The Case Against Vaccination.
ADDRESS BY DR. HADWEN
AT
GODDARD’S ROOMS, GLOUCESTER,
JANUARY 25th, 1896.
A large and enthusiastic meeting of citizens was held in the Northgate Assembly Rooms, Gloucester, on Saturday evening, January 25th. The hall was crowded, and many failed to gain admittance. Mr. S. Bland, J.P., presided.
The CHAIRMAN, in opening the proceedings, said: Ladies and Gentlemen,—The issue of the Doctors’ Manifesto on the present outbreak of small-pox in Gloucester has opened the flood-gates of discussion and denunciation upon the vaccination question. The anti-vaccinators, firm in their convictions, remain unmoved by the stale sophistries, bogus statistics, and stupid taunts thrown at them. (Cheers.) The spectacle of a few individuals opposing the unanimous dictum of the local doctors is a fair butt for the small jokes of those superior persons who, to save themselves the trouble of study and thought, give their bodies to the doctor and their souls to the priest, relying on the necromancy of the one, and on the other for their physical and spiritual salvation. I yield to no one in proper respect for both of those professions—(hear, hear)—but knowing as I do, and as you do, the discarded fallacies and tremendous blunders which have received their unanimous support in the past, I maintain the God-given right of liberty of conscience and the use of my reasoning powers to accept or reject any of their present dogmas. (Cheers.) We read the truism in an older Book than any of their treatises, “that whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” ‘That eminent physician, Sir Andrew Clarke, said—“Nature never forgets and never forgives.” And until it is an indisputably proven fact, which it is not at present, and I do not think ever will be, that you can preserve health by the inoculation of disease, I will have none of it. (Cheers.)
Many years ago my attention was directed to the subject of vaccination by an extraordinary event. The Guardians of Keighley Union were sent in a body to prison for refusing to
