Page:Vaccination a delusion.djvu/16

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10
VACCINATION A DELUSION
CHAP. I

proof of this failure to protect in the first ten years of the century; and had it not been for the unscientific haste of the medical witnesses to declare that vaccination protected against small-pox during a whole lifetime—a fact of which they had not and could not possibly have any evidence—this proof of failure would have convinced them and have prevented what is really one of the scandals of the nineteenth century. These early proofs of failure will be now briefly indicated.

Only six years after the announcement of vaccination, in 1804, Dr. B. Moseley, Physician to Chelsea Hospital, published a small book on the cow-pox, containing many cases of persons who had been properly vaccinated and had afterwards had small-pox; and other cases of severe illness, injury, and even death resulting from vaccination; and these failures were admitted by the Royal Jennerian Society in their Report in 1806. Dr. William Rowley, Physician to the St. Marylebone Infirmary, in a work on Cow-pox Inoculation in 1805, which reached a third edition in 1806, gave particulars of 504 cases of small-pox and injury after vaccination, with seventy-five deaths. He says to his brother medical men: " Come and see. I have lately had some of the worst species of malignant small-pox in the Marylebone Infirmary, which many of the faculty have examined and know to have been vaccinated." For two days he had an exhibition in his Lecture Room of a number of children suffering from terrible eruptions and other diseases after vaccination.

Dr. Squirrel, formerly Resident Apothecary to the Small-pox and Inoculation Hospital, also published in 1805 numerous cases of small-pox, injuries, and death after vaccination.

John Birch, a London surgeon, at first adopted vaccination and corresponded with Jenner, but soon, finding that it did not protect from small-pox and that it also produced serious and sometimes fatal diseases, he became one of its strongest opponents, and pub-