A detail of experiments confirming the power of cow pox to protect the constitution from a subsequent attack of small pox, by proving the identity of the two diseases / [John Badcock].

  • Badcock, John, active 1816-1830
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A detail of experiments confirming the power of cow pox to protect the constitution from a subsequent attack of small pox, by proving the identity of the two diseases / [John Badcock]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    a spurious vesicle. It is not at all improbable that all these causes may have operated in lessening the value of vaccination, as a means of protection against small pox. Dr. Gregory, Physician to the Small pox _ Hospital in London, in a report which he made some time since, gives additional weight to one of these reasons, by the remark that vaccine lymph, passed through many persons, loses, in process of time, much of its activity. His statement has-been confirmed by several eminent medical men on the continent; and I believe there are but few practitioners who would, at the present day, venture to gainsay the statement. | Be the cause what it may, the fact is now beyond a doubt, that the vaccine lymph, that most precious boon of Jenner to a suf- Jering world, has become greatly impaired in value, and is even still advancing in the pro- cess of deterioration. Medical men repeatedly find in practice that vaccination with the old stock of lymph, requires to be repeated more than once, and occasionally as often as four times, ere a genuine vesicle is produced, and that even when they have used great care in the selection of the lymph they employ. In other