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METHOD OF EDUCATION:
A. 1ST ADDRESS
INTRODUCTORY TO THE SESSION 1859-60
♦
OF THE
ST. LOUIS MEDICAL COLLEGE,
BY
J. H. WATTERS, M.D.,
Professor of Physiology and Medical Jurisprudence.
ST. LOUIS:
GEORGE KNAPP & CO., PRINTERS.
1 8 59.
��METHOD OF EDUCATION:
An Address Introductory to the Session 1859-60 of the St. Louis Medical
College. By J. H. WATTERS, M.D., Professor of Physiology and Med
ical Jurisprudence.
Gentlemen,—Under favorable auspices we meet to-night to
celebrate the opening of our eighteenth session, and in behalf of
the faculty I welcome you as students to these halls dedicated to
medical education.
The ardent aspirations of the young of a country to fit them
selves for useful and honorable activities, brings happiness not
only to the individual, but secures life, intelligence and refine
ment to society—stability, power and influence to the state. It is
this which engenders and fosters the very vitality, spirit and soul
of a community. General society — yes, our whole country—is
interested in this assemblage of young men gathered hither from
the various parts of our extensive and prosperous valley, all in
spired with a common desire to be enabled to render a reasonable
answer to the problem of life. Some answer, whether it be rea
sonable or not, must be given by every man. It is not optional,
but the necessity is implied in the very existence of a rational be
ing : it is not a request, but an imperative demand. Should one
think to avoid it by silence or refusal to act, he deceives himself;
for his very silence and supineness become contempt, and contain
already his answer.
Man is by nature most munificently gifted; but his character and
activities are the apswer he renders to the question, “ what will he
do with it”—with his life, his mind, his reason, his image of God?
The various grades of characters, from the lowest besotted dregs
of society to the highest and noblest men, present merely the dif
ferent uses made of nature’s high gifts. Consider now
“ The wisest of the sages of the earth
That ever from the stores of reason drew
Science, and truth, and virtue’s dreadless tone
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and now reflect upon this solemn fact, that
“ Him, every slave now dragging through the filth
Of some corrupted city his sad life,
Pining with famine, swoln with luxury,
Blunting the keenness of his spiritual sense
With narrow schemings and unworthy cares,
Or, madly rushing through all violent crime,
To move the deep stagnation of his soul,—
Might imitate and equal.”
We hear in our youth too much cant about “ poor weak human
nature, the flesh, and the deviland those who would throw
upon the shoulders of these imaginary personalities the necessary
and legitimate results of individual slothfulness, inactivity, and re
fusal to use what has been given, would obliterate what little of
the image of God is yet visible in humanity, and would put a stop
to progress—not by bold and open opposition, which would be ac
companied with corresponding reaction, but by smothering and
destroying the already enfeebled energy and spirit.
That each individual may use his talents and powers in the best
and most reasonable way possible, is the object of all education,
whether literary, professional, scientific, or religious. In other
words, the object of education is to enable man, in his activities,
to harmonize with the Infinite, the Universal, the Absolute. It is
only as his activities do harmonize and thus cooperate with the
Infinite, that man is emancipated and exalted; while in so far as
they are discordant, man militates against God, and in the con
flict is always vanquished, degraded and enslaved. This proposi
tion is universal, and extends in its application through the whole
range of human activities. And, gentlemen, as you propose to as
sume the responsible vocation of physicians, the object of your
professional studies is that you may be enabled so to act upon
physical nature as to cure disease and relieve suffering. This,
too, can be done only by cooperating with the universal and abso
lute in perfect obedience to the physical laws; which laws are to
us the outward expression or representation, in space and time, of
universal reason. If our acts are not in obedience to these laws,
our medications, like the prayers of the wicked, are an abomina
tion. It is a common saying that nature cures disease, and that
the physician’s province is to assist nature. While this expression
admits of very liberal interpretations, yet literally it is most false.
Man under no circumstances assists nature; this is neither his
province nor prerogative : it is his highest privilege to use nature.
But how are we to use nature ? By what method are we enabled
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to take advantage of her laws ? In other words, what relation has
education to success, science to art? This is the question I pro
pose discussing to-night; and while I address you, gentlemen,
especially, as medical students, the method by which you will be
enabled to attain the objects of your calling, is the method of
every human activity whatever—of your social and political rela
tions no less than professional.
As the object of all education is to enable man to harmonize his
activities with the Infinite, the Universal, the Absolute, this object
can be attained only so far as we know the Infinite, the Universal,
the Absolute. I am aware that there are those high in authority
who contend that the capacity for this knowledge is not vouch
safed to man. If this be so, then indeed are we most miserably
circumstanced. What! here—possessing hopes, desires, aspira
tions, longings for something better—condemned to disappoint
ment and ignoble defeat upon every side, except in so far as our
activities are in harmony with the Infinite, and yet having no ca
pacity to know that Infinite by whom we are judged and to whom
we are subject! This can not be so: else man could not adapt
means to ends; the result of his spontaneity would be altogether
accidental; his fortune would not be in his own hands. It is not so:
the development of science condemns it; our railroads, telegraphs,
and manufactures, and all the arts, condemn it; our social, politi
cal and religious relations condemn it; all culture and progress
condemn it. As the result of every human activity is determined
by its relation to the Infinite, the relation which any people bear
to the Infinite is expressed not only in their moral, social, political
and religious condition, but also as well in their machinery, their'
manufactures, their agriculture, their navigation, their architecture,
their painting, their sculpture, their poetry, their ornaments, their
dress, in all their activities and in every expression of their sponta
neity. All advancement and progress of the individual, of society,
of humanity, is proof that we have the faculty to know the Abso
lute to which we are subject, as all success is but an expression of
this knowledge, and a resulting harmony between our activities
and the Infinite.
But man is guided in his activities by his intelligence, and mind
is in its very nature active, spontaneous, self-determinate. Know
ledge, therefore, must be the determination of the mind itself, else
the spontaneity and self-determination of mind would be super
seded and abrogated by knowledge, which is absurd. Consequent
ly, the mind must possess the faculty of determining itself harmo
niously with the Universal and Absolutewhether you agree to
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designate this power of the mind thus to determine itself, as know
ledge of the Universal and Absolute, or not, matters nothing, so far
as the question under discussion is concerned—By what method
is man enabled to harmonize his activities with the Infinite, the
Universal, the Absolute ? This faculty is reason. Reason being
one and absolute to man, to nature, and to God, it is most appa
rent, that, so far as our activities harmonize with reason, they must
in that very fact harmonize with the Universe and with God.
Therefore, the method by which the object of all education is to
be attained, is the method by which we are enabled to harmonize
our activities with .Reason. This proposition, gentlemen, embod
ies the central idea which I hope to present to you to-night in an
intelligible manner. You yill observe the important point, that
in this proposition we have substituted Jieason for the Infi
nite, the Universal, the Absolute. I know full well, that, in
making this substitution here in a public lecture, I am in no little
danger of being understood as making man equal with God. But
if there were no danger here, there would be little or no occasion
for this lecture ; and if, on account of this danger, I had chosen
another theme, or had treated this in a manner to conform to the
more general and popular notions, I would in that have been hug
ging my own shackles; whereas my theme this night is, How are
we freed, emancipated, exalted? A just man has not his freedom
curtailed by just laws in so far as he cognizes justice, because the
law unto himself frees him from the external laws; that is, the ex
ternal laws cease to bind and restrain him just in so far as from his
own self-determination he would fulfil them. Just so, and for the
same reason, a reasonable man has not his freedom annulled by
the laws of reason in so far as he knows reason. As one in his own
spontaneity determines himself according to reason, he ceases to
be restrained by the external laws of reason. If all moral and
physical laws be laws of reason, then indeed can man be delivered
from the dominion of necessity only so far as reason in him be
comes self-conscious. We believe in Divine Omnipotence; that
in the Infinite “we live, and move, and have our beingthat with
out Him we can not think a good thought or do a good act; and
yet we believe that man is free and justly accountable. The truth
and consistency of these two positions is all I contend for in the
substitution I have made of Reason for the Infinite, the Absolute,
the Universal. He who believes in human freedom can not but
believe that man possesses the faculty of determining liimsflf in
harmony with the Universal; for in so far as man is determined
by anywhat not himself, he is necessitated and not free. He who
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believes in human freedom and also in Divine Omnipotence and
Omniscience, must believe these twq positions consistent; unless,
indeed, he be himself a slave, clinging in blind fanaticism to the
very chains which bind him. And what does he mean by consist
ency except their mutual harmony with reason? And when he
acknowledges that two truths must be consistent, in this necessity
he recognizes reason as the universal umpire, authoritative to man,
to nature, and to God.
If, therefore, the object of all education is to enable us to har
monize our activities with reason, then the method we seek is the
method of reason becoming self-conscious, or, in other words, it is
the method of reason coming to a knowledge of itself. This is
perfectly clear, that in order that we may harmonize our activities
with reason we must know reason. But the reason alone can
know reason; consequently we can know reason only as the reason
becomes self-conscious. Did you ever see a little child held before
a looking-glass ? Through its senses it cognizes the phenomenon
and through its understanding it is convinced of duality,—it peeps
behind the glass fully expecting to find another child. But as it
comes to know itself, with apparent rapture it recognizes itself
in the image. Not the senses, nor yet the understanding, but only
reason can know and comprehend reason. The spontaneity of man
may be under the dominion of the senses, or of the understanding,
or of the passions; but as these are all finite and related to the in
finite only in and through reason, when they guide, the blind lead
the blind and both fall into the ditch together. But when oui*
spontaneity is guided by reason, the outward expressions of this
spontaneity—our activities, our works—must harmonize with rea
son, with nature, and with God. The great problem of humanity,
therefore, is to identify our spontaneity in each, every and all of
its various possibilities with self-conscious reason. Our question,
therefore, as to the method by which the object of education is to
be attained is now reduced to this form: What is the method of
the reason in becoming self-conscious ?
As we are students of nature, and as in this department especial
ly we hope to assist in the great struggle of humanity, and to leave
the world the better of our having lived, (if this be not our ambi
tion we are unworthy of humanity,) I shall seek this method only
as expressed in the more developed sciences. And we may hope
to get some insight thus, because Science is the formal recognition
of reason. Do not allow yourselves to anticipate me here, and to
object in your thoughts to this position, that the physical sciences
treat of nature and her laws, and, consequently, that a knowledge
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of these laws can be obtained only through observation and ex
periment. Be patient one moment and we will consider this matter
together. It is admitted that observation and experiment are ne
cessary conditions to a knowledge of nature and her laws, but you
must admit also that you neither see, feel, taste, nor smell the physi
cal sciences. It is true you put ores and compounds into the
crucible, but you neither put therein nor take hence the science of
chemistry; it is true certain angles and distances must be obtained
by observation, but the transit instrument and the telescope are not
wonderfully devised machines for the manufacture of the science
of astronomy; you may examine and peep, but the science is not
there—you can not get it thus. What, then, is the relation between
observation and science ? This question is sub judice, and until
decided it might be well to suspend our anticipated objection.
Physical science is rendered possible only in and through the
identity of the laws of nature and the laws of thought. This is
a self-evident proposition; for if nature could in her mode of
action be whimsical or unreasonable, where, I ask, would be the
criterion whereby we could know nature or determine her mode
of action ? There would be none, and we would necessarily be ut
terly in the dark. If there be physical science at all, therefore, the
laws of nature must be identical with the laws of thought, and
Science must be the recognized identity. The senses do not and
can not give us science; observation and experiment can only give
phenomena. Physical science exists only so far as reason has come
to a recognition of itself in the phenomenal. That is, so far as we
have science reason must have become the criterion whereby na
ture is recognized as laws of thought. But reason can become
the criterion only in so far as it becomes self-conscious, or as it
knows itself. Consequently, we may hope by an examination and
careful analysis of the sciences, to learn something of the method
whereby the object of all education is to be attained; in other
words, of the method of reason in becoming self-conscious or in
recognizing itself. Though we may thus only obtain a partial in
sight, yet even this is not to be altogether despised.
As mathematics is more developed and more generally under
stood than any other science, we will direct our attention to it
especially. And let it be understood that our object here is not
to reduce all science to what has been termed the mathematical
method, but rather to seek in the mathematics the method of the
reason in becoming self-conscious, as all science (mathematics, of
course, included) has been shown to be the reason coming to know
and recognize itself. As my object, as a teacher, is always more to
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excite thought than to amuse,—to draw out the mind rather than
to instil dogmas, I hope you will excuse me for selecting for your
consideration a subject requiring so much study. My excuse is
that the principles involved in this subject, though they may seem
abstract, are most practical, forming as they do the very foundation
of all knowledge and all success.
Mathematics as a science starts with certain primary proposi
tions, which are divided usually into two classes—Definitions and
Axioms. But what mean these propositions ? whence came they,
and where is the authority for the use made of them in mathemat
ics ? If we can obtain correct answers to these questions, we will
have approached very near what we seek: but do not be uneasy, I do
not intend to lead you over the paths already well worn by the Sen
sationalists and Idealists. First let me call your attention to this most
important consideration— That there can be no existence, law, mode
of action, or phenomenon, without limitations; for all these im
ply determinations, and there can be no determinations without lim
itations. This is self-evident and absolute; think of it one moment.
There can be no this and that without a difference, and there can be
no difference without limitations. To vision, pure light would be
equivalent to pure darkness; there can be no seeing without a
mingling of the two—without shades or colors. Power is equiva
lent to no power without resistance; you can not lift yourself by
the hair; as Archimedes could not find a pou std, or place to fix
his machine, he could not move the earth. The equation sign
stands forever between absolute motion and no motion; the an
cients did not recognize the parallel lines, and they attached the
predicate no motion to the earth. And our physical sciences (so
called) now are mostly legerdemain to induce the student, by com
plicating the process, to believe he has succeeded in lifting him
self ; in lieu of the earth, physical science is placed on the back of
a tortoise. As there could be nothing to know, therefore, without
limitations, so there could be no knowing. As all things and phe
nomena depend upon the union of opposites, as of motion and rest,
of power and resistance, of light and darkness; so science is based
upon the union of opposites necessarily. As what is to be known
has its existence in this union, evidently the knowing must be bas
ed upon it. Now pure space, like pure light, is without limits, and
consequently is without determination. There is no this, as deter
mined from that; there is no here and no there; no outside and
no inside; no circumference, and no centre. As, for vision pure
light must be united with its opposite—darkness, so the science
of geometry must be based upon the union of the pure idea space
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and its opposite. Now, what stands opposed to space as darkness
is opposed to light? You at once recognize it as the point. The
point is not space, but it is related to space as its opposite, as its
negation, as its limitation. We are now prepared to understand
the meaning of the Definitions upon which geometry is based.
These definitions are the limitations of space by its opposite—the
point;—the motion of a point may be said to generate a line; the
motion of a line, to generate a surface; the motion of a surface, to
generate a solid. So, while pure space is without limitations or
determinations, yet united with its opposite we have definitions as
the bases of science. We now have a here and a there, a this and
a that. By this union we have a straight line, a curved line, a tri
angle, a square, a polygon, a circle, an ellipse, a parabola, an hy
perbola, a polyedron, a prism, a parallelopipedon, a sphere, an ellip
soid, &c. &c.
But before investigating further the meaning of the definitions
of mathematics, we must investigate whence they came; a know
ledge of their origin will contribute to the understanding of their
nature. You are aware that many contend that all our knowledge,
including of course mathematical definitions and axioms, is deri
ved from sensation; and that others contend, no less confidently,
for the existence of innate ideas, and for this origin of all know
ledge. It is not pertinent to our present object to meddle with
either of these systems. We have seen that all determination is
through limitation; that is, if all limitation were removed from
any thing, all determination would be removed; and what would
be left would be equivalent to nought—is nothing—the thing
would no longer have existence. But do you say something would
still be left ? Think one moment; your something left being with
out determinations, wherein, I ask, is its difference from nothing ?
You call it something, I call it nothing, and you can not apply a
predicate to your something which I can not also apply to my
nothing; if you can, then your “something left” has limitations
which is contrary to the hypothesis. It is perfectly apparent,
therefore, if we know not the limitations, we know not the thing;
and that, in so far as we know the limitations, we know the thing
in itself—the thing having an existence only in these limitations.
Therefore, if things in themselves were not related to us, we could
never know them; if there were no bond of union between nature
and ourselves, all things in nature by which we are surrounded
would be to us as though they were not,—we would be uncon
scious of their existence. Consequently, if we know nature at all,
(and no one will be likely to deny this,) there must be some means
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of our knowing or becoming conscious of the limitations of things
in themselves. But how can the mind know or become conscious
of that which is outside of itself? This is the difficult but most
important question. If we admit the duality of nature and mind,
must we admit that the mind can get outside of itself to know na
ture ? This would be a manifest absurdity, for nothing can get
outside of itself. Then, to admit a knowledge of nature, are we
compelled to do away with the duality, and to become out and out
materialists on the one hand, or idealists on the other ? I think
not. Then, if the mind can not get out of itself, how can the mind
know nature if duality be admitted ? I think I see one, and only
one possible solution of this problem; for, in admitting that the
mind can not get out of itself, we admit that our knowledge of na
ture comes from the mind knowing itself. This is the problem:
Admitting the duality of nature and mind, and that the mind can
not get out of itself, how can the mind know nature ?
It is admitted that we have some knowledge of nature, and, con
sequently, that there must be some relation between mind and
the external world. Now if we admit duality, the only possible
relation is that of mutual limitation; that is, in so far as nature and
mind are distinct and dual, they must reciprocally exclude and ne
gate each other. And in so far as they are distinct, the only pos
sible relation they can have on the side of their duality must be
xthe mutual limitation through this reciprocal exclusion and nega
tion. This is the only possible relation upon the admission of dual
ity, because neither could get outside of itself, which would of
course be necessary for any other relation. Consequently, this re
lation, so far from requiring the denial, is in virtue of the duality;
and, as this is the only possible relation consistent with duality, this
must be the avenue to a knowledge of nature; or else, we must de
ny either the duality, or, the possibility of such knowledge. These
three are the only possible alternatives:—You must either do away
with the duality and become materialists on the one side, or ideal
ists on the other; or else, admitting the duality, you must deny
the possibility of a knowledge of nature; or else, admitting both
the duality and a possibility of a knowledge of nature, you must
find in the mutual exclusion and limitation the condition of this
knowledge. Endorsing this last alternative, we must endeavor to see
how nature and mind mutually excluding and limiting each other, is
the avenue to a knowledge of nature. We are not now concerned
with the inquiry how nature and mind limit each other, but our
present inquiry starts with the fact that they must limit each other,
upon the admission of duality. This is the solution: Nature and
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mind mutually excluding and limiting each other, in so far as the
mind cognizes its own limitation, in that act, being limited by na
ture, it recognizes the limitation of nature. To illustrate: suppose
A and B own adjacent farms; A, in knowing the limitations of his,
knows, in that very fact, the limitations of B’s so far as they mutu
ally limit each other; just so, the mind, in knowing its own limita
tions, knows the limitations of nature so far as they exclude and
limit each other. Thus the mind knows nature in knowing itself.
This is the only possible solution; but we need no other as this is in
every respect most satisfactory, containing within itself evidence
of its truth, and is therefore worthy of all acceptation, even though
we were not forced to adopt it, or else either materialism or ideal
ism, or the doctrine that all knowledge of nature is impossible.
But, at first glance, all this may seem to have little to do with the
Definitions of mathematics. Upon reflection, however, I suspect it
will be found to have somewhat to do not only with mathematics
but with our political, social and even religious condition, with the
steam engine and weaver’s shuttle and doctor’s pill, and even with
our bread and butter.
But to continue;—all knowledge, therefore, including mathema
tics and the natural sciences, is the mind knowing itself. If this
be so, you may ask, how do we know that nature is actual and
real? You may say, “upon the admission of the duality of nature
and mind, and, that they mutually limit each other, it is clear
enough that the mind, in knowing itself, knows nature in so far as
they thus limit each other; but, if the mind only knows itself, how
do you get the duality ? How does the mind know that an actual
nature stands over against it limiting it; and that these limitations
of itself, which only it knows, have an external condition at all ?”
This knowledge comes through sensation, which gives us a con
sciousness of objectivity. This will be clear, I think, if you will
call to mind a point already discussed at some length. As we have
seen that all existence and phenomena depend upon the union of
opposites, as of motion and rest, of power and resistance, of light
and darkness, so all consciousness implies duality. Consequently,
consciousness in the line of our spontaneity—that is, a limitation
where we know there is no internal limitation—gives us objectiv
ity authoritatively. The primary condition of our knowledge of
the existence of nature, as opposed to and as limiting mind, is mo
tion. But I must not dwell upon this part of my subject.
On the other hand again, one disposed to sensationalism will ob
ject,—“this is all nonsense to talk about the mind knowing nature
by knowing itself,—I see and feel objects themselves, but I do not
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know the mind,—I can not see it!” I grant you your position fully—
that you see and feel objects, and that you know mind very little;
probably if you could only get it under a microscope, or into a cruci
ble, you would know it better. But I thank you for your objection
just here in close juxtaposition with the one of the idealist already
considered; as we have to steer here between Scylla and Charybdis,
we must keep in mind their localities. In reply to idealism just now,
it was maintained that objectivity is given authoritatively in sensa
tion, in that all consciousness implies duality,—the union of op
posites. This seems to the senses to approach dangerously close
to you, O voracious Charybdis! who would draw all knowledge
into th£ abyss of sensationalism. You say you do not know mind,
but that you know nature, objects, matter, which are given in
sensation. Hence you peep at nature; you make observations and
experiments; you turn her round to make her present herself to
your senses on as many sides as possible; probably you may use
a microscope to assist the senses; you note down very carefully
the results—what you see; you classify this and call it Physical
Science ! And to be so lucky as to see something fir§t, say a new
fossil, and to describe it and classify it, entitles one to endless fame
in the history of Science ! Can it be that now, in the latter half of
the nineteenth century, such a gross and bungling counterfeit is
palmed upon humanity so currently! You say you know little or
nothing of mind because you can not see it,—this I have granted
without the slightest mental reservation; but you say you know
nature and objects around you because you see them and feel
them! Hold! you feel the fire and say it is hot; you see the rose
and say it is red; you taste sugar and say it is sweet. But the
sugar is not sweet, the rose is not red, the fire is not hot; these are
but sensations which you objectify and put into things which you
say you know in sensation. Now you must acknowledge that you
know not the things you imagine you see, and you say that you
know not mind as you can not see it;—what, then, do you know ?
Your physical science is no science, containing as it does the two
factors—the things seen and the individual seeing—most hetero
geneously mixed up, neither known, both undetermined, and one
of them (the individual seeing) extremely variable. Call this
Science! It is mockery, it is trifling with common sense to palm
such stuff off as science.
We have seen that the mind can know nature only in knowing
itself, and, consequently, that the mind can know nature only in so
far as they mutually limit each other. Now the grossest sensa
tionalist acts upon this position; for when he says the rose is red,
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that sugar is sweet, that fii’e is hot, he actually makes his own
limitations in sensation the limitations of things; and the more re
fined of the class who say, “we can know nothing of nature except
the phenomena,” in this fully endorse the same position. The real
difference between these and me is not here therefore, but rather
in this, that they would restrict mind to sensation, or at most to
the understanding. They, no less than I, acknowledge their own
limitations as all they know of nature or indeed can know. But
it may be asked,—“ if the limitations of mind are the means of our
knowing things, or all of nature that we can know, are we not right
in objectifying our sensations?” Certainly we are right; if we
wished to, we could not help seeing the rose as red, feeling* the fire
as hot, and tasting sugar as sweet. But I do most solemnly pro
test against the currency of this, or of any classification or gen
eralization of what is given in sensation, as science either of na
ture or mind. It is not science, because the mind does not Tcnow
and recognize itself in what is given in sensation. It cognizes
only the sensation, the feeling, the redness, the heat, the sweet
ness, &c., which are cognized as well by beasts; for no doubt
they see the grass as green and feel the fire as hot as well as we.
In the language of Scripture,—“The ox knoweth his owner, and
the ass his master’s crib; but Israel doth not know, my people doth
not consider.” The mere cognition of phenomena is not know
ledge either of the thing or of mind; and although phenomena are
an essential condition of physical science, it is a gross blunder to
suppose we can get knowledge or science by an accumulation,
classification, and generalization of no-knowledge, no-science. You
can not hang your coat on the shadow of a nail; it will not sustain
it, try it as often as you please. From all we have said, it follows
most manifestly that, as the thing exists only in its limitations as
we have seen, and as the limitations of nature are the limitations of
reason, physical science can only exist in this,—the reason becoming
self-conscious and recognizing itself in what is given in sensation.
This is a most difficult process, but it alone is worthy of humanity
and of our highest ambition; the reason in becoming self-conscious
pulls down the “wall of partition,” and admits us into the very
presence of the Infinite, the Universal, the Absolute. It alone can
make us free indeed, not by doing away with the external law, but
by enabling us in our own spontaneity to fulfil the law; which is the
object of all education, and should be of all human aspiration.
But, as we have seen, the mind can not get out of itself, and yet,
what has been given in sensation you have thrown from you and
already put in the thing, or rather, have made it the thing. IIow
�17
are you to get it back into mind again, to enable the reason to re
cognize itself in it? It is absolutely necessary, as you see, to get in
terms of the reasoning the limitations given first in sensation. The
only possibility left now for science, is for the reason to go out and
limit itself by the limitations of sense made object. To illustrate:
suppose you wish to get a cast containing the limitations or form
of a given object; you first take an impression in plaster; you now
make it the object of 'which you take an impression in a given
metal; you now have in metal the limitations of the original ob
ject. So you first take an impression of nature in the terms of ex
ternal sense, you now make this the object and take an impression
of it in terms of the reason. You now have, not science, but the
first condition of science; you have the object in terms of the rea
son,—but the science is the reason coming to know and recognize
itself in this its own object. As the thing in itself exists in those
same limitations which you now have in terms of the reason, the
reason in knowing itself in its own object, knows the thing in itself.
The object of reason thus obtained is always an idea limited by its
opposite,—as we have already seen the “definitions” upon which
geometry is based consist of the idea Space limited by its opposite.
Now we see whence the definitions come, and understand clearly
what they are. We now have some insight, I think, back to where
science must begin, if it begin at all. The definitions upon which
geometry is based, are, in distinction from the objects of sense, ob
jects of reason : they are ideal, not sensual. The words, point, line,
triangle, &c., are but signs to represent to the understanding the lim
itations of the idea; consequently, when I say a triangle is a figure
bounded by three straight lines, I give only a verbal definition of the
word triangle; but the word defined is only a sigu of the Conception.
So when I draw a triangle on the blackboard, the diagram is only a
sensual representation. The real, which the verbal definition and
diagram represent, is the ideal object—the object of reason. There
are many who think they study mathematics, who never grasp the
real definitions, but only the shadow as given in sensations. All these
ever reach are forms and rules. When they get a little older and
dabble in philosophy, they tell us mathematics is based upon hy
potheses and even absurdities; for, say they, “nothing can have
position which has neithei- length, breadth, nor thickness, as the
the mathematician predicates of & point.” This only shows that
the objector himself does not see the point, and it is to be feared
he never will see it, because not given in sensation.
The science of mathematics, in all its various branches, from the
determining the product of two and two, to the highest achieve
�18
ments of Newton or LaPlace, is constituted of the expressions of
the reason in the act of coming to know itself in the various limit
ations of the idea Quantity. This definition follows from what has
already been sufficiently insisted upon, but I will try to make it
even more clear. The data of every mathematical problem must
limit the problem, or it can not be solved. This involves, if clearly
understood, the most that I have said to-night. Every standard
measure of real things must be given both in sensation and in rea
son ; that is, it must be both cognized in sensation and recognized
by the reason. For instance, when I say a foot is one straight line
twelve inches long, here the straight line and numbers one and
twelve are recognized limitations of reason, whereas foot and inch
are cognized limitations of objects. All the standard measures are
such as as are both cognized and recognized together, and hence
used with the least possible effort. But all which is necessary is
that the data should limit both the thing and the idea. Hence, on
the side of sensation I may use inch, foot, yard, pole, or any stand
ard, provided I cognize it; so on the side of reason I am not
restricted to straight line, but may use triangle, square, circle, &c.,
&c., provided they can be both cognized and recognized. Hence
you see the application of the whole of mathematics to physical
science in regard to its quantitative determinations. Though I
can not measure the height of a steeple with a straight line, a foot
stick, I can measure it with a triangle. Here the cognition and
recognition are not together, and apparently in the same act of
mind, as when a foot rule is used, since we can not recognize the
triangle in all its properties by a simple act of the reason. Hence,
when we get the base line, or one side of the triangle, in units of
feet, and the angles in units of degrees—all of which are both cog
nized and recognized—we neglect for a time the side of sensation,
that the reason may recognize itself in the triangle; and when we
thus recognize the other leg of the triangle in units—terms Of the
reason—we then put back these units into feet from which we took
them, and now both cognize and recognize the height of the stee
ple at once; that is, we know it. This is an illustration of every
application of mathematics to physical science.
But the different sciences may involve different ideas; quantity
is not the only idea involved in the physical sciences. The ancient
Greeks did not, for obvious reasons, succeed in developing a science
of other ideas as they did of the idea quantity, and with us other
ideas have but little to do with assumed knowledge, with sci
ence. We do not recognize the Platonic “Idea” as the very
life of all science, of all knowledge and all success; and it is
�19
fashionable in these days to declare, both implicitly and expli
citly, that the Organon of Bacon has superseded the Organon of
Aristotle. As both sensation and reason are essential to physical
science—the one to give the condition, the other the essence and
life—it is difficult to comprehend how the one can supersede the
other, except upon the assumption that reason is nonessential to
science. But if, as we have seen, science consists in the reason
knowing and recognizing itself, then this judgment can be but a
sign of ourselves, that sense has superseded reason in us;—
“ Doth the harmony
In the sweet lute-strings belong
To the purchaser, who, dull of ear, doth keep
The instrument ? True, she hath bought tjhz right
To strike it into fragments,—yet no art /
To wake its silvery tones, and melt with/bliss
Of thrilling song! Truth to the wise exists,
And beauty for the feeling heart.”
I now find that many points are left untouched which I intend
ed to discuss, and which would be necessary to give unity to the
subject; but I find time will not permit, and I must hasten to a
conclusion. Let me remark, however, that Axioms are but expres
sions in terms of the understanding of the living-force of the rea
son of each individual. How erroneous, therefore, is the definition
that an axiom is that which all men receive as absolutely true. An
axiom is an absolute and universal truth, but it may not be recog
nized by all men. If I had sufficient energy of thought or living
force of self-conscious reason, the proposition that the square of the
hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two
sides of a right-angled triangle, would become an axiom; but as I
have not this, and as the mind can not transcend itself, I have to
use the lever of method. But as all this is but the carrying out of
what has already been said, I need not dwell upon it. This living
energy of reason was so great in Plato, Shakspeare, and Goethe,
that they could lift greater weights directly than most men could
with all the appliances of levers and pullies.
We have seen that, as the mind can not get out of itself, (and
this position is implicitly admitted by all, though it may be expli
citly denied,) it can know only through a knowledge of itself. We
have seen that we can know physical nature even, only because
nature exists in its limitations, and these limitations are identical
with the limitations of mind or the laws of thought. And God being
Infinite Mind, in whose image we are created, the mind knows God
only in so far as it becomes self-conscious or knows itself. “ God
�20
is a Spirit, and they who worship Him must worship Him in spi
rit and in truth.” But we have seen, also, that the mind can know
itself only in self-conscious reason, and that reason hence is the
only criterion of truth. It is sad to reflect how little self-conscious
reason there is in the world, in humanity. Though reason is the
only criterion of truth, and it alone can exalt us and free us, by en
abling us to unite and cooperate with the Universal and Absolute,
yet, do we not see this our only hope condemned and upbraided
even in the pulpit, driven from the state, and trampled down and
spit upon by politics, and treated little better by science, so-called ?
When this is gone, what have we left? Nothing but individual
tape-strings! Oh, yes! they all talk loudly about the “ Higher
Law,” and say “ do right! do right I” And you ask them, what is
the Higher Law? what is right?—and they immediately and with
the most impudent assurance present their individual tape-strings,
and commence straightway measuring! measuring! But by what
authority are these stamped? By the senses, the feelings, the pas
sions. But each individual has a different standard stamped by
the same authority, except where what is called education induces
many to use the same string. And what power is umpire in these
irrepressible conflicts thus inevitably induced ? God is out of the
question, as reason has been dethroned, apd nothing is left but
physical force. Hence family, political and religious discord and
strife—one tape-string in conflict with another; no self-conscious
reason, no knowledge of the Absolute. If you direct your mind
through the whole range of human activities, you find labels ac
cording to these tape-strings stuck on every thing—the most sa
cred no less than secular. And this is called Knowledge! Truth!
Higher Law! And Education, in all its various departments, is,
in the main, the drilling into the young these lifeless forms, these
shams, these midnight apparitions, these labels arranged in order
to suit the easy method of the sensational understanding. Oh! it
is sad to behold how grossly humanity is engulfed into the senses.
We boast that we are the lords of creation; which means, that we
can bridle the horse, and that we will ultimately exterminate the
lion: for, the spirit of humanity is indicated, not in the question,
how shall we use those gifts to us which have not been vouchsafed
to beasts ? but rather, how shall we make up our deficit in beastly
gifts ?—“ What shall we eat ? what shall we drink ? and where
withal shall we be clothed?”
�St. Louis Medical College,
November 1st, 1859.
’
Prof. J. H. Watters.
Dear Sir,
At a meeting held by the Class, J. T. Marsh in the
chair, it was unanimously resolved, that a committee be appointed for the pur- •
pose of requesting from you permission to publish your Introductory Address,
delivered before the Class, in College Hall, on the evening of October 31st.
Hoping that the above resolve may receive your approbation, a favorable reply
will meet with the thanks of the Class, and of yours,
Respectfully,
J. L. WILCOX,
GRATZ A. MOSES,
CHAS. KNOWER,
JOHN THOMPSON,
J. C. HICKERSON.
St. Louis, Nov. 2, 1859.
Dear Sirs,
The manuscript of my lecture is at your service ; please present
to the Class my acknowledgment of the compliment,
And believe me, as ever,
Your attached friend,
J. H. WATTERS.
To Messrs. Wilcox, Moses, Knower, Thompson, Hickerson.
�
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Method of education: an address introductory to the session 1859-60 of the St. Louis Medical College
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1869
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Conway Tracts
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Text
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
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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
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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
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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,
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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.
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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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Victorian Blogging
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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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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Compulsory vaccination, its wickedness to the poor
Creator
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Wilkinson, James John Garth
Description
An account of the resource
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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F. Pitman
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[1873?]
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G5287
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Health
Vaccination
Social problems
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Text
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Conway Tracts
Health
Medicine
Poverty
Vaccination
Working Classes
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Text
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KNOWLEDGE THE ONLY GUIDE TO ACTION
ft
'k)r
An Address to the Graduate of the St. Loui§ Medical Col
lege : Delivered February 28 th, 1857, by Professor J. H.
r
Watters, M.DU[Pwi/A/zetZ by- request of the
♦* ’ •
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[From the St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal} of May, 1857.]
**,
Gentlemen—With no ordinary feelings of pleasure I Congratulate you on this honorable termination of your pupilage,
and auspicious commencement of professional lifel Havjng
chosen the medical’prof^ssion as your vocation, the present
occasion marks one gdS.1 reached, but it equally marks the
commencement of another stage of the race just begun.
While the present is the legitimate offspring of the past, .it is
also the germ of the future; and “the future is determined4
more by present development find intrinsic energy than by
any extrinsic conditions or outside influences. A man may
be almost what he wi}L*if he will but use the means. We
are born human beings Without our wills, and we must die in
spite of our wills ; |>ut between these two epochs much is op
tional,—much depends upon our own volition and individual
action. It is a thing more to be desired than riches or than
hereditary position,.that a man just entering'ftpon life should
personally realize how much he holds in his own hands,—how
much he is legitimate heir to, independently of all contingenVol. xv—13
�2
Valedictory Address.
cies, simply in virtue of his nature as a free and intellectual
human being. AU progress in art, in science, and in literature,
is due primarily to the individual development of those facul
ties, and the energetic exercise of those capacities, which man
inherits as a part of his being. And mtany of those foremost
in the march and in the contest of truth, have been men least
advantageously circumstanced by the accidents of fortune or
other objective influences. There is nothing to discourage an
ingenious youth from the noblest daring save inherent cow
ardice.
It is the want of a fixed purpose, self-rtffeance, and energetic
action that necessitates failure, and Tint accident, fate or
evil fortune. This is frequently learned in time only to be
get regret, rather than to inspire courage. Content as lifeless
sounding-boards, many learn not till their individuality and
spontaneity are lost in the popular noise that they might have
assisted in quieting the babbling discord, and themselves have
given utterance to sounds more in harmony with the sweet
music of nature;—
“ How many a rustic Milton has passed by,
Stifling the speechless longings of his heart,
In unremitting drudgery and care !
How many a vulgar Cato has compell’dj!
His energies, no longer tameless then,
To mould a pin, or fabricate a nail!
How maiiy a Newton, to whose plosive ken,
Those mighty spheres that gem infinity,
Were only specks of tinsel, fixed rin>heaven,
To light the midnights of his'laffiraw!’’
In the study of the sciences connected with our profession,
there is a fascination which thosg oijly who experience it can
realize. From the wonderful constitution of the human mind,
a man may have a sort of pleasure in any position or occupa
tion, if it accord with his capacity; from the negro with^his
tamborine and the emulation of a cor^g'hucking, throqah e'yery
degree up to Humboldt in the grand contemplation of the cos
mos ; from the hod-carrier, who toils day by day that he may
live to toil on, up to Fulton,, Watt and Morse, who^, by their
effective geniuses, have made the dumb agents of nature con
spire to their ends. All have their pleasures and their sorrows,
different however in degree, according to the respectiye, de
velopments of their minds. The physician, if he be enthusi-
�y-alediclcrry Address.
. 8
a'stic in his calling, will find in the duties of his profession
sources of indefinite pleasure. Who is there whose mind is
at all cultivated that doesfnot deffiye a corresponding pleasure
in studying a good painting, or nne piece of sculpture, or
nicely adjusted machinery, or any work of art-, as he receives
the conceptions, the ideas and the thoughts^of the artist ex
pressed and personified in hisWork,—human thoughts, human
ideas, and human conceptioip?taking on fo«? The antiqua
rian, eager in h^pursuitJbtndies night and day the records
of ancient time^ delighted with the anticipation to him allahsorbing, and encouraged by partial success, of bringing to
light the thoughts, works and actions of his fellow-man of
remote ages. The archeologist pi nds pleasure in studying the
inscriptions upon old and crumbling monuments, and feels a
thrill of rapture as he find/ a key te their interpretation*
But the physician is a student of Nature, the monument of' ,
God ; and shall he not feel an untold delghtas he finds a clue
to the characters there inscribed, not by man, but by the’nm- '*£.»' '
ger of the Eternal gausa -cauwn-wm,—characters which are
the expressioni^tof infinite MBwledgeVEhe embodiment of the
Di. vine Conception? The boo® of Nature, full of thought, not
a particle without its purpose and signification, is opened,
loudly calli^ for’fa terpretors. The human mind gives en
thusiastic response, and man’s physical condition is improved
by the revelations of science.
But I do not propose, gentlemen, in taking leave of you, to
dwell upon the beautieb of Nature, nor upon the pleasures af
forded the human mind in studying her unchanging laws, but
rather to direct your -attention to knowledge as the only guide
to successful action. Actioi^energetic action, is demanded
of him who has an object in lwing, and an end to accomplish ;
of him who is unwilling to be tosS&djiamong whirlpools on the
Sea of, life merely by the .current of cifence, without oar or
riidde&Shnd remember, the oar and the rudder are equally
apt to hasten to that which ^phild be avoided except their
action ‘be guided by knowledge. It is the greatyfeecret of fail#
ure/fiiat few stop to reflect wow awfully hazardous their very .
freedom to act and to mould themselves as they please, ren/
ders their position. Freedom of action is useless, and even
dangerous, unless knowledge andycaution be commensurate
�4
Valedictory Address,
with freedom.. This is true of every action in the range of
man’s voluntary power, but it is of especial force in connec
tion with the actions the physician is called upon to perform.
The freedom of your Ifettle barque to move this way or that,
indifferently, while it renders the gaining of almost any desir
able harbor possible, makes destruction probable unless intel?
ligently guided.
The mechanic, the architect, the farmer, the merchant, or.
the general, was not born? such. Who does not know fhat
each must study till he acquire a knowledge to guide the ae-«
tions pertaining to what he undertakes ? In every trade, each
man’s work corresponds with the knowledge he^possesses
pertaining to his business. The art of healing is no exception
to this universal rule^ that knowledge is the only guide of
voluntary action to useful ends. Physic has no discretionary
power; our pills, and powders, and drops, would ^bout as
leave kill a^cure. A sharp razor is good to shave with, but
it would not hesitate toi ^ut your .throat if so directed by the
hand of an assassin’. The only place for discretion and judge
ment is in the administration; the physician is voluntary, and
if he have not knowledge and caution to correspond, his very
freedom makes it a sad thing to fall into his hands. I say#
kriowledge and caution to correspond—caution to restrain
wherfe knowledge fails to guide. He who knows most, most
knows his ignorance, and he who knows his ignorance is
mosifcautious. Only those whose minds are most cultivated,
realize that they have gathered but ai few pebbles upon the
shore of knowledge, while, the great ocean of unexplored truth
is spread before them; but the school-boy who can read and
write, and perhaps cypher as far as the rule of three, imagines
himself almost a little god. (t Devils venture where angels
feafito tread.” The reckless madman might perchance cross
theniwaon floating icesafely, hy$.uinping from cake to cake-;
so the heartless1* qua'ck might produce a wonderful cure by
chance or accident; this is heralded to the world, and many
good citizens intrust their lives in the hands of him whose
recklessness^ engendered in ignorance, is the only claim to
their confidences. Though these same persons could not be
led by the madman on cakes o|#fioating ice, for they know if
they sink the penalty of violated law must be paid ; thus far
�Valedictory Address.
5
they see that theTaws of nature are inexorable. Men in the
various pursuits of life may be well acquainted with the con
ditions to be fulfilled and the indications of action in their
'respective vocations,—they may be well acquainted with his
tory and general literature, and yet take little thought of the
organization of their own bodies—the functions the different
organs have to perform in the general phenomena of life.
They know that if ffipii’ watch does not keep time, there is
some physical derangement, yet they have-not so clear a conception'ithart the same is true Of the human organism; that
wvery molecular change, eve® vital phenomenon in'health or
in disease,*is determined by physical conditions in accordance
'with law as mexorable. They have only an indistinct idea,
insufficient/for all practical purposes, that disease depends
upon deranged physical conations quite as much-as do the
irregular actions of their timepiece. Actions, show how in
operative this truth is in tfe popular wind. While none
^would attempt to adjust their watch \^h?en out of order, unless
they knew something of iW naechaniBSiW apd conditions of ac
tion, lest they might d® mW® harm, than good, man^, as ig* #
■uprant of anatomy and physiology, would not hesitate to .give
iphysic to their sick child. Yet wefdo not doubt their child is
quite as nea| their hear® a||theiir wateh-'is, though it were
set with never so many precious dramoirfs. They do not
stop to reflect that the truth ^appMcablS to the wrnan or-*
ganism and to the laws ofwganie life,* thrat whatever drug
is capable of doing any thing is^Capable of doing harm, and
requires knowledge to guid^in the administration. May the
time soon arrive when anatomy and physiology will constitude part of a ♦liberal education, quite as essential as^Geography, Grammar, Latin, Greek,’of Astronomy'!- This knowledge
alone can give a clear conception of #he fixed daws of organic
action, and remove that superstition still lingering,in every
commqnity which in forftrer -times wa^ the basis of beliefLhi
witchc^ift and sorcery. WWt"y¥tem of quackery is too ab
surd to find belie vers in the popular mind 1 Ignorance and su
perstition have always been correlative- In’ihe darkness of
midnight, tombstbnfe and cobwebs become ghosts and hob
goblins ; but the light
day dispels tfie illusion. As nurses
amuse children with fairy tales, and frighten them with ghost
�Valedictory* Address.
stories, s©' quackery has its influence through the credulity ®f
ignorance. Who would not Laugh for instance, if, when a steam
boat suddenly strikes a bar and is aground, the passengers,,
who know little of the machinery, structure or management
of the boat, o>r of the character of the particular difficulty,
should volunteer their advice and suggestions ? I think I hear
one remark,—perhaps a lady I was on a boat once before when
she ran aground just as this did, they then did so and so ; now
if they would only follow my suggestions and do the same
thing, we would soon get her off. Another says : I have been
in Mexico, South* America,, and in th® mountains among the
Indians of the rudest tribes, and from these I learned the best
method of getting steam-boats off of bars. Another says I
know nothing of how it is done more tharf you, but I^have'the
magic power by certain passes and motions of relieving steam
boats from every difficulty to which they are subject. Another
says: 1 have a principle applicable to all cases | just let them
put on steam enough, and I will insure motion. And I can
imagine one even presumptuous enough to say r The old cap
tain and officers, whose actions are guided by the particular
indications derived from a knowledge of the condition of
lhingsb5present, are all wrong; the true guide is not this
knowledge, but “ similia similibus curantur —now if you can
only find out what is capable of producing a state of things
like the present, and will use that in infinitesimally small
doses, the difficulty will be removed like magic.—Farces in
definitely more ridiculous than this, though awfully serious to
those upon whom they are played, are aeted every day in our
midst as a conseqa^pce of that superstition which only a more
general knowledge of God’s organic laws for the preservation
of health and removal of disease, can dispel. If your house
is on fire, in th® name of Heaven throw on water ; God’s im
mutable laws are not to be trifled with by man. As intelli
gent beings, we may take advantage of these laws for the ac
complishment of our objects; but never can we set them at
defiance in the living organism more than in inorganic nature,.
Flee th® burning wreck, or you will be consumed in the
flames—if your knowledge of the laws of Nature direct not
your action, the fire ■will care little whether you be a human
being or a lifeless door-post; the burning body will be but
�Valedictory Address.
7
fuel for the flame, to augment the heat. Preachers, lawyers,
congressmen^ merchants, ana ladies too, are seen flocking to
the office @f a man who pretends to cuVp all manneref dis
ease by passes and charms. Now, it is so clear a proposition
as to need only the statement to be received, that if any man
can jjius change the organic actions under abnormal condi
tions to a state of health, he cad by the same power change
them from a state of health to diseases This is an awfully
solemn vie v of the subject. Do you not see here partially
slumbering in our most influential citizens, that same element
of supej^jtition which a little while ago manifested itself in the
buftnipg pitches on the commons of Boston? It is this ele*
mefiut of superstition which gives foothold to quackery in all
its various forms,—^it is this that neutralizes the force of the
truth that man can relieve suffering and cure disease only by
taking advantage of inexorable laws, and that without a
knowledge of these laws he is worse than powerless. This
source of error will remain till the young shall be instructed in
the laws of organic action, which one would think quite as
important as ancient mythology, or the languages and actions
of the Greeks and Bomans ; and quite as wise gten for a na
tion to take an interest in, as the exploration of the, regions
about the north pole or even tfie gold mines of California
But if knowledge is the only guide to Voluntary action, and
if whatever is done withou^jthis guide is harm except by acci
dent, the wisest of our profession should be diffident and mod
est because even of their limited insight into the lawrs of na
ture. But if the most learned in these laws have reason to
be diffident, what is to be said of that oftplady, who, moved
by her natural impulses and kindness of|heart, is ever going
about among the sick, and, Instead bi^doing what good she
might according to hei&capacities, becomes a self-conktituted
doctor, unless indeed the attendant happen to be her own
family physician to whom she modestly defers. I leave this
question with you; I add no epithets—I know none sufficiently
expressive. This lady is probably president of a society for
the amelioration of the conation of the South Sea islanders,
or Esquimaux Indian^lwhile her children are left without in
struction in those principles and motives which alone can se
cure their happiness in after life. And who would wonder if
�.8
Valedictory Address.
her eldest son, moved too by ms natural impulses, but ndt
kindness of heart, should undertake the cure of disease for a
business fl unwilling to devote that time to close study necessary for the legitimate business, he would likely deny .the ac
cumulated lore of our profession and build for himself a brazen
calf, that the people who love new things and seek after
strange gods, might worship. It is not an easy thing to start
an entering wedge; it will frequently rebound. The Esqui
maux Indian or the South Sea Islander is little conscious of
possibility of improvement, and he will repel the missionary;
so if you talk to the people of the ne^ssity of a knowledge of
the medical sciences, and remark upon the imposition of the
quack, many will turn and rend you; and our profession,
always open to improvement, and, as history attests, ever the
cradle in which every infant science has been rocked with the
hope better to relieve suffering, is even accused of jealousy.
You cannot remove the effect while ignorance exists; if your
acquaintance employ an empty pretender, you had as well
leave him be: “ Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone.”
Even the cobbler is not a cobbler by inspiration :
“ A man must serve his time to every trade,”
Save Physic—doctors, some are ready-made.
True worth is always modest and unostentatious. It is the
boy who has never yet left his father’s domicil that imagines
he occupies the flejhtre of creation, and that his particular
horizon is the boundary of the universe. As one ascends the
hill of science, his field of vision enlarges, and as peak after
peak is attained, each gives a higher point of view from which
others appear still rising in the distance yet unexplored.
Each successive peak affords a view more and more enchant
ing ; the desire to know increases with knowledge. The hu
man mind is capable of indefinite expansion, and the field of
science, though bounded on either side, is infinite. The wise
often hesitate, but ignorance is presumptuous and never at a
loss. Men there are who even offer plans for the creation of
worlds, and not a few would suggest improvements in the
present order of things. Ignorance alone prompts man to
“play such fantastic tricks before high heaven.” Man, whose
capacities have as yet scarcely e’nabled him to obtain a glimpse
of the intimacies with which things are effected in this world,
�Valedictory Address.
9
found created ready for him, to whose laws he»j a creature,
owes his being, would assume all knowledge; and, closmg
his eWs, he mistakes the dreamings and phantasms of his
sleeping faculties for reality. The human mind isylimited
upon either side by narrow confines; but these are parallel,
making the province of knowledge infinite in the legitimate
direction. As thought precedes action, and knowledge suc
cessful action, human power is likewise limited :
“ Remove yon skull from out the scatter’d heaps :
Is that a temple where a God may dwell ?
Why ev’n the worm at last disdains her shatter’d cell 1”
“Look on its broken arch, its ruin’d wall,
Its chambers desolate, and portals foul:
Yes, this was once Ambition’s Bjfiih all,
The dome of Thought, the palaes of the Soul;
Behold, through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole,
The gay recess of Wisdom and of WiL
And Passion’s host, that neveribrook^control :
Can allsaint, sage, or sophist, ever writ,
People this lonely tower^this tenement refit?”
,
■'<’
-
Though man has not all powerjhe is not therefore impo
tent; though he has not all knowledge, he is not on that ac
count imbecile. True, he cannot make one grain of corn,
but he can plant it and water it; he cannot tell why oxygen
unites chemically with carbon with the phenomena of heat,
but he knows the fact, and can dig the coal from its bed and
have a comfortable fire of a cold day. Though he have not
ten talents, he can legitimately use and cultivate the five that
he has. Man’s sphere of action is definite, and fortunate is
he who attempts not to crops the boundary, but keeps himself
within his province:. Are the boundaries to the human mind
and to human power apparent when you consider this tenantless skull? The same boundaries extend through every thing
in nature/ The watch-maker can not create one atom of
iron, nor yet can he tell why the steel spring recoils; his
sphere of action is merely to determine such conditions by his
knowledge of the fews of Nature so far as*they pertain to
his business, that thesemnmutable laws shall work out his
designs under the physical conditions determined by him for
this special purpose. Nei^ier Fulton nor Watt could pro
duce steam by any effort of thefr minds, nor could they tell
why water is expansible by heat; but they cpuld determine
�10
Valedictory Address.
the conditions under which steam would be produced accord
ing to the eternal laws of God. Then they could adjust .cylin
ders, pistons, valves, &c., so as through such physical condi
tions to avail themselves of these laws for the action of a
powerful engine. Morse could not explain why the union of
the poles occasions chemical action in the battery with electric
phenomena, but he can so determine the conditions as to avail
himself of these laws even for the communication of thought.
To what subject soever you may turn your attention, you find
the same limits to man’s sphere of action; his power stops
with the adoption of physical conditions by which he may
take advantage of unvarying laws for the accomplishing of
his ends. Would he cure disease? Here too his sphere is defi
nite and likewise limited to modifying physical conditions.
Are knowledge and a cultivated mind necessary for the adop
tion of the conditions of a telegraph, steam-engine or watch,
and yet not necessary for the adoption of conditions for the
cure of disease? Does the very difficulty of the problems in
medicine, and the amount of time and study necessary to im
prove the mind sufficiently to solve them, obviate the neces
sity, and enable men to adopt means to cure disease without
science and cultivated minds? What absurdities are often
believed ! If you throw boiling water upon the skin, the des
quamation and subsequent inflammation are determined by
the existing conditions; the physician may modify the condi
tions, and tljus, through the organic laws, promote recovery.
This is his legitimate business—here his usefulness stops. As
the blister is occasioned by the application of boiling water,
so every disease depends upon some change in the conditions
of life. The art of healing is the art of promoting the return
of normal conditions. While the efficacy of remedies is thus
restricted, within these limits the physician may do much for
the prevention of disease and the restoration of health. The
human organism is so wonderfully devised, that it is able to
preserve normal conditions under great external vicissitudes;
and even more wonderful is its natural capacity to remove
disorders and restore the healthy equilibrium, if only supplied
with pure air, cold water, and wholesome food. Hence the
conclusion is clear, that the condition of a patient is far better
in the hands of a good nurse, who attends to the ventilation
�Valedictory Address.
11
and diet, and who keeps the tongue moistened with cold wa
ter, and soothes the troubled mind with her sympathies, than
under the charge of a thoughtless and uncautious M.D. And
the truth is the same if the good nurse should have a nominal
appendage in the shape of an infinitesimal doctor, if he would
only stick to his third triturations in the administration of his
pills and powders. But good maybe effected not only by the
regulation of the air, water and diet, but by the use of means
more directly to change the internal conditions and to modify
the actions of organs. The physician cannot produce a single
organic action, but, as in inorganic nature, he may modify
conditions and thus promote recovery. The physician, there
fore, is prepared for the duties of his profession upon precisely
the same principles as men are prepared for any business
whatever. There is no royal road to knowledge, and the
mysteries of organic phenomena do not furnish the physician
a short cut to wisdom or judicious action. But there are
many short cuts to wealth ; a man may even steal it, or mur
der for it, or, which is the same thing, he may tamper with
human life under the pretext of relieving suffering, for it. Men
there are who have even assumed the cloak of religion for
gain, and shall we deny that there are men even in high
places in our profession who resort to little things for per
sonal favor, which would be a disgrace to a professed quack ?
“The laborer is worthy of his hire,” but for hire an honorable
man will never resort to any species of deception. If he be
starving, he may take what will satisfy hunger, but he will
do it openly, manly, and above-board.
The laws of life, including health and disease, are as con
stant and invariable as the laws of inorganic matter. There
is no such thing as chance or accident in all the operations of
nature. And nowhere throughout the domain of natural his
tory do we with more wonder and admiration , witness the
supremacy of law, than in the phenomena of organized beings.
As health is preserved, and disease cured, only by taking ad
vantage of these laws, it is more important, that the physician
should be a scientific interpreter of phenomena, a deep thinker,
a philosopher, than any other professional character whose
duties are connected with our temporal relations. First, on
account of the multiplicity of difficulties which present them
�12
"Valedictory Address,
selves, the number of circumstances and phenomena to be taken
into consideration in the solution of every problem ; Second,
because of the value of that which is at stake—nothing less
than the lives of our fellow-men; Third, on account of the
fact that any mistake is irretrievable. The mathematician
may discover his mistake and correct his error—the planets
move on their regular course in spite of it; the wayfaring
man may mistake his road, but he can retrace his steps, but
the physician’s mistake is irremediable;—
" If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me :—but once put out thine,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat,
That can thy light relume. When I pluck thy rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again;
It needs must wither.”
.■'
The land surveyor may be qualified for his business by a
mere mechanical knowledge of some of the principal rules
which he has committed to memory and made familiar by
practicing a few examples, though entirely ignorant of the
great principles from which the formulas have been deduced
through which he arrives at the contents of land. But the
art of healing is not to be hemmed in by any such rules or
dogmas; the scientific physician cannot have his mind thus
shackled by the iron fetters of mere routine. He must be ac
quainted with the foundation principles, from which he may
for himself deduce rules and formulas applicable to every par
ticular case. Every case which may be presented to you in
your practice will be an independent problem, needing a spe
cial formula for its solution. As one face differs from another
in form and expression, so diseases differ though called by the
same name; hence the necessity of scientific knowledge and
a well trained mind to determine appropriate remedies. It is
a peculiarity of all the various schisms that they substitute
some system as their guide, for this scientific knowledge and
cultivation of mind. Men propose to cure disease by Turn
bull’s system, by Thompson’s system, or by Hahnemann’s sys
tem. The Yankees can put a block of wood into a machine
and it will come out nutmegs; then we have sewing machines;
�Valedictory Address.
13
and machine poetry too ; but who would knowingly entrust his
life in the hands of a machine doctor? The nutmegs look
well superficially ; but when you attempt to use them, your
pudding is covered with sawdust. True, the land surveyor
need not go further back than his formulas and tables of lati
tude and departure; but the good physician must be as the
mathematician who devises formulas and makes tables.
Blackstone says, wisely, and with his usual conciseness, that
the greatness of a man does not consist in the number of his
ideas, but in the relation of those he has. In these few words
we have the essence of the distinction between erudition and
knowledge—between mere information and the cultivation of
mind which alone can render that information available for
practical purposes. There is perhaps no word in our language
more misunderstood than the term Practical. Look around
you among your acquaintance in the ordinary pursuits of life,
and who is the practical man ? who is he that adopts the best
and most judicious means to accomplish his objects, and whose
judgment is desired in matters of opinion ? It is not the man
of erudition necessarily, but necessarily the man of strong
common sense; it is the man whose knowlege becomes fore
knowledge through the relation of the ideas that he has.
Hence this faculty of the mind needs especial cultivation for
the judicious application of remedies for the cure of disease.
All great men are necessarily self-made men, because this
faculty upon which their greatness depends can be strength
ened only by exercise in individual thought and in the habit
of associating ideas so that the data in hand will spontane
ously suggest ideas to direct. But the man of great erudi
tion is necessarily a fool, if, in the acquisition of his informa
tion, he suffer this faculty to run to waste and die out for want
of exercise. The boy who is forced to provide the ways and
means is bound to think ; but the school boy is bound to com
mit to memory the thoughts and systems and formulas of
others; and for this he is rewarded, and for this praised as
smart. This one may become perfectly saturated with erudi
tion, so that if he only open his mouth learning will flow in a
constant stream, but in action and in judgment he will be out
stripped by others of far less lore, but who have not neglected
iklv
:«
�14
Valedictory Address.
to improve that faculty by which knowledge is made available.
No man can by any effort of his will call up ideas and thoughts,
but to render information available the mind must be so trained,
that the data in hand will spontaneously suggest thoughts
and ideas through the laws of association, that our knowledge
may be luminously spread out before the mind to guide ac
tion. Whatever therefore will train the mind to close thought,
and cultivate the habit of associating the ideas we have so
as to bear upon a given subject, is eminently practical. This
alone renders knowledge available; and a young man whose
mind is thus trained will gain more practical experience from
one patient closely observed, than would another, of mere eru
dition, from a thousand.
There have been two great schools of philosophy—the
Idealists and the Sensationalists; the one referring all our
knowledge to the senses, the other to the mind through innate
ideas. In science there have been two great epochs, the spi
rits of which partially represent these two schools. Prior to the
time of Bacon, science was mainly pursued subjectively. The
laws of nature were sought through workings of the human
mind, and science necessarily consisted in conceptions of what
might be rather than what is ; of what is plausible rather than
what is truth ; of what is conceivable rather than what is
actual. This is but an attempt on the part of finite man to
substitute his inventive genius for the wisdom of the great
Author of nature. It is apparent that we have not faculties
to arrive at the knowledge of the laws of nature by such
speculations. The order of things as presented in nature as
a whole, is only one of many conceivable ; hence any attempt
to arrive at a knowledge of what is, from purely a priori con
siderations, must prove abortive. It is a comparatively easy
thing to comprehend, for instance, the principles and mechan
ism of a steam engine now, if we study the machine itself; but
with all our skill and ingenuity this was not invented till the
middle of the eighteenth century. If such a machine as this
remained uninvented till so recent a period, how utterly futile
must any attempt to arrive at the principles and laws of the
machinery of nature prove, other than that based upon the
facts and phenomena as presented in her works 1 Since the
�Valedictory Address.
15
time of Bacon, however, the votaries to science have been
becoming more and more exclusively practical sensationalists.
Thus, men, like tides, pass from one extreme to another. The
results of the old method proving its futility, the spirit of the
last epoch has been to substitute the results of mere experi
ment for science—to place empiricism above philosophy; as
if science consisted in the mere collection and classification
of the results of observation and experiment! Hence the pre
sent is little less speculative and visionary than the former
period. The collection and classification of facts are the neces
sary means, but not the ultimatum of science. Facts are the
raw material of which the temple of science is to be con
structed; they are the rough marble just from the quarry,
needing the chisel of the sculptor before it can have expres
sive form; they are as the letters of the alphabet—but signs
of ideas. The microscope and crucible have their uses, but
can never substitute thought; the acorn is a condition, but
it is not the noble oak of the forest. Before, they had thought
without facts; now, relatively, we have facts without thought.
But the arch of knowledge and science can be supported only
by both conjointly. He alone is a practical man who thus
joins the two. The strength of the arch depends upon the
pillars that sustain it; but no arch whatever can be sustained
by one pillar, how strong soever it may be. Give the facts of
the present day to a Plato or Aristotle, and we can form no
idea of what science would then become. The fall of an ap
ple, the steam gushing from a tea-kettle, the jerking of a
frog’s leg, are insignificant phenomena to the common mind;
but to the cultivated nothing is trivial,—the commonest phe
nomena suggest great principles which they but illustrate.
How defective therefore is that education where the Memory
is cultivated at the expense of the more important faculties of
the Mind; where systems, rules, and formulas, are crammed
in, rather than the mind led out and expanded in independent
thought, reason and power. Is it not the great tendency of
this age of young America, called practical, to anticipate the
acquisition of useful knowledge by a short process; to lay
aside individuality as a useless incumbrance and to substitute
rules for thought? Young men thus educated are necessarily
�16
Valedictory Jlddress.
most conceited and ridiculously presumptuous, because they
measure all things by the systems they have committed to
memory, and have mistaken for knowledge, because taught by
their oracles: but the man of thought feels how little is known,
and while he thinks, he is equally -willing to let think, know
ing that the pill that he gives will act according to the unva
rying laws of nature without much regard to the systems of
men.
Gentlemen, iataking leave of you, I would remark, be not
overawed by great names; preserve sacred your individuality,
and let truth and the laws of God be honored rather than the
dogmas of men; leave arrogance to the weak and narrow
minded, and suppose not that dogmas and rules preclude the
necessity of individual thought. Only those who mistake dogmasjor knowledge are arrogant. During the early period of
your professional life devote your leisure time to study and
thought, and thus lay up treasures from which you may after
wards draw without exhausting, instead of giving yourselves
up to those frivolous pursuits to which too many do, as if they
sprang from the schools ready equipped as Pallas from the
brain o^ Jupiter. Such a course will enable you to rise toi a
position you could never otherwise attain whatever may be
your natural geniuses. You will prize it more—it will ren
der you more real happiness in after-life than the money you
would make in the same time were you immediately to get
into a large practice. Think not to arrive at great and use
ful ends except by the route the laws of mind direct; there is
no short process—and he who attempts one must fail;—
“ What shaped thou here at the world ? Tis shapen long ago ;
Tby Maker shaped it, and thought it were best even so.
Thy lot is appointed, go £ llow its host;
Thy journey’s begun, thou must move and not rest;
For sorrow and care can not alter thy case,
And running, not raging, will win thee the race."
�
Dublin Core
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
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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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Knowledge the only guide to action: an address to the graduates of the St. Louis Medical College: delivered February 28th 1857
Creator
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Watters, J. H.
Description
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Place of publication: St Louis
Collation: 16 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From the St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal (May, 1857).
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Date
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[1857]
Identifier
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G5364
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Medicine
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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 (Knowledge the only guide to action: an address to the graduates of the St. Louis Medical College: delivered February 28th 1857), 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
Conway Tracts
Knowledge
Medicine
Press