Vaccination a Delusion: Its Penal Enforcement a Crime: Proved by the Official Evidence in the Reports of the Royal CommissionWallace, Alfred Russel
Science
Vaccination a Delusion: Its Penal Enforcement a Crime: Proved by the Official Evidence in the Reports of the Royal Commission
Wallace, Alfred Russel
Vaccination
vaccinated the other not, and none of them having had small-pox, and
then having the resulting effects carefully described and compared by
independent experts. Such “control” experiments would now be required in
any case of such importance as this; but it was never done in the early
days of vaccination, and it appears never to have been done to this
day. The alleged “test” was, it is true, applied in a great number of
cases by the early observers, especially by Dr. Woodville, physician to
a small-pox hospital; but Dr. Creighton shows reason for believing that
the lymph he used was contaminated with small-pox, and that the supposed
vaccinations were really inoculations. This lymph was widely spread all
over the country, and was supplied to Jenner himself, and we thus have
explained the effect of the “vaccination” in preventing the subsequent
“inoculation” from producing much effect, since both were really mild
forms of small-pox inoculation. This matter is fully explained by Dr.
Creighton in his evidence before the Royal Commission, printed in the
Second Report. Professor E. M. Crookshank, who has made a special
study of cow-pox and other animal diseases and their relation to human
small-pox, gives important confirmatory evidence, to be found in the
Fourth Report.
This brief statement of the early history of vaccination has been
introduced here in order to give what seems to be a probable explanation
of the remarkable fact that a large portion of the medical profession
accepted, as proved, that vaccination protected against a subsequent
inoculation of small-pox, when in reality there was no such proof, as
the subsequent history of small-pox epidemics has shown. The medical and
other members of the Royal Commission could not realize the possibility
of such a failure to get at the truth. Again and again they asked the
witnesses above referred to to explain how it was possible that so
many educated specialists could be thus deceived. They overlooked the
fact that a century ago was, as regards the majority of the medical
profession, a pre-scientific age; and nothing proves this more clearly
than the absence of any systematic “control” experiments, and the
extreme haste with which some of the heads of the profession expressed
their belief in the lifelong protection against small-pox afforded
by vaccination, only four years after the discovery had been first
announced. This testimony caused Parliament to vote Jenner £10,000 in
1802.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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