The Story of a Great Delusion in a Series of Matter-of-Fact ChaptersWhite, William
History
The Story of a Great Delusion in a Series of Matter-of-Fact Chapters
White, William
Vaccination
Woodville lent his powerful influence as head of the Smallpox
Hospital to establish the New Inoculation. He put Jenner’s
prescription to the test with perfect sincerity and admirable
courage, suffering himself to be thrice inoculated with horsegrease
in order to come at the truth;[115] and only resorted to cowpox
when he found horsegrease cowpox unattainable. Mr. Anthony
Highmore, surgeon, speaking over Woodville’s grave in 1805,
exclaimed--
Who that have felt the benefits of Vaccination will not teach
their children, and their children’s children, to bless the name
of Woodville when they bless the name of Jenner.
Yet Pearson and Woodville, who made the New Inoculation practical
and practicable, were pursued by Jenner with implacable animosity,
stigmatising their mishaps and appropriating their apparent
successes.
To publish a pamphlet for the detraction of Woodville, and if
possible to upset Pearson’s Vaccine Pock Institution, Jenner left
Berkeley for London on 28th January, 1800, taking Bath on his way,
where also a Vaccine Pock Institution was in progress.
Early in 1800 appeared _A Continuation of Facts and Observations
relative to the Variolæ Vaccinæ_--a quarto of 40 pages, Jenner’s
third pamphlet. Like its predecessor, a trumpery collection of
gossip, it was designed to manifest his advantage over Woodville,
who had inadvertently confused cowpox with smallpox in his
inoculations at the Hospital.
First, Jenner expressed satisfaction over the interest of Europe in
Cowpox Inoculation--
I have the pleasure, too, of seeing that the feeble efforts of a
few individuals to depreciate the new practice are sinking fast
into contempt beneath the immense mass of evidence which has
risen up in support of it.
He then went on to describe the accumulating mass of evidence--
Upwards of six thousand persons have now been inoculated with
the virus of Cowpox, and the far greater part of them have
since been inoculated with that of Smallpox, and exposed to its
infection in every rational way that could be devised, without
effect.
“True,” Pearson might have observed, “but who inoculated the
vast majority of the six thousand? Nor were they inoculated with
the horsegrease cowpox you prescribed, but with the cowpox you
condemned.”
The introductory reference to Woodville revealed Jenner’s
disposition and tactics--
It was very improbable that the investigation of a disease so
analogous to the Smallpox should go forward without engaging the
attention of the Physician of the Smallpox Hospital in London.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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