The truth about vaccination : an examination and refutation of the assertions of the anti-vaccinators.

  • Hart, Ernest, 1835-1898.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The truth about vaccination : an examination and refutation of the assertions of the anti-vaccinators. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover.' This descrip- tion applied with at least equal force a hundred years later. Few indeed, then, were those who were not at some time or other of their lives attacked by this fell disease ; and happy was it for any one so attacked that he should escape with un- impaired health or without serious disfigurement. Among those who outlive it (says De la Condamine) many either totally or partly lose their sight or hearing; many are left consumptive, weakly, sickly, or maimed, many are disfigured for life by horrid scars, and become shocking objects to those who approach them.1 Sir Gilbert Blane,2 at a later period, quoted a report of the Hospital for the Indigent Blind, to the effect that two-thirds of those who applied there for relief bad lost their sight by small- pox. 9. The introduction of inoculation and of vaccination.— Such was the state of affairs when a rumour came from the East that by receiving small-pox of one's own accord, the suscepti- bility to contract it could be exhausted by artificial means, giving indeed the disease, but so mildly, that there was hardly any danger in the process. Of this method of inoculation, of the objections to it, and of the discovery of vaccination by Jenner, it is beyond my present purpose to speak, but it may, cursorily, be pointed out that to the present time it remains one of the most interesting and least explained facts in pathology, that the specific contagion or ferment of small-pox, so uncon- trollable in its operations when it enters a man in the ordinary way by his breathing an infected atmosphere, becomes for the most part disarmed of its virulence when it is artificially in- troduced to the system through a puncture of the skin ; so that a person exposed to this artificial infection very generally con- tracts the disease in its mildest and most tractable form. Equally strange and inexplicable is the further and greater change which this ferment undergoes in passing through the 1 Seaton, Handbook of Vaccination (Macmillan, 1868), p. 189. Medico-Chirurgieal Transactions, vol. -s. p. 326.