’s
tale of her child’s sickness, or death. The child is taken
to another surgeon, who also pooh-poohs, and gives a little
medicine, and the longer the case lasts the less it has to
do with direct ruin by Vaccination. She finds the medi
cal men sealed against her piteous story all round. As
a man at Plymouth, whose horrid dominion is over 2000
women a fortnight, said of the poor wretches violated by
the Contagious Diseases Acts, “ We listen to no com
plaints.”
Is Parliament going to proceed on this ex-parte evi
dence? Does Parliament not know that the opinions of
professional experts are not safe unless common experi
ence is added to them from the largest field of good sense
and ordinary attestation ?
What then is to be done ? I say, let a Parliamentary
Commission sit in any great borough of London, and
summon the Vaccinated poor, and take their depositions
with regard to the effect of Vaccination on their children.
Let there be a house to house visitation, such as Mr.
Gilpin s canvass of Northampton proved to be, when he
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
23
said it was pitiful to go from one to another, and to have
to listen to the long story of disease and death which
parents forced upon him as the sequel of the Vaccination
laws. I maintain that parents do know much, and all,
about these consequences. They see their immediacy
upon Vaccination. The Vaccinators do not. They watch
every point of the Vaccination diseases. The Vaccinators
do not. In reality they have a scientific knowledge
which the Vaccinators have-not, if science is founded
upon experience, and ever-widening experience, and
comparisons of experience. And then they have quick
affections which gather the terrible knowledge, where
the Vaccinators have now but the love of power, and
for eyes, dogmas, which are not to see.
I have taken the trouble to inquire of parents whether
they had ever known evil consequences to arise in their
homes from Vaccination. And the results are curious..
Knowing that I am a medical man, at first they were
silent on the subject. But when they found that I was not
one who “listens to no complaints,” they have in many
cases opened to me a breast of suffering. From my in
quiries I state, under full responsibility of the statement,
that I could without difficulty gather tens of thousands
of cases of serious and irreparable evilland a large rate
of death, if I were able to make anything like a wide
inquiry. A figure so great, that after all eliminations
and honest deductions, it would appal the people,
and make them cry aloud for guarantee and indem
nity. .
This morning, February 27th, in my Dispensary prac
tice, a poor woman, Mrs. T. (thanks to Parliament, I
dare not mention her name) brought in her baby. Her
words: “ Vaccinated last September. A fat, strong boy
till he was done. Never well since. Wasting away.
�24
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
Arm never has got well.” I examined and saw. “ A
similar place on forehead and throat.” I saw them.
“There could not be a stronger child than this was
before. Three days afterwards he came out with some
thing which the doctor said had nothing to do with
Vaccination.
7s wzt? being summoned to have a
second baby done /” Out! child of hell by Parliament I
Out! damned Law’!
If this happened to Mr. and
Gladstone, and they
had had the utter conviction whicll these poor parents
have, they would, or could, have paid fines, and kept
their next child unvaccinated; but this blacksmith can
not pay the fines, and must go to prison, and let his
wife go to beggary, or offer up another babe to what
they regard as State murder. That blacksmith is cer
tainly nou equal to Mr. Gladstone in the face of British
law.
Another case. Mygoachman’s child was vaccinated,
and took with it erysipelas, which overspread the body.
The mother who wl nursing it took the erysipelas,
and both nearly died of it, I assert that this result, of
two long and all but fatal illnesses, was, in a poor man’s
house, due to Vaccination, and consequently due to
Parliament.
3.—Miss Edith Hutchinson, of Kensington, was
vaccinated by the late eminent Dr. Joseph Laurie.
The arm dwelled enormously, and ms hard like wood.
After a month it subsided, and then a putrid thrush
occurred, which disappeared after some weeks. The
disease was next transferred to the abdomen, and its
lymphatic system, and she died of great purulent
collections in its cellular tissues, the matter, putres
cent, voided by the bowels. I attended the later
stages of the case with Dr. L. Vaccination, careful
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
25
-conscientious vaccination, did it as plainly as fire
burns.
I give this case again in Mrs. H.’s own words.
“ 2, HorntoJ Villas, Kensington,
“6th March, 1871.
“My Dear Dr. Wilkinson,
“ The dear child was in perfect health in
May, 1863 ; but as Small-pox was prevalent, and our
household being vaccinated, she was subjected to the
process,—though the operation had been performed
upon her, and had c taken,’ when she was four months
old. Within a few days of the Vaccination in May,
1863, she—(being then nearly six years old)—was
attacked with inflammation of the lymphatic glands of
the arms to so severe an extent that her arms were
immensely swollen, and so heavy and hard that each
arm had to be supported in a sling; her sufferings for
ten days were very great, at the end of which time her
arms gradually resumed their natural appearance. But
within a few weeks the poor child was prostrated by an
attack of apthous ulceration of the mouth, which was
of a most distressing character from the peculiarly
offensive odour emitted from the gums, &c.
“The dear child was more or less delicate ever
after, and, in the' following June, enlargement of the
abdominal glands, and mesenteric disease set in, her
life being terminated by a . succession of abscesses in the
bowels in July, 1864; the doctor who attended her
telling me that the glandular disease had been coming
on for some months.
“ I felt then, and still do feel convinced that her
system was poisoned by the introduction of the vaccine
matter, for she had never had a spot or swelling of any
�26
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
kind before, nor had there been a previous case of
mesenteric disease in our family,
11 Ever, my dear Dr. Wilkinson, believe me,
“ Yours most sincerely,
“ S. Hutchinson.’7
The three stages in this case are a linked chain of
consequences uncoiling from the Vaccination. 1.—The
Vaccination itself, poisonous lymph, producing poisonous
lymph. 2.—The enormous swelling of the cellular
tissues, and consequently of all the tissues of the arm;
the cellular tissues being the great plane at the end of
the whole lymphatic system I the universal lymph
plane. All the lymphatic vessels and lymphatic glands
of the body stand in the relation of centres to the
cellular tissue as their great circumference. Effects in
the cellular tissue are reflected in intimate effects in
the vital lymphatics. It is a great arena of transfer
ence! of fluids I and if you disease it, of transference of
diseases. It Suns into the depth! of every organ in the
body]) and a spark of poison in its skin may soon be a
devouring fire of poison in its mesentery. 3.—The
next stage! the malignant thrush, was no doubt the
indexl of commencing destruction in the lymphatic
system of the abdomen. 4.-—The centre of the Vaccination was reached; the abscesses in the abdomen were
the end of the Vaccinatory deed. Verdict—Death by
FaccwaftW
This was a compaMtively acute case, and only
lasted about one terrible year. But you can easily
infer from it the certainty, in many cases, of more
subtle and chronic destructions. Keep your minds
open where they have before been willingly closed, and
you will see.
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
27
4.—Lady Campbell, the wife of a British Ambas
sador, (not known to me, but well known to Mrs.
Hutchinson, of the last case,) was vaccinated by a Dr.
L. The vaccinated arm swelled to enormous propor
tions.
A strong fine woman before, she died in a
twelvemonth from the direct effect of Vaccination;
which the doctor did not deny. All the particulars of
this case are extant, and can be verified if required.
5-—The Bev. Dr. L/s daughter had Small-pox last
autumn, for which I attended her. Mrs. L. asked me
to vaccinate the family. I declined, and gave my
reasons. Dr. L. expressed surprise 1 but Mrs. L. said
she was rejoiced to hear me speak thus; and added,
“ Do you not recollect that our eldest son has a scrofu
lous swelling of the arm from Vaccination, and has
never been well since?” He then remembered ; and I
examined the son, and verified the fact of the disease.
6.—A well-known literary gentleman, a name
known to everyone in Parliament, consulted me last
autumn, for an affection of the leg, attended with a
skin eruption, which much crippled him. He said,
“ Four years ago I was overpersuaded by a lady to be
vaccinated ; and I have had this affection ever since.
I showed it to Mr. ------------ > ; he pronounced it to be
gout, and did not admit its connection with Vaccina
tion.” (Gout may be caused by Vaccination, see p. 38.)
This case wonderfully illustrates the post hoc ergo non
propter hoc pleaded against big linked facts, written
out in two tangible and similar diseases, while the post
hoc ergo
hoc is held by the same surgeon in
favour of the invisible, intangible, untraceable con
nexion supposed to exist between Vaccination and non
Small-pox ; or between something and nothing. To
such a logic, endowment and establishment have
�28
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
brought the heads of the profession. The logic of fees
simple.
But if doctors are so subtly able to trace the absence
of Small-pox when it is absent, to the fact of Vaccina
tion, than which no greater mental ingenuity is con
ceivable, how can they refuse the common public the
right to put tens of thousands of like antecedents and
consequences of the broadest kind into the same rela
tions of cause and effect,—the right to attribute visible
immediate consequences to visible immediate deeds and
causes ?
I could multiply my cases from my own note-books,
but have not space! and I will content myself with re
peating that every neighbourhood is full of such cases,
which are only concealed in their ghastly multitude by
the Egyptian darkness, that is, the scientific darkness
of the established Medical Profession! If the reader
wants more information Met him consult the Anti-Vaccinator and
Health Journal, edited by Coun
cillor Pickering, Cookridge Street, Leeds. I have
touched the matter merely to give the pointing of my
own personal enquiries and observations.
All this experience, the whole other half of the
question, is ungathered, and Parliament has legislated
Compulsory Vaccination without it. Now I maintain
that it is the men and women of England, especially
the poor,!vho are the depositors of all the real scientific
information on the subject. The doctors know the micro
scopy of pustules and pock-marks! the poor know the
serpent whose trail is death in their homes. Why has
Parhament cast out the science of the poor ? Why has
it only listened to the venal science of the experts ?
There is a class intermediate between the poor and
the doctor, which can supply a fink, and that is the
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
29
Chemists and Druggists. To them the wounds and woes
of the vaccinated are freely taken; they are not esta
blished into stupidity; and they listen to the tale. If
they will honestly speak out, they can tell the tale. A
Parliamentary Commission ought to call their evidence
in preference to that of the professional experts. But
the substantial evidence will always be that of thevaccinated poor themselves, who have the real science.
Why the poor ? Because their circumstances cause
the Vaccine Disease, like other diseases, to create greater
ravages among them than among the other classes : and
hence it is a more heinous wrong to vaccinate White
chapel compulsorily than so to vaccinate Belgravia.
Add now to these facts, that in the medical darkness,
the Egyptian darkness that can be felt, and that is
cruelly felt by the poor, Parliament has enacted that
thirty-four millions of people shall, generation after gene
ration, be vaccinated to lower the death-rate (not the
disease-rate) of a few thousands of cases of Small-pox.
Is it less than certain that the death from such a vast
field of Vaccination towers over any immunity ever pre
tended to be secured by Vaccination ? If the doctors
dispute this, in which they are themselves arraigned, let
them come down from the bench, and go into the dock,
and let Parliament order a personal minute to be taken of
the experience of the poor ; then, and not till then,
Parliament can set death against death, and strike a
just balance as between compulsory Vaccination and
natural Small-Pox.
Parliament, if it will meddle with particular kinds of
physic, ought also to enquire into the practice in its
Small-pox hospitals. Do the men there, who lose 42 per
cent, of bad cases, stick to their routine and violent
drugging ? or do they try all the available means and
�30
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
new discoveries for treating Small-pox ? At Hampstead
and Highgate do they try the Homoeopathic way, with
tartar emetic in infinitesimal doses ? Do they try the
Hydropathic way, which is, I believe, excellent; and
always a good adjunct ? Do they try Mr. Rose’s plan,
with cream of tartar, the great success of which is
alleged ? Do they use the Hydrastis and veratrum viride
method ? If they do not try all these ways, they are
playing with Small-pox, and the death-rate is greatly
due to their own perverse incapacity! Parliament, if it
meddle at all, ought assuredly not to stop meddling
until it searches out these things, which must affect
even the half-statistics on which it makes its laws.
But is not a clear case made out for abolishing com
pulsion ? It has been shewn that the statistics in favour
of Vaccination—founded as they all are on
hoc ergo
propter hoc for their own side, and post hoc ergo non
propter hoc for the other side—are subtle and unreliable;
it has been also shewn that the statistics against Vacci
nation, gross as sick-beds and coffins, come up in num
bers, so that the whole foot of Old Medicine cannot
stamp them down! b^^hey have been refused to be
heard in the case. In the face of the flimsiness of the
one part, and the horrible doubt of the other, what has
a wise ParliamentKo do but to repeal these compulsory
laws ? Let them compel epidemics to relax their hold
on the throat of the cowitry, by compelling municipalities
to compel property-holders to set towns right, and
estates to set cottages right; but let them beware of
all compulsion that! rests on grounds more subtle and
metaphysical than these.
If compulsory Vaccination is right, compulsory Re
vaccination is right, and moreover necessary. But no
parliament dare enforce it. Were it attempted by fines,
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
31
it would break down ; were it carried out by violence
personally, the lancet would be jostled by the pistol, the
poker, and the knife. And laudable homicide, and godly
homicide, and if ordered or done in court, good and just
magistraticide, would become common verdicts in the
land.
Even the present law, if unrepealed, will lead to civil
war of its own kind. Against the mother who has one
child destroyed, or badly poisoned, by Vaccination, and is
compelled to bring up another and another to the same
ruin, it is civil war; and she, and her kind, will elude it
not by the laws of peace, but by the ways of war. If she
has strong convictions, who can say what is not lawful for
her to do ? She may conceal her births ; and to do so,
call into existence a new and clandestine class of mid
wives who will turn the doctors out of the neighbour
hoods of the poor. She may invent substitutes for
Vaccination, such as tartar emetic injected under the
skin, and forged certificates on a large scale. She wTill
assuredly do everything to barricade her room and her
neighbourhood against the compulsory Vaccinator. In
the process, a complete alienation must occur between
the poor and the medical profession. And a new, an
unrecognized, and probably secret medical service must
•supply the traitor’s place among the poor. How far
this will be serviceable to sanitary progress it is for
Parliament to think.
It may strike Sunday schools, and all education of
the poor, heavily; for the poor will become secretive
under fear for their children’s lives; and if the Hymn
Book means the poisoner’s lancet, woe then to the Hymn
Book.
But if it will create war between the poor and the
doctors, these laws, if persisted in, will speedily destroy
�32
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
the humanity of the profession. The doctor used to be
a familiar friend in the cabin, and the poor abode ; but
now he is the herald of the policeman, the bringer of
fine or imprisonment, the stern derider of the mother’s
eye, and the mocker of her complaints, the minister to
her children, as she believes of disease and of death.
He is not the single-eyed man of charity, but the tool,
the protected tool of the State, as the State is itself,
by base sufferance, the tool of the medical head-centres.
What is his comfort to the lying-in bed, if his know
ledge of birth which he thus gains, is treacherously
turned into a slmmons against father, or widowed
mother to render her fchild to Vaccination in three
months’ time ? He can only be detested while he
serves. His Eawheart .Bind Bpacitv, must be seriously
affected by the State making him into a spy, and an
informer, and his studies and his skill cannot but be
wasted by the sense of official poweSagainst the people,
where he ought to be a minister and interpreter of
nature only, and a private friend of the poor man’s,
needs®
Panic is the direct out-come of the present laws ;
and panic is a potent feeder of Small-pox. House to
house Vaccination puts all persons in dread; and the
vast fee field which is thereby created corrupts the
senses of the medical profession. The bigger the panic
the greateJ the profits. In the meantime, the death
rate ® scarcely affected by the disease, which only robs,
scarlatina of its usual victims ; for when the one disease
rises the other falls, so that nothing is gained to present
life. In the last weeklwhen 227 died of Small-pox,
the whole death-rate was six under the average of the
ten years. But the doctors stupefy themselves and
terrify the public, by proclaiming “the terrible scourge”
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
33
of Small-pox, when scarlatina, a scourge far more dreadis unnoticed in their public action altogether. This
moral deadness is a direct consequence of the endow
ment and establishment of the treatment of one parti
cular disease by Parliamentary acts.
The laws indeed confound the mind by their stu
pidity of conception. Within three weeks, I, as a
medical adviser, have urgently recommended between
twenty and thirty families not to be vaccinated. I
have done so on all the grounds I know, with all my
light, and all my conscience. As a medical man I am
entitled to an opinion, and am a free agent. But what
is my relation to the law ? It is undoubtedly, without
intending offence, a seditious relation. If I could be
heard, I would prevent all London from being vaccinated ; at any cost I would prevent it. If dragoons
were in the streets to do it, I should still stand only in
a medical right and say to the people, “ At all hazards
do not be vaccinated.’' Again I ask,—Is my little light
and skill forbidden by the laws ? And am I a traitor
to my country because, as a medical man, I do what I
know to be right for the people ?
Perhaps you will say, I ought to succumb to the pro
fession. I answer, that all the gain of man by time
comes out of minorities of one, and that we, the Anti
Vaccinators, cannot yield. I know the profession too
well, its fashions, its fluxions, its prejudiceslits passions,
its hopes, and its fears, to be able to cede an inch of
insight to its decisions, embodied in, and further vitiated
by, Acts of Parliament. Upon this particular question
I know that the profession, in spite of its routine, is a
hot mass of uncertainty and unhappiness.
There is nothing for us to do but to resist. And
those who resist here will have on their side the working
3
�34
■COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
people of England, and in time the majority ot the
House of Commons.
The agitation against the Compulsory Vaccination
laws cannot die, but is growing every hour. The at
tempted coercion of the people by medical despotism
cannot die, but is growing every hour. And the Glad
stone Ministry determined upon one permanence, its
own dynasty, cares nothing about small questions that
kill and maim hundreds of thousands, because these
questions do not seem to imperil the Gladstone empire,
the Cabinet life! The people, the masses, often invaded,
always invaded by these party lusts, the frontiers of
their rights constantly infringed, and their homes wasted
by empire-loving Gladstones, who are determined to
secure to the bullet boys of party their thrones, the
people are not yet drilled I but there is a nucleus of
militant resistance springing up in the Anti-Compul
sory Vaccination League, and the National AntiContagious Diseases Acts Association. The’only
thing you can do, my brothers and sisters of the British
Islands, who have bodies to be defended, and babes to
be defended, is to pass into the ranks of these little
armies, by your allegiance, and by your money, where
you will be silently drilled and informed for the coming
hour. Medical despotism, the despotism of science,
Egyptian darkness and Egyptian despotism, that which
brings down upon your houses the curse of the death
of the first-born, the worst despotism of all is going,
when you are fully ready, but after hard fields, to die
the death. As against the medical Gladstone Govern
ment, to-day is your Jena ; if you join ranks obediently
and heartily, another not distant day will be your Paris.
You must insist on new frontiers to your homes,
frontiers of fortified right over your persons, which me
�35
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
dical science and medical men cannot overstep without
your sovereign pass, and then always as private citizens.
You must insist on the demolition of all the fortresses
from which they have sallied against your lives ; on the
dischartering of all medical and scientific corporations.
You must have Science itself coynpletelg dismantled, and
reduced to its own exact but utterly individual authority,
or you will never be safe for science, erected beyond
its place into any power not its own, is the worst tyrant
of all; red democracy is nothing to it |land while go
vernmental fortresses of it stand, you are a constantly
invaded people. You know now, by experience, that
the rule of science by divine right is the most enslaving
of superstitions ; that an uninspired schoolmaster on
the throne, or above the throne, ferruling overgrown
men and women, is a very devil incarnatel Besides
this, during the civil war now waging, you must keep
account of your destructions,—careful books of harm to
persons and to industry, and life, wrought by these
Government Acts,—first least volumes of the new Dooms
day Book of God and the People,—and when the day
of treaty comes, you must demand from the common
stock your war indemnity. The first Parliament of the
people will levy it for you. And if Mr. Gladstone be
then Prime Minister, as we trust he will be, he is
greatly capable of assessing from the poor man’s point
of view, under the poor man’s thumb and pressure, to
secure his dynasty, the Weregild to be paid; the value
of babies to the mother, and of sons and daughters to
the country.
March 4, 1871.
3—2
�NOTES.
The profits accruing to medical men from a diligent
cultivation of the Fee-Field of Panic during these last
weeks, are in the aggregate enormous. One practi
tioner, they tell me,J in a neighbourhood not remote
from my own, has been making sixty guineas a week
by Vaccination. Statesmen, who can measure interest
as a factor in the instincts of cliques and corporations ;
as a creator of class-doctrines; as a power in shutting
the eyes, or opening the eyes, to facts; as a new lease
giver to abuses,—of course regard heavy fees as a
powerful though unconscious operant cause why the
medical profession has a great love for Vaccination. It
may be a legitimate love, but, were it not so, the fees
would give it artificial permanence. Of that, no states
man can doubt. Gain swerves the mind very danger
ously from the rails of fact, and is a general conjuror
with statistics^ Large profits, then, must be regarded
as at least a possible element in the building of the
present collegiate tables, which, while undestroyed, are
professional gold mines.
Bad cases are said to be due to unhealthy lymph,
and the first object is to get “ healthy lymph.” Clean
dirt, and healthy cow-disease! But passing this by,
we know what they mean,—that only the disease of the
beast should be actual in the matter. But what a sur
prising want of subtlety of mind, what pint-pot mate
rialism, as though men and women were vessels filled
with blood and juices from the tap of the “ King’s
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
37
Arms,” reigns in the medical profession, if they can
dream that matter transmitted through the offspring of
men and women for ten or twenty years, does not con
tain all kinds of abominations. If a drop of seed will
make a man, because it is a man’s, a drop of lymph will
make a gout, or a consumption, or a syphilis, because it
has been trailed through systems impressed with those
diseases. Even if it were all mere dirty cow, cows may
differ so far as to be full of hereditary taints, and our
babes may take the analogues of human diseases very
well from the domestic animals. There is no way out
of it. ’Tis all pollution together, though the vaccinator’s
cauldron may have more or less complexity, or simplicity
of disease and decay in it.
Thoughtful dentists suggest Vaccination as a pro
bable cause of the early decay of the teeth in this age.
The surmise gains countenance from the consideration,
that the germs of the second or permanent teeth are
appearing at the time selected by Government physic
for performing Vaccination. Lay this down as sure—
wherever nature is busy upon any conceptive operation
in the body, any’sudden unnatural shock to the system
is likely to impress the embryonic structure ; and hence
it is feasible to suppose that if Vaccination and the be
ginning of the second teeth are contemporaneous, de
formity of the teeth may be the birth-mark on them
inflicted by Vaccination, and premature decay of the
teeth, consumption of the teeth, the inheritance. Small
pox at the time would not have the same power of ill,
for it is taken because the system is predisposed' to it;
but in Vaccination a disease is given by violence against
pre-disposition not to receive nt.
�38
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
Vaccination is sometimes claimed as in principle a
part of Homoeopathy. Falsely, so far as Homoeopathy
in its whole scope is concerned. Homoeopathy, by an
incomparable drug-science, cancels the symptoms of
disease. But there is no case in which it aims to give
a diseased Vaccination is unsuccessful unless it gives a
disease. It also violates the body in a way that no
disease, not plague, or scarlatina, or typhus does, by
an actual wound into the blood; a poisoned wound.
Neither pestilence, nor physic, has any analogy with •
this procedure.
The clerks in the War Office have lately been vacci
nated. A large number of bad arms has been the con
sequence! Vaccination during epidemic Small-pox is
more likely to produce acute bad results than at other
times; because the town is already charged with a
poisonous miasma. In the War Office, axillary abscess,
and crops of boils on the body, have, I hear, followed it,
and ^rheumaj^c affections have freen reproduced. One
reason of the latter is, that depressing diseases bring
out all the weak points. See p. 28.
There is also goodl’eason to suppose that a process
like Vaccination, which in its theory of prevention,
affects the whole organism, is potent, and harmful, in
an increasing ratio from age to age. We have work for
brain and nerves which make morbid disturbances in our
bodies less tolerable than they were in those of our an
cestors. We cannot do that work, and live grossly as
our ancestors did. Finer causes count for us, and
against us. I submit that on this ground the special
empoisonment of Vaccination is more against us now
than it was in Jenner’s day. See if the effects of the
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
39
present re-vaccinations do not bear out this remark.
And also add to the subject the cumulative effects of
successive Vaccinations.
The baby T., mentioned p. 25, died of convulsions
in the night of March 10. The Vaccinating Doctor’s
certificate ran—Died of Congestion of H Drain during
Teething. Mylcertificate would have been—Died of
Convulsions, the product of inanition ccnd nervotis ex
haustion, caused by
disease d^ect^gpaused
by Vaccination. See what a different statistic will be
gathered from the two different views.
Last Sunday (May 1M1872) I lost a little patient,
Edith Clare Patterson, aged six monthslof whoopingcough. She was twice v®cinated — successfully at
three months old. Always weakly, she seemed no
worse, but her parents said, father better, after the
vaccination. The whooping-cough was of the adynamic
kind : convulsion throughout the frame rather the
character of the disease than cough. She was so blue
during the “inward fits,” as almost to suggest blue
heart-diseasel This weak child had a delicate mother.
What had vaccination to do with the case ? In the
first six months of its life vaccination gave it, by shock,
a disease it need not have had. The disease could not
but take away some of its life. And (1st) predispose
it to any current infantile maladieslsuch as whoopingcough—viz., by weakening its powers of resistance g
and (2nd) weaken it for surviving the whooping-cough
when it came. These positions seem to be incontestable
deductions from vital economics. The case is valuable
to me as illustrating the causes of the present great
death-rate from whooping-cough? The parents, I may
add, are distinctly averse to vaccination, but coerced.
�POINTS SUBMITTED
BY J. jIgABTH WILKINSON
to the Vaccinatio^Committee of the House of Commons.
I.—He is prepared to offer evidence giving actual
observation of evil effects arising from Vaccination.
II. —To allege that such evil consequences are wide
spreadgand very serious to the community.
III. —To show reasons why they are to a great extent
hidden from the medical profession. And why, so long
as Vaccination is endowed and established, they will be
so hidden.
IV. —To show that the statistics on this side of the
question are unknown, and that it is not policy to
legislate without them.
V. —To dispute the statistics which allege fatality
of Small-pox to Non-Vaccination, by showing that
other obvious factors are the causes of the fatality, and
Non-Vaccination only the coincidence of it.
VI. —To dispute the fact that Vaccination, or that
the stringency of Compulsory Laws, has anything to do<
with the abatement of the disease in modern times, or
with the immunity of faces in our day from pockmarks.
VII. —To show that the medical profession is incon
sistent in rigidly applying the rule, Post hoc ergo prop
ter hoc, to all who after Vaccination do not take Small
pox, and at the same time in rigorously insisting on
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
41
Post hoc ergo non propter hoc against all domestic evi
dences of grievous complaints following Vaccination.
VIII. —That fathers and mothers, from the necessity
of the case, have a greatly larger scientific basis of know
ledge of the real consequences of Vaccination than the
doctors can obtain. That Acts of Parliament have
brought this state of things about, so far as medicine
is concerned. They have paralysed medicine.
IX. —That Small-pox is a bugbear, because the
medical profession will not look at the various new
means now known of treating it.
X. —That its hospitals, in carrying the people from
Whitechapel to the tops of Hampstead and Highgate,
propagate the disease ; and by the severe act of carrying,
as well as otherwise, increase the death-rate. That
medical men carry it also, and are wide infectors. That
both these infectors can be easily done without.
XI. —That the medical profession will be socially
ruined if it has compulsory laws to carry out its pre
scriptions ; if it is associated with the police; and
the accoucheur of to-day becomes the informer after
wards ; and is either a party to violent Vaccination for
the child; or a means of fine, or gaol with ruin, to the
husband, or widow.
XII. —That the humanity of the medical profession
is seriously compromised by such acts, and its skill
against suffering diminished.
XIII. —That the poorer classes will become aleague
of secrecy against such acts I and concealment of births,
or false Vaccinations, and forging of Vaccination certifi
cates, will be means of public safety.
XIV. —That resistance to the mother’s knowledge,
erroneous or not, that one child has been poisoned, or
killed, by Vaccination, and forcing her to have the next
�42
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
child Vaccinated, is a procedure which, if insisted on
by Parliament, will cause virtual, and chronic, though
it may be covered, civil war. The Acts that do it are
regarded as declarations of war against, and as invasion
of, poor men’s homes. They may seem to triumph, but
resistance will be perpetual.
XV. —That Law Courts could not carry out punish
ments against poor men and poor women if they oppose
violent resistance to violent Vaccination. The moral
sense and sympathy of the constituencies will be en
tirely with the poorer combatants.
XVI. —That the primary wrong of Vaccination lay
in the Parliamentary grant of £30,000 to Dr. Jenner,
which gave Vaccination, then a slight experiment, an
artificial
all over the world, and made^ it so
difficult to reconsider the question, that compulsory
laws easily followed upon the hasty status thus given
to Vaccination^ The assumption that Vaccination can
do no wrong is the first outcome of these laws. The
next consequence is that all enquiry into the evils
inflicted by Vaccination is regarded as out of date.
And, third, all compensation for the mischiefs and mur
ders, is barred by Act of Parliament.
XVII. —The endowment and establishment of Physic
by the State, and its presence and influence in the
Privy Council, is a.n anomaly, and the like of it exists
with no other private calling 9 and it has been disas
trous, as being, among other things, the main cause of
the compulsory Vaccination laws, founded as they are
not upon facts, but upon presumptions, and in disre
gard of wide facts of the evils of Vaccination, known to
the poorer classes especially.
XVIII.—These futile and oppressive laws divert
the mind of Parliament, and of the Municipal bodies of
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
43
the kingdom, from the true social way of stamping out
Small-pox; viz. : the rebuilding and systematic purifi
cation of poor men’s homes in town and country.
FURTHER REMARKS®
When I was under examination, DrlBrewer asked
me : “ Do you not approve of isolation of Small-pox
cases?” I said I “With oil?” He said I “ No, in
hospitals.”
There are two ways of isolation. 1. Keeping every
case of Small-pox in the room where the patient is, and
sending in a nurse. 2. Using a drug which will sheathe
and destroy each poison particle as it comes off the
skin.
The present way—DrlBrewer’s way—is the way
of the general diffusion of Small-poxl That all London
does not take it, shows how few persons are susceptible
of the disease.
1. The patient is taken from a single Boom, where
no one need be in danger, through perhaps six
miles of streets, dropping contagion as he goes, into
the ready furrow of panicl which the ambulance
makes as it passes.
2. He is removed even with death upon him, and
the act kills him, and his aggravated death increases
the ripeness of the field of contagion.
3. He is taken into hospital, where contagion is
concentrated and focussed, and whence it pours
forth in compound waves over Dr. Brewer’s city of
London.
�44
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
4. Doctors steeped in it visit as usual, and sow it
on their own account.
5. When the patients are convalescing, they may
be seen walking in the purlieus of the hospitals, and
if wind and poison-dust exist, they must be sending
showers of seed of Small-pox. (see Tyndall on Dust)
on the wings of the wind over their locality.
6. When the patients are half well, they are
turned out, and communicate the disease to their
own people and neighbourhood after all, I know
this by experience. Why were they taken away at
first ?
Is this isolation] I say it is Diffusion of Small
pox by Medical Act of Parhament, Concentration of
Small-pox in Barns and Granaries of Small-pox, and
systematic sowing of Small-pox, and continual harvest
ing of Small-pox. The wit of man could not have
devised any respectable means of making Small-pox
more universal than Dr. Brewer’s Small-pox hospitals,
and the process of filling them, and emptying them.
Crown ah with the fact, that Dr. Marson, the virtual
Buler of Treatment in the Small-pox Hospital, avows
to the Select Committee that he has no new lights in
the Treatment of Small-pox, which stands for his
mind where it did twenty or thirty years ago : that
his Art of Medicine can do nothingRoo combat Zymotic
Diseases.
So Parliament endows and establishes Small-pox,
and not to be unfair to its little sister, endows and
establishes Vaccination also.
�LETTERS TO A MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT
ON VACCINAL SYPHILIS
Feb. 12, 1873.
Dear Sir,—
Owing to your multifarious duties, it is pro
bable that you have not seen The Medical Times and
Gazette of Feb. 1, containing a Lecture by Dr. Jonathan
Hutchinson, Senior Surgeon to the London Hospital—
“A Second Report on the Communication of Syphilis in
the Practice of Vaccination” —and a leading article in
the same journal—“ Vaccinal Syphilis.” In this article
the editor says : “ It is plain that our Compulsory Vac
cination laws cannot be maintained unmodified. * *
The number of instances yet before us is small, but we
also well know the manifold inducements to keep these
secret. * * If a full EB| investigation were made * *
we doubt not but that many more facts might be ac
quired. * * What we do know suffices to warn us of
the possibility of the dreadful contamination. * * * It
is not fair to subject peoples’ children to risks such as
those Vaccination-Syphilis implies, with no alternative
save to go to prison.”
Will you not move at once in this matter ? The
Compulsory legisBtion extends virtually to all subjects
of the British Crown. Considering what the human
race is, it is strongly probable that Vaccination syphi-
�46
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
lizes more people—and these little children—than all
debauchery put together; and, whatever the number,
the two Houses of Parliament have the responsibility
of it. Every month of delay, those two Houses are
syphilizing the Young Hope of the British nation.
The facts now at last admitted by the medical
profession render it also certain that whatever other
diseases blood can carry are imparted into the com
pulsorily-vaccinated by the power of your Honourable
Houses.
I say nothing in detail of my own recent experiences,
but I have lately seen many and sad cases of the irre
mediable evils caused by Vaccination.
Will you not, then, afteik brief consideration, move
for a return of all fines and imprisonments under the
last of the Vaccination laws, and beseech your Honour
able House for an immediate delivery from fine and
gaol of all who are suffering in the holy cause of pro
tecting their infants from “ Vaccinal Syphilis” and
other law-made diseases ?
I cannot but hope that your love to the Lord will be
shown in your prompt action here for the little children
of your country.
Yours truly.
Feb. 13, 1873.
My dear Sir,—
What you tell me of the communication of
Syphilis in Vaccination is very distressing; but the
ravages of Small-pox appear to me more alarming, and
much more extensive ; and I could not make up my
mind, even under your high authority, to take a part in
�COMPULSORY VACCINATION-.
47
•withdrawing protection from helpless infants against
that scourge.
Could not something effective be done to prevent
such clumsy practice in. Vaccination ?
Ever truly yours.
; Feb. 14, 1873.
Dear Sir,—
The ravages of Small-pox are not now alarm
ing, while the death-rate of whooping-cough, pro
bably caused by the weakness induced on infants by
Vaccination, is very great, though taken no account of
by the Legislature or the Profession. I had thought
that the recent epidemic of Small-pox had demonstrated
in large characters the futility of Vaccinawon as a pre
ventive of Small-pox. In well-vaccinated and re-vacci
nated Berlin, the death-gate proportionally is four times
greater than in London. And all the statistics about
the deaths in. the Prussian and French armies, cited
from St. Petersburg, have been shown by German
officials to be fiction.
On the other hand, the curtain is now being lifted
by the unwilling hands of the medical profession itself
from the child-victims of Vaccination. A thick curtain
it is, of prejudice, and greed of money and power; but
under it the profession is forced at last to see the in
fant destruction lying, and to suspect the |arger woe
and destruction which is still for the most part covered.
The poor men and women of the country knew all
this long ago: Parhament and the Profession are the
last to know it. The judgment of Solomon proves
who are the rightful fathers and mothers, and that your
�48
COMPULSORY VACCINATION.
Honourable Houses are neither paternal nor maternal.
The eyes of the heart are the most precious of even
scientific eyes, and your Houses have them not here.
After what has transpired, the longer maintenance of
Compulsory Vaccination amounts to the National En
dowment and Establishment of Syphilis by the Govern
ment. This is inconsistent with the avowed purpose of
the Contagious Diseases Acts. Their aim is to stamp
out Female Syphilis in the interest of the army, and of
respectable youths who are one day to be virtuous hus
bands. But at the other end you are establishing a
Syphilis Factory, Applicable to all infants. In short,
the law you have made is putting in Syphilis with its
hands, and stamping out Syphilis with its feet. The
babies of the country are in its hands, and the women
under its heels.
This does not depend on clumsy, or careful, Vaccina
tion. No Vaccinator can be sure that he is not syphi
lizing the babe on whom he operates. Will you still
send fathers to gaol for their horror at the dreadful
chance ?
Yours truly.
THE END.
BILLING, PRINTER, GUILDFORD, SURREY.
�
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Compulsory vaccination, its wickedness to the poor
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Wilkinson, James John Garth
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 48 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Contains letters written by the author to a Member of Parliament for Vaccinal Syphilis and points submitted to the Vaccination Committee of the House of Commons. Tentative date of publication from KVK. Printed by Billing, Guildford, Surrey.
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[1873?]
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Health
Vaccination
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Conway Tracts
Health
Medicine
Poverty
Vaccination
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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
PAPERS FOR THE PEOPLE, No. 8.
THE TRUTH ABOUT
VACCINATION.
BY
JOHN M. ROBERTSON.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
1—“THE P1UEST AND THE CHILD.”
2—“THE PEOPLE AND THETR LEADERS.”
3—“GODISM.”
4—“THE BLOOD TAX.”
5—“ SAVING AND WASTE.”
6—“ HOME RULE AND RULE OF THUMB.”
7—“THE VOTE FOR WOMEN.”
8—“THE TRUTH ABOUT VACCINATION.”
9—“WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY DONE.”
in March.
Ready
*
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PRICE ONE PENNY.
------ —------BRADFORD : TRUTH SEEKER Co., 36, VILLIERS STREET.
LONDON - R. FORDER, 28, STONECUTTER STREET.
LONDON: A. & H. BRADLAUGH BONNER, 1 & 2, TOOK’S
COURT, CURSITOR STREET.
MANCHESTER : JOHN HEYWOOD, DEANSGATE. .
This series of Pamphlets has already been boycotted
by a large number of News-agents. The Publishers wish
it to be distinctly understood that any News-agent can
get them to order. Customers please take no such
excuses as out of print or not obtainable.
Bishopsgat® Irnstimtad
�BISHOPSGATE INSTITUTE
REFERENCE LIBRARY
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Classification ...............
THE
TRUTH ABOUT VACCINATION.
I.
T
he above title is that given by Dr. Ernest Hart, Editor of the
British Medical Journal, to a pamphlet first published in 1880.
It is an out-and-out defence of vaccination as by law established.
I read it with great care, soon after its publication, in the hope of
finding the value of vaccination proved by it, and it had the effect of
converting me to a decided disbelief in the general power of vaccination
to prevent smallpox. It may be well to explain the circumstances.
I was a journalist, and I had had occasion to write on the case of a man
who refused to have his child vaccinated, giving as his reason the fact that
a previous child had been killed by disease set up through vaccination. He
produced medical evidence for his statement, yet the magistrate, without
disputing the evidence, fined him for his refusal to risk the life of the
second child in the same way. The magistrate said the law gave him
no choice.
This struck me as a monstrous tyranny, which could never
have been contemplated by the parliaments which made vaccination
compulsory. I myself then confidently believed in vaccination ; and I
remarked, in discussing the point, that were an epidemic of smallpox to
occur near me, I should get re-vaccinated, taking what precautions I
could against “diseased” lymph. To my surprise, my editor objected
to any comment on the case I have mentioned, urging that we ought to
do nothing to bring vaccination into discredit.
This, to me, unsatisfactory position set me upon fully investigating
the subject, and I spent many weeks upon it, reading all the literature
I could obtain on both sides. Some of the attacks on vaccination, in
particular the pamphlet by Mr. P. A. Taylor, struck me as extremely
weighty. But, as I have said, it was the zealous defence of vaccination
by Dr. Ernest Hart that convinced me that his side was in the wrong.
In an appendix to his pamphlet he gave the figures of the smallpox
cases and resulting deaths in the army and navy during a number of
years. As all the men in the army and navy are vaccinated on entering
the service, whether or not they were vaccinated before, we have in
their case one of the best available tests of the value of vaccination.
Yet not only had there been, on Dr. Hart’s own showing, a large number of
deaths from smallpox in the army and navy; but in the case of the
latter service it came out very clearly that its measure of freedom from
smallpox was due not to vaccination but to the sailors being usually out
of the reach of infection.
First, as to the simple fact of the failure of vaccination. In the
year 1860, as Dr. Hart shows in his appendix E, there were 2,749
deaths from smallpox in England and Wales. But of these only 638
occurred among adults of 20 years of age and upwards, being at the rate
of 59 deaths per million persons of that age. In the same year there
occurred in the home force of the British navy 84' cases of smallpox,
�3
with 12 deaths. But as the number of men and boys in the home force
was only 23,500, these 12 deaths represented a rate of 5T0 deaths per
10,000 of strength, that is, a death rate of over 500 per million. That
is to say, there was more than eight times as much disease and death, in
proportion to numbers, in the navy, where everybody was officially
vaccinated, as in the ordinary grown-up population on land, where a
number were unvaccinated. Of course the proportion was different in
different years ; and in some years there were no deaths from smallpox
in the navy, though in twenty years there was only one year without a
case of the disease; but in several years, as in 1860, the proportion of
deaths was.higher in the navy than in the general adult population.
And as showing in particular the futility of vaccination, we have
this fact. In the year 1864, with a home strength of only 19,630 men,
there were 199 cases of smallpox in the navy, with nine deaths, or at
the rate of 458 deaths per million persons. And on this year’s figures
Dr. Hart has the following note :—
“ This remarkable return, being so greatly heavier than any other year ” fwhich it
was not, as regards deaths] “ needs a word of explanation. No fewer than threequarters of the cases (151), and two-thirds of the deaths (6), were from infection at
Portsmouth, where the very large number of 228 deaths from smallpox occurred in
1864. Nor was this all. From infection traced to Portsmouth, the disease manifested
itself on board the Duncan, when on its voyage for the North American station ; 38
men were temporarily disabled by it, and one died.”
This note served to satisfy me, and will probably satisfy many
others, that Dr. Ernest Hart is not very well qualified to form a sound
opinion on a question of statistical evidence. Vaccination, in the terms
of the argument, is claimed to be a safeguard against smallpox infection.
Dr. Hart here admits, apparently without knowing it, that when
vaccinated and re-vaccinated sailors, living on normally healthy ships
of war, happen to meet with infection, they catch smallpox wholesale;
and that if the whole of the royal navy had been at Portsmouth, at the
same time, there would probably have been thousands of cases, and
hundreds of deaths. By offering such an “ explanation ” to save the
credit of vaccination, Dr. Hart showed that, in the case of ships that
do not touch at an infected port, and in which, accordingly, the men
could not catch smallpox if they wanted to, he would give the credit
of their immunity to vaccination. To any intelligent reader, these facts
will suffice to show that Dr. Hart’s defence of vaccination, at least, is
childishly fallacious. And the point is one which any intelligent person
can reason out for himself, as well as any doctor. It is purely a
question of figures and logic.
But further, if the figures given by Dr. Hart be accurate, vaccfnitself is an utter fallacy. The case of the navy is what is called, in
a phrase of Bacon, an experimentum crucis, it is a “ crucial test.” Every
man in the navy being vaccinated, we only need, in order to test the
value of vaccination, to bring a few crews within the range of infection:
when we then find them going down like ninepins—38 catching the
disease on one ship while at sea, from one original infection—-we have a
conclusive proof that vaccination does not prevent smallpox.
I wrote a letter pointing out ail this to my old friend Dr. Andrew
Wilson, the editor of Health ; but he, being a champion of vaccination,
declined to insert my communication. Other people, however, must
have shown Dr. Hart what a mess he had made, for in' the second
edition of his pamphlet the note which I have copied above was dropped,
�4
and there was inserted, in its place, one to the effect (I cannot now
procure that edition and am citing it from memory) that there was
supposed to be something wrong with the vaccinations in that particular
year or in the particular ships affected.
Now, I leave it to sensible and practical men to say what they
would have thought of this attempt to save the case if it had been made in
any other dispute. Would they not have said that it was an absurd
subterfuge? Would they not decide that Dr. Hart just caught at any
possible pretence to retrieve himself? If therS had been any doubt
about the vaccinations in question, why was it not heard of before the
second edition of the pamphlet ? It is ludicrously clear that the doubt
was invented only when the significance of the facts was seen. And
that Dr. Hart did not see it when he first published his pamphlet, is a
startling proof of the possibilities of incompetence in men who pretend
to special knowledge and special wisdom in these matters.
II.
One such refutation as the foregoing is logically as good as a
thousand. No statistics whatever can unsay what is proved by those
above cited from Dr. Hart. But let us give vaccination another chance,
and assume that in the year 1864 the 199 sailors who caught smallpox
had all, by a miraculous coincidence, been badly vaccinated. In that
case, we learn that when vaccination is performed even by surgeons in
the employment of the Crown, there is an enormous risk of its being so
badly done as to be of no value whatever. So that people are bullied
by law into submitting their children to an operation which not only
carries a risk of loathsome and fatal disease, but is very likely to be
otherwise badly performed. So be it.
But smallpox continued to occur in the navy after 1864 ; and I
learn from the work of. another champion of vaccination, the Vaccination
Vindicated of Dr. John C. McVail, of Kilmarnock (1887), that after the
law of 1871 (passed in the panic of a bad epidemic), vaccination was
much more carefully enforced. Let us then take the home navy figures
for 1871 and 1872. They are : for 1871, with a strength of 22,100
persons, 67 cases with four deaths, being at the rate of 181 deaths per
million living; for 1872, with a strength of 23,000 men, 62 cases, with
nine deaths, being at the rate of 391 deaths per million living. So that
after the most strenuous measures had been taken to perfect vaccination,
there were more deaths and hardly fewer smallpox cases them before.
After 1872, of course, there were very few cases, but that was clearly
not because of vaccination, but simply because the epidemic had run out.
There was in general no chance of infection. Even in 1871-72, by
simply keeping ships as much as possible away from infected ports, the
disease was kept under much better in the navy than in the general
population. But it is very plain from the above figures that if another
equally bad epidemic came round, there would be just as many cases
and deaths as before, unless some better preventive than vaccination be
found.
III.
The case for vaccination, then, breaks down on the official
statistics themselves. I have used no others. And if it be asked why the
case is not equally clear on the face of other statistics, the answer is this,
�5
that it is a very easy thing to “cook” statistics, by choosing those which
best suit you, and by grouping sets of years in particular ways. Thus
Dr. Hart takes the figures for the years from 1838 (an extremely bad
year) to 1842 (after which for four years the statistics are lacking), and
from 1847 to 1853, when compulsory vaccination was established; then
he takes all the years from 1854 to 1879, a much longer period, with a
number of good years in it : then he divides the total deaths in the two
periods by the number'of years in each, and shows that in the twelve
years 1838-42 and 1847-53 the rate of smallpox mortality was 420 per
million living, while in the twenty-six years 1854-1879 it was only
208’5 per million living. Even by Dr. Hart’s own account, vaccination
would only be a half cure ; but when we go into details we find that
in 1842, without compulsory vaccination, the deaths from smallpox were
only 168 per million living, while in 1871 they were 1,024, almost as
high a rate as that of 1838 ; and even in 1877 they were 175 per million.
Any unprejudiced person can see that it is all a matter of epidemics, and
that vaccination makes no general difference.
But doctors constantly tell you that in epidemics the proportion of
un-vaccinated cases and deaths is much greater than that of the vaccinated.
Observe, the original pretence of Jenner, on which he got his money
reward, was that no one would take smallpox after vaccination; and if
it be admitted that a number of vaccinated people can die of smallpox
the whole theory is put in hopeless doubt. But, passing over that, we
find that it is left to the doctors to decide whether or not the sick and
the dead had been vaccinated, and they often refuse to take the word either
of the patient or of his family. If they cannot see proper marks on a
corpse (through a smallpox eruption!) they will return it as unvaccinated.
What is the value of such evidence as this? For my own part, I believe
that many conscientious doctors get an erroneous idea as to vaccination
in general from the fact (as I believe it to be) that during the few weeks
of the vaccination fever itself patients are inapt to take smallpox. One
fever may in this way exclude another; hence a belief in the special
efficacy of re-vaccination during epidemics. But the naval statistics above
given suffice to show how brief is the protection in adult vaccination as
in that of infancy.
Let us ask, again, who are the unvaccinated? They may be classed
under three heads : (1) children of anti-vaccinators, (2) children who
were too sickly in infancy to stand even vaccination, (3) children of
vagrant parents, or street arabs, who escape the vaccination officer. If
then it can be shown that the children of anti-vaccinators suffer more from
smallpox than other people, there will so far be something of a case for
vaccination. But who has ever pretended to prove this? Who can
pretend to prove it? For many years there were very few anti-vaccinators,
but plenty of smallpox and of vaccinated people, and in those days the
officials said what they say now; if on the other hand the deaths of un
vaccinated persons, young and old, (they are mostly young) be mainly
those of people who had been very sickly in infancy, and of those whose
childhood was one of poverty and bad feeding, there would be nothing
strange in their succumbing rather easily to smallpox. But Dr. Me Vail
tells us there are very few children too sickly to be vaccinated, and he
tries to make out that there are few street arabs. Then, as he cannot
show that the unvaccinated are mostly children of anti-vaccinators, he
does but throw doubt, once more, on the official figures. In all likelihood
�6
many patients described by medical officials as unvaccinated were really
vaccinated.
So notorious is it, indeed, that vaccination does not prevent small
pox, that doctors constantly result to what J must call a very sorry
subterfuge, telling patients that the vaccination has prevented their dying
(though many vaccinated people die of smallpox, and many un vaccinated
patients recovery, or that at least it has prevented their being pitted.
A few years ago I met a hospital nurse who had been so persuaded She
happened to mention that, there being an epidemic at the time, all the
nurses in her hospital had just been vaccinated. “But” I remarked, “you
only entered a few months ago; were you not vaccinated on entering?”
“ Yes, ” she answered, “ but we were all re-vaccinated last week.” I
observed that the doctors did not seem to have much faith in their own
specific, and she assented, adding, “ I have now been vaccinated five
times.” I remarked, laughing, that she ought to be pretty safe. “ Oh,”
she answered, “ but I have had smallpox too !” That would be, I suggested,
before she had been vaccinated ? “ No,” was the answer, “it was after my
third vaccination ; but they told me that but for vaccination I should have
died or been very badly marked!” Thus do men defend error by untruth.
Her own experience as a nurse might have taught her that whether a
patient is pitted or not pitted is a matter either of the virulence of the
attack or of the nature of the treatment. With care, pitting can nearly
always be prevented, whether the cured patient be vaccinated or not.
At this moment, however, there are still a good many pock-pitted people,
though vaccinators tell you that you “ never see them now.” And when
it is admitted that a vaccinated and re-vaccinated man may die of small
pox, it is a little too impudently absurd to say that if he lives and is not
pitted, vaccination has been the cause.
IV.
*
If all this holds good, it may be asked, how is it that the great
majority of the medical profession continue to believe in vaccination?
This is a very important question, going to the heart of the matter, and
I will here answer it. The majority of doctors stand by vaccination,
either passively or actively, for one or more of three reasons :—(1) They
were taught to believe in vaccination as in other current medicine, and
they stand to what they were taught, the great majority never making any
independent investigation of the subject. (2) Even when a medical man
does investigate the subject, if he be young he knows he will be to a
large extent boycotted if he condemns vaccination ; and if he be elderly
his prejudices and his self-esteem are enlisted in favor of what he has
been doing for many years, making him loth to admit that he has all
along been under a gross delusion. (3) Vaccination is a considerable source
of easy income to the majority of medical men ; and among doctors as
among other men, a pecuniary interest sets men against even listening to
arguments which, if accepted, would involve a heavy loss. I may be told
that this last is an unworthy argument to use against an honorable pro
fession. But I am arguing in the case of doctors just as I would in the
case of any other body of men, lawyers, priests, soldiers, policemen, or
authors ; and, what is more, I am meeting professional vaccinators with a
kind of argument which many of them have used against anti-vaccinators.
I think as highly of the medical profession as most men; and I have the
highest esteem for many of its members, knowing as I do their devotion,
�7
their benevolence, and their public spirit. But the question is one of
averages and of average human nature. On the other hand, I find a
medical man, Dr. Howard Barrett, writing in a work on The Manage
ment of Infancy and Childhood in Health and Disease (p. 233) that
“from time to time ignorant people, from a love of notoriety or for their
own selfish ends, try and stir up the prejudices of the uneducated ” against
vaccination. Here is a man who earns money by vaccination, charging
low ends on all anti-vaccinators. Clearly then we are free to retort the
charge, as well as to deny his right to make it. Not one anti-vaccinator
in ten thousand can possibly make a farthing by his propaganda ; and the
rest risk money loss,' persecution, and boycotting by it. On the other
hand, I repeat, ninety-nine doctors out of a hundred know nothing of the
history of the theory and practice of vaccination ; nothing of the facts as
to the changes made in lymph; nothing but the myth about Jenner;
nothing of the statistics but what is officially served out to them. And
it is the strict truth that nearly all we know about the history of vaccination
is due to the anti-vaccinators. If any careful reader doubts this, let him
spend a few weeks in mastering the works of Dr. Creighton, Professor
Crookshank, and the late William White : then let him question all the
doctors he knows and see how much they know on the subject. How
should they be well informed on it ? They are mostly hard-worked men ;
and in their student days they were taught what passes for scientific
truth on the subject. The most thorough research in it has been made
within the last ten years, and the two standard scientific authorities on
the history and nature of vaccination are Creighton and Crookshank,
both of whom were originally orthodox, and both of whom were led by
their studies to give up their belief. And many other competent medical
men have at different times declared against vaccination.
In the face of these facts, it matters little whether the majority of
a Commission who set out on an inquiry with full faith in vaccination
end in the same faith. We are told that almost no physician who was
over forty when Harvey published his discovery of the circulation of the
blood could be got to believe in it. Conversion in these matters is a
question of time. But although nearly all the doctors twenty years ago
insisted that vaccination could not possibly convey other diseases, and
that “ sanitation ” was of no avail against smallpox, it is now proved past
all question that vaccination can and does convey other diseases ; and
many vaccinators now admit that sanitation counts for a very great deal
in checking smallpox epidemics. Year by year the superstition loses
hold. Men see that; other contagious diseases, against which there is no
vaccination (though on the current theory there ought to be), are being
kept in check by sanitation; and that the supposed special results of
vaccination are thus illusions. Were it not for the vested interests,
official and professional, the majority would have seen it ere now.
Nothing else could keep ordinarily intelligent men wedded to the principle
of compulsion when, if they really had faith in the nostrum insisted on,
they would feel that no compulsion is needed, since each man, in the terms
of the doctrine, can protect himself if he will. Compulsory vaccination
is at once an assertion and a denial that vaccination protects from small
pox. The theory is as contradictory as the practice.
Printed and Published by the “ Truth Seeker ” Co., 36, Villiers Street, Bradford.
�Ready February, 1897.
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Victorian Blogging
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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The truth about vaccination
Creator
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Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon) [1856-1933]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: Bradford; London; Manchester
Collation: 7 p. ; 22 cm.
Series title: Papers for the people
Series number: No. 8
Notes: Stamp on p.[2]: Bishopsgate Institute. Reference Library, 17 NOV 1987. Written in reply to a pamphlet of the same title by Ernest Hart, editor of the British Medical Journal, first published in 1880. Publisher's advertisements on back page. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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Truth Seeker Co.; R. Forder; A. & H. Bradlaugh Bonner; Joihn Heywood
Date
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[1897]
Identifier
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N563
Subject
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Vaccination
Health
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The truth about vaccination), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
NSS
Smallpox
Vaccination