Medicine -- Anecdotes; Physicians -- Great Britain
"I was absent from home when your obliging letter of the
24th November arrived; but I do not think this is likely to
occur again for some time, and I shall therefore be very
happy to take your little family under my care at the time
you mention--the latter end of January. Our arrangements
must be carefully made, as the children must be met here by
proper subjects for transferring the Vaccine Lymph; for on
the accuracy of this part of the process much depends. It
may be necessary to observe also, that among the greatest
impediments to vaccination (indeed the greatest) is an
eruptive state of the skin on the child intended to receive
the infection. On this subject I wrote a paper so long ago
as the year 1804, and took much pains to circulate it; but I
am sorry to say the attention that has been paid to it by
the Faculty in general has been by no means equal to its
importance. This is a rock on which vaccination has been
often wreck'd; but there is no excuse, as it was so clearly
laid down in the chart.
"I am, Sir, your obedient
"and very humble servant,
"EDWARD JENNER."
Jenner was a bright representative of that class of medical
practitioners--sagacious, well-instructed, courageous, and
self-dependent in intellect--who, at the close of the last century,
began to spring up in all parts of the country, and have rapidly
increased in number; so that now the prejudiced, vulgar, pedantic
doctors of Sterne's and Smollett's pages are extinct--no more to be
found on the face of the earth than are the drunken squires who
patronized and insulted them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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