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
Ample proof now exists of the fallacy of this belief, since vaccination
gives no protection whatever, as will be shown later on. But there was
also no lack of proof of this failure to protect in the first ten
years of the century; and had it not been for the unscientific haste
of the medical witnesses to declare that vaccination protected against
small-pox during a whole lifetime—a fact of which they had not and
could not possibly have any evidence—this proof of failure would have
convinced them and have prevented what is really one of the scandals of
the nineteenth century. These early proofs of failure will be now briefly
indicated.
Only six years after the announcement of vaccination, in 1804, Dr.
B. Moseley, Physician to Chelsea Hospital, published a small book on
the cow-pox, containing many cases of persons who had been properly
vaccinated and had afterwards had small-pox; and other cases of severe
illness, injury, and even death resulting from vaccination; and these
failures were admitted by the Royal Jennerian Society in their Report
in 1806. Dr. William Rowley, Physician to the St. Marylebone Infirmary,
in a work on _Cow-pox Inoculation_ in 1805, which reached a third
edition in 1806, gave particulars of 504 cases of small-pox and injury
after vaccination, with seventy-five deaths. He says to his brother
medical men: “Come and see. I have lately had some of the worst species
of malignant small-pox in the Marylebone Infirmary, which many of the
faculty have examined and know to have been vaccinated.” For two days he
had an exhibition in his Lecture Room of a number of children suffering
from terrible eruptions and other diseases after vaccination.
Dr. Squirrel, formerly Resident Apothecary to the Small-pox and
Inoculation Hospital, also published in 1805 numerous cases of small-pox,
injuries, and death after vaccination.
John Birch, a London surgeon, at first adopted vaccination and
corresponded with Jenner, but soon, finding that it did not protect from
small-pox and that it also produced serious and sometimes fatal diseases,
he became one of its strongest opponents, and published many letters and
pamphlets against it up to the time of his death in 1815.
Mr. William Goldson, a surgeon at Portsea, published a pamphlet in
1804, giving many cases in his own experience of small-pox following
vaccination. What made his testimony more important was that he was a
believer in vaccination, and sent accounts of some of his cases to Jenner
so early as 1802, but no notice was taken of them.[2]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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