PREFACE
position do the doctors now occupy as authorities, and promoters of future practice and legislation, in the case? They are the last men to learn the truth, and have struggled against that truth with obdurate minds. Are they now
Now, what likelihood is there that persons so blind for a generation or two to facts obvious enough to unlearned fathers and mothers, should see clearly the material or statistical facts or figures that belong to the relations of vaccination to smallpox? Demonstrated blindness, blindness residing in and spreading from the will, what we may call amaurosis of self-interest and self-love, especially corporate amaurosis of self-love, runs through the capacity of seeing the whole subject when such blindness pertains to one part
"A healthy and well-nourished calf," says he, "about three months old, is hired from a butcher, and vaccinated in the usual way, on its shaved abdomen, in about sixty-places. Upon the punctures thus made vesicles form, as from ordinary vaccination in the human body. These vesicles run their due course, and the vaccine virus which they contain is ripe and fit for use about the fifth or sixth day of that course—for use, namely, from the living animal in direct vaccination, and for collection in a fluid state into tubes, or in a dry state on ivory points, for the purpose of vaccination which is indirect. After seven days the calf is returned to the butcher, none the worse for what has happened."
hundreds of children die of smallpox, and are acknowledged to have died of smallpox, who had previously been vaccinated. It must be remembered also that the figures put before us by the Government are utterly unreliable, unreliable partly because it is acknowledged by medical men to be impossible when children have died of smallpox to tell afterwards whether they have been vaccinated or not, and unreliable also because it is a principle with medical men not to return children who have died from the effects of vaccination as having so died. It has been stated by medical men that they do not like to cast a slur upon the system, and therefore they do not return deaths by vaccination, even where they do occur...................presumption, and for the doubt, whether it is wise to vaccinate their children. Far more than this, it is no longer held that it is absolutely safe to vaccinate children, as was stated to us when the Committee sat in 1871. During the first part of the time that the Committee sat the doctors who were called before us declared it to be impossible that syphilis and other diseases could be communicated by inoculation, while it was actually proved to demonstration before we finished our sittings that thirteen cases of syphilis had arisen from one case of vaccination alone. (Hear, hear.) Indeed, that fact is now notorious all over Europe. Not so very long ago that
The Dublin Local Government Board denounces Variolous Vaccination.
In Tract No. XII., which treats of the sources of the present supply of lymph, documentary evidence was given that nearly all the lymph now in use is smallpox matter, first inoculated from human smallpox into the cow, and then taken from the cow under the name of vaccine, the inoculation law being broken in presumably every case of vaccination.
"Nothing less than the immediate withdrawal of all the vaccine—so called—now in use will suffice to exempt the Government from the direct and just charge of wilfully allowing the smallpox to be given wholesale to the people in order to save a humiliation to the medical profession."—From the Galway Correspondent of the Dublin Daily Express, communicated by Fras. Davis, jun., Enniscorthy, Feb. 20, 1879.
It is fair to expect that the action of the Dublin Local Government Board will be followed up by similar action of the Local Government Board of London; which will have the effect, not only of placing a ban upon the whole of the vaccination lymph now in use, confessedly got, as it is, by inoculating cows with smallpox and then communicating smallpox virus called vaccine from human arm to arm;—but also of putting into severe inquisition the pretended calf-lymph of Dr. Wyld and his coadjutors; and of stopping their process until each calf which they inoculate is proved to have matter of the lineage of spontaneous cowpox; say rather, until every such calf is proved to have spontaneous cowpox. Each point or lancet also issued by these vitulators must have a Local Government Board in-vaccinetur upon it, stamped during its taking from the legalized calf. This follows in con
This subject has yet to be studied; for the medical profession is almost blind to the facts, and is averse to the study; because political vaccination, endowed and; established, and become a strong limb in the hundred handed love of power, allows of no light or truth on the part of the official vaccinators, who are the medical profession. A few heads may be indicated to exceptional medical men and to the general public.