Observations on some late attempts to depreciate the value and efficacy of vaccine inoculation / by Samuel Merriman.

  • Merriman, Samuel, 1771-1852.
Date:
1805
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on some late attempts to depreciate the value and efficacy of vaccine inoculation / by Samuel Merriman. 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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    kind, as to make our females fall in love with bulls, and generate Minotaurs. Can it be possible, that any man should be so infatuated as to believe, that such sheer nonsense as this is to overset a practice founded on the experience of the most judicious and able physicians and surgeons in the world ? Is it to be supposed, that a grave physician, wishing merely to instruct and inform his fellow creatures, would fill his pages with such unmeaning, such impertinent de- clamation ? Or does he expect, that the worki will give credit to a publication, contaminated with so disgusting an insinuation ? For the vulgar, and the most ignorant of the vulgar only, can such arguments be intended. It is astonishing, then, that he who appears desi- rous, solely, of courting the applauses of this class of people, should attempt to make them believe, that no mischief whatever can be pro- duced by the Small Pox, even if matter for ino- culation be taken from patients labouring under inveterate scurvy, scrophula, the itch, the venereal disease, or consumptions 1—nay, that matter may be safely taken after death, from those who hav^e died of a confluent Small Pox. and from those who are in a state of putrefaction ! Very different is the general opinion. No caution is more earnestly impressed on inoculators by parents, than that they should chuse a favor- able sort, and healthy subjects, to take matter