The vaccination question, being the second issue of a letter addressed by permission in the autumn of 1894 to ... H.H. Asquith : togetther with a letter addressed by permission in the autumn of 1895 ... to Arthur James Balfour. With notes and corrections to the letter to Mr. Asquith and an index.

  • Hutton, Arthur Wollaston, 1848-1912.
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The vaccination question, being the second issue of a letter addressed by permission in the autumn of 1894 to ... H.H. Asquith : togetther with a letter addressed by permission in the autumn of 1895 ... to Arthur James Balfour. With notes and corrections to the letter to Mr. Asquith and an index. 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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    belief and not merely for his inaction in not having his child vaccinated that he is repeatedly punished. For, if a parent, either from the experience he has had in his own family, or from what he has seen in the families of others, or from what he has read in the writings on vaccination of competent medical men, is convinced that the operation is not only useless but one that involves serious risk to his child's health and life, it would be in him an immoral act to present the child to be vaccinated ; and to suppose that the law compels a man to act immorally is absurd. So it punishes him for holding an opinion which, in the judgment of the majority, is erroneous. It was prophesied, when this Bill was before Parliament, that this vexatious provision would provoke an agitation that would not cease until compulsion had been entirely repealed; and it had not been in force four years when a Select Committee (of which Sir Lyon, now Lord, Playfair was a member) unani- mously recommended that repeated penalties in respect of the same child should be abolished. Yet the section is in force still to-day, and is likely to remain in force, until an enlightened and indignant people make short work of the whole foolish business. It is a striking instance of the impotence of the Legislature to correct its own mistakes. The recommendation of the Select Committee, that re- peated prosecutions should be abolished, was approved in the Commons by a majority of five to one (57 to 12) but was rejected in the Lords by a majority of one (7 to 8), after a brutal speech by the late Lord Redesdale, who entirely mistook the issue, and compared a parent, who for love of his child refuses to allow it to incur the risks of vaccination, to a man who repeatedly gets drunk. Grouse-shooting was already a week overdue when the Bill came back to the Commons (August 19th, 1871); and the Lords' amendment was accepted by the House on