Is vaccination injurious? : a popular essay on the principles and practice of vaccination / by Henry Alleyne Nicholson, M.D.

  • Nicholson, Henry Alleyne, 1844-1899.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Is vaccination injurious? : a popular essay on the principles and practice of vaccination / by Henry Alleyne Nicholson, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    mitted by vaccination, Professor Paget, perhaps our greatest living pathologist, decides in the negative upon these grounds :— ] (a) Because infantile syphilis, though conveyable in some i instances by its own peculiar morbid products, does not render i the blood of the patient capable of directly conveying the i disease ; and (h) because, if the blood of a syphilitic child could i so modify the vaccine disease within it as that the vaccine lymph i should be capable of conveying any other disease, there is every i reason to believe that the vaccine vesicle in the diseased child : would be modified in correspondence with the modified lymph. i (Vide Article Vaccination, in Reynolds's System of Medicine). 1 To put this less technically, the theoretical grounds for believing i in the impossibility of communicating infantile syphilis by [ vaccination are as follows :—(1) The blood of syphilitic children I is not so much altered as to be capable of transmitting the i disease even by direct inoculation ; and it would be contrary to ( all analogy to suppose that vaccine lymph from such a child ( should transmit syphilis, when the blood fails to do so ; (2) if ] infantile syphilis were to be transferred by the operation of 1 vaccinating, all pathological laws go to show that no vaccine 1 vesicle, or an imperfect one, would be produced. We may remark, en 'passant, that this last mentioned pathological prin- t ciple, though it would not, of course, afford any consolation in s any particular case in which syphilis might have been trans- t mitted by vaccination, nevertheless affords an almost certain ( guarantee that there can never be any repeated transmission of ( syphilis by means of vaccine lymph. i Secondly: We have to see how far theory on this subject is i borne out by actual facts, and we find that the results of direct 1 experiment are in singular accordance with what we should have ( been led to expect by theoretical reasoning. The experiments* s on this subject have been twofold, thus according with the two c theoretical objections which we have just mentioned. In the i first class of experiments, largely and repeatedly performed (by [ *T]ie author would wish here to exonerate himself from the charge which might be brought against him, that he would approve of these experiments. The ques- tion is not one to be discussed in this place, but it is admittedly hard, if not [ impossible, to justify experiments such as these, and nothing but the great value of ^ their results could prevent them assuming a criminal complexion.