panic in town respecting it, and there were, at one time, fears among the West-end tradesmen that it would cause the “session” to come to an untimely end.
Let us admit it at once. This result is only one example of the price we pay for our determined opposition to centralisation. We put the liberty of the individual above every other consideration, and we see that public danger is the result.
In comparison with most of the great European nations, England, the very source of vaccination, is by far the worst protected against smallpox of them all. Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, and Austria stand particularly high in this respect, for the simple reason that children are vaccinated in those countries with the same certainty that they are registered at birth in this.
Some ten or twelve years ago, chiefly at the instance of the medical profession, a compulsory Act was passed, directing that all children should be vaccinated within four months from birth. The sages, however, who passed this law forgot to enact machinery by which it could be worked. There were penalties, it is true, for non-compliance with the Act, but no reasonable means of putting them in force. When the Act first passed, the public for a time were frightened into a steady compliance with its requirements; but they soon found out that the law if it barked could not bite, and by degrees parents, especially among the poorer classes, began to neglect an act which, for the preservation of their children’s lives, was just as essential as their clothing and food.
Moreover, the duty of vaccination was, by some unaccountable blunder, placed under the direction of the Poor-law Board, which contracted with medical men for the vaccination of their respective districts. In some cases there is at present such competition for these contracts, that there are two vaccinators for one child, consequently poor parents imagine that they are conferring a favour upon the vaccinator in allowing the child to be protected against death; and they will attempt to make a bargain with the doctor, saying, “You shall vaccinate baby if you will give so and so a bottle of physic,” or if you will “give us a pot of beer.” The most rooted antipathy to allow children to be vaccinated—we are again told by the Inspector of Vaccination—is removed by twopence, or the presentation of a toy. Can anything be more absurd than this? If there are faults upon the part of parents, there are also faults in the kind of vaccination which is offered or rather thrust upon them. Upon the efficient manner in which the act of vaccination is performed depends the success of the operation. It is a delicate, if not a difficult, act to perform; but will it be believed that a duty which is necessary to shield the population from a terrible disease is not taught in one of our public hospitals?
The student passes from these great places of study as ignorant of vaccination as the savage in the woods. When he gets into practice he manages to pick up his information as best he can. Consequently, the method of transferring the vaccine lymph from arm to arm, or from the vaccine point to the arm, differs as widely as the ideas of men can differ who have to act without any previous knowledge on a given subject. Some merely scratch the skin, others make a deep puncture, in some cases only two incisions are made, but the perfect vaccinator will always make three incisions on each arm. In many cases through ignorance the lymph is taken from the arm when it is over-ripe, and the consequence is not only a source of failure in its power of protection, but a fear that it may cause many of those unsightly eruptions which are known to follow the act of vaccination from impure lymph.
We have said enough, and more than enough, to show that in the present state of the law we can never be certain either that the population is well vaccinated, or that the lower stratum of it is vaccinated at all. When an epidemic arises people rush to the vaccination stations to protect their little ones against the arrows of death which they see flying around them and striking here and there to the death; but the epidemic passes, and their fears with it—a new crop of unvaccinated children springs up, and a new epidemic, to be repeated every four or five years, sweeps off these neglected children, and spreads terror and contagion among adults.
The Government have yet to realize the fact, that we must create a standing army of well-trained medical men, well officered, and ready to meet this enemy day by day, and beat him in detail, and not to allow him to overwhelm us by sudden onslaughts. To give this protective force due efficacy, it should have a medical organisation, and not be frittered away among poor-law boards, vaccine boards, or the many conflicting authorities which now create such friction, and make the working of the Vaccination Act a perfect nullity. We have an officer of health; why should not the working of the machinery of vaccination be entrusted wholly to him? and if, having given him the proper instruments and subordinates for the due carrying out of Jenner’s discovery, he fails (which he would scarcely do), we should dismiss him, and appoint another, as our Yankee friends are now doing with those commanders-in-chief who have failed against the public enemy in the field. A. W.
CONCERNING FLAT-FISH.
The varieties of the peculiar “genre” of fish comprised under the above denomination are so many, that to treat of them individually under separate heads would occupy too much space, and perhaps be not altogether acceptable to the bulk of miscellaneous readers.
In some of my previous papers I have had occasion to remark on the inexhaustibility of the subject of “fish,” and indeed the flat-fish of our seas are as a tribe so numerous and interesting, as to be well worthy of a paper to themselves. I shall attempt to deal with only a few of them, and accordingly commence with that prime favourite the Sole.
Soles are well known and numerous in nearly