Vaccination impartially reviewed : being one of the prize essays sent in to the Ladies' Sanitary Association / by Ferdinand E. Jencken.

  • Jencken, Ferdinand Edward, 1823-1881.
Date:
1868
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vaccination impartially reviewed : being one of the prize essays sent in to the Ladies' Sanitary Association / by Ferdinand E. Jencken. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    merely left unheeded by the public, but had, in the beginning, to encounter even the most embittered opposition, and it was only after many years’ struggle that the logic of his theory was admitted, and the prac- tice of vaccination universally adopted. But though vaccination has been of incalculable value in pre- venting the spread of the smallpox, which, previous to the discovery, committed such fearful ravages, branding or destroying its victims with unsparing cruelty, yet the benefit that it confers is not alto- gether of that unexceptional, that absolute, kind, as to entitle us to pronounce its prophylactic virtues to be of an unfailing and unalterable character. The cow-pox is not a disease natural to man, but its in- oculation is practised with the object of introducing a virus sufficiently powerful to forestall the inroads of another, though similar, disease ; however, it being thus used as a prophylactic amply establishes the mildness of its character and the readiness in which it fraternises with the economy, yet it is just from these more genial virtues which render it so highly valuable as a preventive, and the almost negative resistance offered to its introduction by the organism, that it refuses to lay so deep a hold upon the human economy as is the case with regard to the smallpox, the invasion of which is not only fol- lowed by a revolution in the system of a grave and