The people of England seemed to think that the fee-simple of his body and mind had been purchased by the TEN THOUSAND POUNDS; and many an unjust and ungenerous intimation of this feeling was conveyed to him. To a mind like his, this was no small annoyance. He was called upon for explanations and opinions by every person who thought a direct communication with the Author of Vaccination an honour worth seeking, while they might have obtained all the information they wanted in his published writings. So much was matter of course, but Jenner had worse to encounter. He took the fine talk of his medical and political friends _au sérieux_, bade farewell to Berkeley, and set up as London physician in Hertford Street, May Fair. The result we have in his own words-- Elated and allured by the speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, I took a house in London for ten years, at a high rent, and furnished it; but my first year’s practice convinced me of my own temerity and imprudence, and the falsity of the Minister’s prediction. My fees fell off both in number and value; for, extraordinary to tell, some of those families in which I had been before employed, now sent to their own domestic surgeons or apothecaries to inoculate their children, alleging that they could not think of troubling Dr. Jenner about a thing executed so easily as vaccine inoculation. Others, who gave me such fees as I thought myself entitled to at the first inoculation, reduced them at the second, and sank them still lower at the third. His fees did not amount to £350 a year, and he presently found himself nothing the better for the parliamentary grant, and involved in grave financial difficulties. He wrote to a friend, 2nd November, 1804-- The London smoke is apt to cloud our best faculties. I do not intend to risk the injury of mine in this way, unless occasionally for the transaction of business. The public has not the smallest right to require such a sacrifice of me. I have received no reward for showing them how to remove one of the greatest obstacles to human happiness; but, on the contrary, am loaded with a tax of more than £400 a year! And to another correspondent-- I have now completely made up my mind respecting London. I have done with it, and have again commenced as village doctor. I found my purse not equal to the sinking of a £1000 annually (which has actually been the case for several successive years) nor the gratitude of the public deserving such a sacrifice. How hard after what I have done, the toils I have gone through, and the anxieties I have endured _in obtaining for the world a greater gift than man ever bestowed on the world before_ (excuse this burst of egotism), to be thrown by with a bare remuneration of my expenses.