Extracts from

Extracts from: [1876] THE STATISTICS OF THE MEDICAL OFFICERS TO THE LEEDS SMALL-POX HOSPITAL EXPOSED AND REFUTED

"I know very well that the statistics as to the cases and deaths of the vaccinated and unvaccinated are published for a purpose—a purpose that is unworthy and contemptible—it is simply to deceive the public mind, and to withdraw all consideration from the rationale of vaccination, .......The Statistics of the Vaccinator are not to be trusted.......The Vaccinator has a craze to support, and he will do it even at the sacrifice of truth......My suspicions, as to the untrustworthiness of Medical Statistics, were first roused in March, 1872, but my enquiries were confined to the small-pox deaths. It never once occurred to me that, either from carelessness or audacity, the Medical Officers would include among the "unvaccinated," living examples of the "successfully vaccinated." During that month I investigated the particulars as to 16 deaths which had taken place in the Hospital between the 29th January and the 9th March, 1872. Of these 16 deaths the Medical Officers had returned 9 unvaccinated, 6 vaccinated, and 1 unknown. After a full and careful enquiry, which occupied Mr. Kenworthy and myself for several days, I attended before the Board of Guardians and handed in a return showing that the 16 deaths were composed of 12 vaccinated patients, 2 unvaccinated, and 2 unknown. The two unvaccinated were two out of the three cases "certified unfit," being scrofulous from birth, and the two unknown were Irish vagrants, who had neither friend nor relative in the country who could give any account of them. Out of the 16 deaths there was, not one fair unvaccinated case. After all the trouble I took in this matter, neither the Board of Guardians nor the Medical Officers accepted my challenge to have a public enquiry."---

JNO. PICKERING, F.S.S., F.R.G.S. [1876. THE STATISTICS OF THE MEDICAL OFFICERS TO THE LEEDS SMALL-POX HOSPITAL EXPOSED AND REFUTED]

"To show in a few figures the untruthfulness of the statistics, I may state that I have seen about half of the 115 cases and investigated them thoroughly, and with the following result:—
    6 living witnesses entered “unvaccinated," all of whom had been "vaccinated."
    9 deceased persons entered "unvaccinated," all of whom, had been "vaccinated."
    8 examples entered "unvaccinated," which should have been entered "unsuccessfully vaccinated."
    4 cases entered "unvaccinated" which should have been returned "certified unfit"
    And these are collected out of about one-half of the 115 cases. One result of this enquiry, and to me it is worth all the trouble, all the time, and all the money, is that I have dispelled for ever the delusive idea that the unvaccinated die in greater proportions than the vaccinated.....It is a cunning and monstrous device, in order to swell the mortality of the unvaccinated, to add to them the deaths of those who have been "vaccinated," the "doubtfuls," "unsuccessfully vaccinated," "certified unfit," diseased from birth, the syphilitic, the scrofulous, and unclean."---JNO. PICKERING, F.S.S., F.R.G.S. [1876. THE STATISTICS OF THE MEDICAL OFFICERS TO THE LEEDS SMALL-POX HOSPITAL EXPOSED AND REFUTED]

"From the 29th January, 1872, to the 24th October, 1874, there have been 715 cases passed through the Hospital, the particulars of which appear in the ledger; out of the 715 cases there were 600 "vaccinated," and 115 "not vaccinated." Now, from the immense pains taken to swell out the "not vaccinated," by adding well authenticated cases of vaccination, the unsuccessfully vaccinated, and the certified unfit, it is not to be presumed the medical officers would add to the "vaccinated" any "not vaccinated," therefore the 600 are all fair and bona-fide cases. On the other hand, how are the 115 "not vaccinated" reduced by deducting the "vaccinated," the "unsuccessfully vaccinated," and the "certified unfit," &c. I do not believe that of the whole 115 cases entered "not vaccinated," after deducting the three classes above mentioned, there would be left 40 fair cases of "not vaccinated."---JNO. PICKERING, F.S.S., F.R.G.S. [1876. THE STATISTICS OF THE MEDICAL OFFICERS TO THE LEEDS SMALL-POX HOSPITAL EXPOSED AND REFUTED]

"Three children, all of the same parents, aged respectively 3, 6, and 7 months, 'all died of " diarrhoea after vaccination." In these cases the small-pox virus invaccinated was driven upon the intestines, and produced "diarrhoea" and death. In the latter cases the invaccinated virus produced its like in another form, i.e, the small-pox. Deaths from "diarrhoea" after "vaccination" may be counted by their "tens of thousands."---JNO. PICKERING, F.S.S., F.R.G.S. [1876. THE STATISTICS OF THE MEDICAL OFFICERS TO THE LEEDS SMALL-POX HOSPITAL EXPOSED AND REFUTED]

"Your medical officers say that their Returns give "conclusive evidence of the protection afforded by vaccination." It is positively painful and humiliating to read such reckless statements. " Protection," what protection when 600 out of 715 patients are " vaccinated," every one of them having been certified "successfully vaccinated"!

"when they recall the frightful havoc which their predecessors caused for nearly a century, in connection with small-pox inoculation. We entertain as great an objection to one practice as to the other—they are both bad and ought to be discountenanced. From 1722 to 1798 small-pox inoculation was practised, and, if there is any truth whatever in the statements of

[* Medical men of our day believe in vaccination just as they recently believed in bleeding in cases of fever, and now believe in mercury and other mineral poisons, because they have been educated therein and know no better. No more appropriate

"In baron’s Life of Jenner, vol 1, p135, the following incident is given:--“His nephew, George Jenner, went into the stable with him to look at a horse with diseased heels. “There,” said he, pointing to the horse’s heels, “is the source of smallpox.”

Query.—Was Jenner sane? I think not. This little scene, so neatly got up, that his greed for gold had obscured his judgment. Jenner’s philanthropy began and ended with himself. Better for him had he never been born than that science, in his hands, should have established a craze—a craze whose dire mischief has now cursed the earth for seventy-five years.

Dr. Birch, a contemporary of Jenner, and physician to the then Prince of Wales, (afterwards George IV.), foresaw all this calamity, and foretold that England would one day find that the vaccine dogma was "a public infatuation." His grave-stone, to this day, hands down that opinion to posterity."---JNO. PICKERING, F.S.S., F.R.G.S. [1876. THE STATISTICS OF THE MEDICAL OFFICERS TO THE LEEDS SMALL-POX HOSPITAL EXPOSED AND REFUTED]

At an Anti-Vaccination Meeting at Boston, in Lincolnshire, held on the 17th November last, Dr. Small, J.P., of Boston, addressed the meeting. Amongst other observations he stated that "from being a vaccinator he had, from his own personal experience and observation, been convinced of the terrible evils of vaccination." He stated an extremely interesting fact, viz. : that "on an occasion when four vaccine points were obtained from London, and four children vaccinated with them, all four cases resulted in small-pox." This is only one of hundreds of instances which have come before my notice during the last twenty years, where the inoculated vaccine produced the small-pox, facts which have led me to denounce Vaccination as being the principal propagator of small-pox. I have known many instances of this kind in Leeds, one occurred only very lately. The base of the virus of vaccine is small-pox matter, absolutely taken from the human subject, then inoculated on the cow, and passed on from one child to another. The voluntary evidence of a gentleman, in the social position of Dr. Small, entitles him to be heard when he speaks of the "terrible evils of Vaccination."

others. Whereas the fact is that cleanliness has rid the horse and cow of their diseases, but filth, the vaccine, has not removed the small-pox from man. Man has been more merciful to his animals than he has been to himself. His filth, his vaccination, and his trust in Jenner, have left him a prey to the filth-disease of the dark ages, a disease that would have disappeared long ago had it not been for his own mischievous interference.

Epidemics, and in fact, all Zymotic diseases may be said to be filth-diseases. There is no exception to that rule. Whom do they attack? The unclean.*

[* In confirmation of the above remark there is a descriptive paragraph in the Report of the Leeds Social Improvement Society, for 1874. It reads thus:—"For, while much work, doubtless very necessary, has been done in improving the business parts of Leeds, many of the streets and courts in which cholera prevailed in 1832, which were the principal seats of fever during the years 1834-1839, of fever and cholera in 1847 and 1848, of fever throughout the five years 1860 to 1865, and in 1867, of diarrhoea and fever in 1870," and from that time to this, continue, even now, to be haunts of filth, vice, disease, and death. No doubt these evils must, in any case, be specially found in the parts of a town inhabited by the poor; but the complaint is that they are here immensely in excess of what they might be, and that, in the present condition of things, it is difficult to see how decency, morality, and health can be expected at all."

What a stimulus is given to disease and death, when, to the above mentioned conditions, which surround the poor in the eastern districts of Leeds, there is added the filth of Vaccination. How the King of Terrors must revel as he follows the wake of the public blood-poisoner! How he gloats over this annual Herodian massacre, which is perpetrated for the sake of two shillings a life!

The scarlet and typhoid fevers, cholera, diarrhoea, and small-pox, fetch all their victims, or nearly so, out of the districts referred to in the Society's report. Food for epidemics, in every stage of manufacture, can be seen at work there at any time. I have been in these small-pox haunts day and night, at all hours from ten a.m. to eleven and twelve p.m., and even into early morning, and I have watched and noted every process.]

"What neighbourhoods do they visit? The filthiest. What towns do they select? Those where sanitary conditions are the most neglected. Note the last small-pox epidemic, and take Leeds as an example. Who were the victims? The very lowest classes of society, children that were filthy, neglected, and ill fed, others living in houses that were overcrowded, destitute of proper ventilation, and in courts and alleys where sanitation is a term unknown; adults who are tramps, drunkards, prostitutes, men and women without homes, wanderers,—with a very modest sprinkling of the very lowest sections of the working classes; these formed 7-10ths of the patients who passed through the hospital of the Leeds Union, and these are the very self-same people, resident in the same houses, streets, and neighbourhoods, who would have fallen the first victims to any other epidemic which had sprung up. If they had not yielded to the small-pox they would have succumbed to scarlet fever, typhoid, or the like. If the unsanitary surroundings are there, and the physically deteriorated in health within reach, then the conditions for producing an epidemic are present, and the result cannot fail to be disastrous. The strong and healthy do not take the small-pox. If we divide Leeds in the centre due north and south, nearly all the cases occurred in the eastern half of the town,—the healthiest half, the western, was free from the scourge. Belgravia and May Fair had no small-pox, but there was plenty of it in the narrow streets and the courts and alleys situate in the east of London. Again, our healthiest towns, such as Leamington, Cheltenham, Brighton, Hastings, and Scarbro', had little or no small-pox during the recent epidemic, whilst Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and similar large centres of industry suffered severely. Do not these facts confirm our previously expressed opinions that small-pox is a filth-disease, and like all filth-diseases, of the zymotic order, the only protection is in general and wide-spread cleanliness?"---JNO. PICKERING, F.S.S., F.R.G.S. [1876. THE STATISTICS OF THE MEDICAL OFFICERS TO THE LEEDS SMALL-POX HOSPITAL EXPOSED AND REFUTED]