Page:Vaccination a delusion.djvu/27

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CHAP. I
INJURIOUS EFFECTS OF VACCINATION
21

of the medical profession, and of Government officials, in regard to the question of vaccination, must never he accepted without verification. And when we consider that these misstatements, and concealments, and denials of injury, have been going on throughout the whole of the century; that penal legislation has been founded on them; that homes of the poor have been broken up; that thousands have been harried by police and magistrates, have been imprisoned and treated in every way as felons; and that, at the rate now officially admitted, a thousand children have been certainly killed by vaccination during the last twenty years, and an unknown but probably much larger number injured for life, we are driven to the conclusion that those responsible for these reckless misstatements and their terrible results have, thoughtlessly and ignorant ly but none the less certainly, been guilty of a crime against liberty, against health, and against humanity, which will, before many years have passed, be universally held to be one of the foulest blots on the civilization of the nineteenth century.[1]

  1. 1 As an example of the dreadful results of vaccination, even where special care was taken, the following case from the Sixth Report of the Royal Commission (p. 128) is worthy of earnest attention. It is the evidence of Dr. Thomas Skinner, of Liverpool:

    Q. 20,766. Will you give the Commission the particulars of the case?—A young lady, fifteen years of age, living at Grove Park, Liverpool, was revaccinated by me at her father's request, during an outbreak of small-pox in Liverpool in 1865, as I had revaccinated all the girls in the Orphan Girls' Asylum in Myrtle Street, Liverpool (over 200 girls, I believe), and as the young lady's father was chaplain to the asylum, he selected, and I approved of the selection, of a young girl, the picture of health, and whose vaccine vesicle was matured, and as perfect in appearance as it is possible to conceive. On the eighth day I took off the lymph in a capillary glass tube, almost filling the tube with clear, transparent lymph. Next day, 7th March, 1865, I revaccinated the young lady from this same tube, and from the same tube and at the same time I revaccinated her mother and the cook. Before opening the tube I remember holding it up to the light and requesting the mother to observe how perfectly clear and homogeneous, like water, the lymph was, neither pus nor blood corpuscles were visible to the naked eye. All three