Jefferson as a vacccinator / by Henry A. Martin.

  • Henry A. Martin
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Jefferson as a vacccinator / by Henry A. Martin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    that journal's proprietors and managers, long after it had been evi- dent to every one else, that the triumphant success of animal vacci- nation was utterly above and beyond all possibility of being marred or even abated by its petty malignity, silence became and has con- tinued the rule. The course pursued towards himself caused the writer no surprise. He kaew the animus of the Boston Clique too well ; with its history, however hateful and obscure, he was too familiar to, for a moment, believe that it would be so false to all its traditions as to fairly and impartially criticise, much less applaud a novelty, however striking and important, the author or represent- ative of whicli was a Boston physician, but not a member of its hereditary Ring. It is a singular but quite indubitable fact that, in Boston, not only animal vaccination in 1870, but tlie Jennerian vaccination in 1800 by Benjamin Waterhouse and variolous inoculation in 1721 by Zabdiel Boylston were first introduced in America. It is a fact as unquestionable, but by no me.ins so singular, to any one who is familiar with the history of the medical profession in Buston and the local influences which now control and always have controlled it, that neither of these events was in atfy way due to the genial, fostering nurture and patronage of the medical profession of Bos- ton, but simply and solely, in the two latter instances, to llie wis- dom, perseverance and courage of two of the noblest and bravest men who have yet illustrated the history of American medicine. These qualities carried Boylston and Waterhouse triumphantly to the end they aimed at, not only without the aid of their brethren of tlie Boston profession, but in spite of opposition and p:isecu- tion at their hands, absolutely without a parallel, or near approach to a parallel in the history of the introduction of vaccination or even of inoculation in any city or country of the world.* This is *In the Boston Folyanthos, ior May, 1806, there Is a brief biographical notice of Waterhouse and a few autobiographical notes in the preface to his own remarkable volume on the authorship of .Junius (a subject not so haclcneyed then as it has since become). I can remember no other attempt at his blograpliy. Apploton's cyclopedia contains some ten or a dozen lines in which no allusion Is made to what was really his great life-work. Waterhouse was, probably, the most thoroughly educated American physician of his time. Nephew of the great Dr. FotherglU and, through that relationship with the recognlKcd head of the English profession, the recipient of very exceptional advantages, Before leaving America ho studied medicine with a very competent physician (Dr. Haliburton, of Newport, U. I.) for three years. In London he enjoyed the familiar intimacy of Fothergill, residing In
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