Vaccination and its relation to animal experimentation / Jay Frank Schamberg.

  • Schamberg, Jay Frank, 1870-1934.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vaccination and its relation to animal experimentation / Jay Frank Schamberg. 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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    ADDENDA (Notes added to the second edition of this pamphlet, lflll.t EFFECTS OF VACCINATION IN* JAPAN The opponents of vaccination in England and the United States have within recent years endeavored to prove that vac- cination has been a failure in Japan. Taking the various vac- cination laws in Japan as a guide, they have argued that the Japanese people were thoroughly and repeatedly vaccinated, and yet at times suffered considerable epidemics of smallpox. These results have been arrived at by antivaceinationists many thousands of miles distant from Japan, and were based solely on paper statistics. They point out that Japan, which is sup- posed to be a thoroughly vaccinated country, has had in the twenty years, from 1889 to 1908, 171,500 cases of smallpox, and that in 1908 there were 18,139 cases. If the inhabitants of Japan were all thoroughly well vaccinated, these figures would seriously challenge the effectiveness of vaccination as a preventive measure against smallpox. There is, however, information at hand to show that a very large number of Japanese subjects have not been successfully .vaccinated, and this information comes to us from an unimpeachable and authentic source. Dr. T. Amako, Director of the Municipal Hospital for Infectious Diseases, in Kobe, Japan, contributes an article entitled A Study of the Variola Epidemic in Kobe (Archiv. f. Schiffs u. Tropen Hygiene, 1909, xiii, page 409). He prefaces the statistics by stating that fearful epidemics of smallpox have laged in Japan seventy times between the years 551 and 1884. He says that vaccination was intro- duced into Japan in 1848, but was carried out very incom- pletely. In 1885 the first Imperial Vaccination Law was passed, and since then the former murderous epidemics of smallpox have been tremendously lessened through vaccination. In the year 1908, in the city of Kobe, with a population of 372,751, there were 4,184 cases of smallpox. Amako had an opportunity of observing 3,465 patients and of noting the rela- tion between vaccination and smallpox in these cases; 1.607 patients, representing 46.4 per cent, of the entire number were vaccinated, and the remaining 1.856, or 53.5 per cent., were either unvaccinated or vaccinated unsuccessfully. Of the vac- cinated cases, 116 died, representing a mortality of 7.2 per cent.; of the unvaccinated or unsuccessfully vaccinated cases, 851 died, representing a mortality of 45.8 per cent. It is thus seen that the mortality among the wn vaccinated cases was nearly seven times as great as among the vaccinated cases.