of the bigotry and ignorance of the learned and the lowly, Jenner began to receive his due. At first, he was widely execrated as a monster who would degrade the human race to the level of brutes. According to some who should have known better, we ought by this time to have been mooing and baaing, or going on all fours, or pasturing like Nebuchadnezzar. Jenner outlived that cry. As for the clamour about his blasphemy in taking human health out of the hands of Providence, it was only what Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her followers had gone through before. Generally speaking, he was estimated sooner than the great benefactors of mankind usually are. He received thanks from almost the whole circle of crowned heads, and was informed of the vaccination of all manner of princes and valuable persons all the world over. Poems were published, and five medals were struck in his honour; and there were some who remembered that he, the father of a family, had largely sacrificed his practice (he had long been a physician, because he had not sufficient leisure as a surgeon), without obtaining any recompense whatever from his discovery; and hence arose the movement which obtained for him a grant of 10,000@l@. from Parliament, followed, some years later, by another of 20,000@l@. To the end of his days, however, the great Discoverer suffered grave inconveniences from the work of his life. He was not only overwhelmed with correspondence; the correspondence was in a great degree occasioned by the blunders of those who wrote to him. We are told that his patience was unbounded; and he went on to the last explaining matters which he had made clear in print years before; but it was weary work! The same mistakes were repeated incessantly; and then the blame of failure was thrown upon him. Through it all, however, he had the comfort of knowing that the terrible disease was disappearing wherever his method of prevention was tried; and that in several countries, the next generation would grow up without knowing, except from description, what the small-pox was like. He was still writing letters and giving guidance to applicants when, in January, 1823, when he was seventy-four years old, he was struck down by apoplexy in his library, and died that very easy death.
Such was the career of a Discoverer who has doubtless saved more lives than any other man: perhaps more than all the slaughterers of their kind have killed since small-pox was first known. We can scarcely suppose that war has ever destroyed so many as fifteen millions every quarter of a century. If ever a Discoverer was to be envied, it must be this man: yet we see that life was not altogether charming to him; and further, that his special discovery seemed no very exhilarating affair to himself. He was not the less, but the more, a great man for this; and the more the dreams of the dreamer approach to the qualified view which Jenner took of the career of discovery, the more likely it is that the dreamer should enter into Jenner's fellowship.
I must add a word about the position in which we now find ourselves. By this time we ought to be like the Swedish and Danish children of thirty years ago—unable to bear witness to smallpox, more or less: or, at least, we should be able to tell nothing beyond some dim remembrance of the nursemaids and gossips shaking their heads over children who are made to understand that they are injured individuals, on whom experiments have been tried, as if they were dumb brutes. I remember the way in which an old sempstress and my nurse lifted up their eyes against my parents and the doctor, and made me quite vain of their pity when I had two marks to show on my arm, vaccination being then new enough to induce parents to try inoculation after it. We may also remember uncles or aunts, or at least grandparents, pitted with smallpox. Even at this day, anybody who walks through Donnybrook fair, or anywhere in the lower order of streets in Dublin, will be struck with the number of pitted faces, and of one-eyed people whom he meets. This should be the utmost we know of smallpox at the date of sixty-four years from the publication of Jenner's "Inquiry." Yet the case is far otherwise. There has been a recent spread of the disease, quite serious enough to awaken us all to consideration. We hear occasional doubts of the efficacy of vaccination; hints that it is wearing out: suspicions that it was sadly overpraised at first; and even some suggestions that it causes diseases as bad as that which it obviated. While such things are said, no attention that can be given to the case can be too vigilant. For my own part, old and experienced as I am, I see in all these hints and complaints nothing but a repetition of the things that were said in Jenner's day; and I feel confident that if he were among us, he would lay his finger on each cause of failure as readily and infallibly as he did in the last century. I believe that, as the novelty and exquisite sense of relief have died out, carelessness has crept in: that we do not understand so well as we ought in what stage of the cow's ailment the vaccine matter is proper for our use, nor perhaps how to distinguish the spurious from the genuine pock. I am very sure that there is great carelessness about the transference of the lymph from one subject to another; and I think it hardly probable that vaccination can be infallibly administered by the whole generation of parochial surgeons who are planted down in a fortuitous way throughout the country. There are other adverse chances: but these are enough to account for a reappearance and slight spread of the old disease. Jenner would wonder that it is no worse.
If there is among us a man as devoted, and candid, and patiently sagacious as Jenner, and as little ambitious of glory on his own account, here is a career laid open to him. Let him take up Jenner's work. Let him carefully study Jenner's course of inquiry, his experiments, his replies to opponents, his exposures of mistakes; and then we shall see where we are wrong, and how our old enemy has partly got his head from under our heel. Let him, when duly qualified, test the proceedings of the Royal Jennerian Society (which probably knows most of the matter), and of every other dispensing authority. The question of compulsory or voluntary vaccination is one upon which every citizen can form an opinion. Before we