Sir Lyon Playfair taken to pieces and disposed of : likewise Sir Charles W. Dilke, bart., being a dissection of their speeches in the House of Commons, on 19th June, 1883, in defence of compulsory vaccination / by William White.

  • White, William, 1831 or 1832-1890.
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sir Lyon Playfair taken to pieces and disposed of : likewise Sir Charles W. Dilke, bart., being a dissection of their speeches in the House of Commons, on 19th June, 1883, in defence of compulsory vaccination / by William White. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    The returns of the Registrar-General, moreover, show that deaths from Syphilis have been steadily increasing in England and Wales. In 1838-42 they were 10.6 per million ; in I860-64 they had risen to 63.6 per million; and in 1875-79 they had gone up to 85.7 per million, being in excess of the death-rate of Smallpox itself, which in 1876-80 stood at 78.4 per million. There is little reason to doubt that this startling increase of Syphilitic Mortality is largely due to the invaccination of the malady. At the same time, be it remembered, the number of deaths thus registered but faintly indicates the misery and the ruined lives throughout the land, which are unentered in the column of Syphilitic Mortality. Time was when the possibility of the invaccination of Syphilis was altogether denied by vaccinators, spite of much evidence to the contrary; but facts adduced by Mr. Jonathan Hutchinson and others at last prevailed; and Sir Thomas Watson, breaking through the etiquette of his profession, openly confessed to the ghastly risk in The Nineteenth Century, saying— I can readily sympathise with, and even applaud, a father who, with the presumed dread and misgiving in his mind, is willing to submit to multiplied judicial penalties rather than expose his child to the risk of an infection so ghastly. Much has been learnt since the Committee sat in 1871, and it is too late in the day to talk of the invaccination of. Syphilis being a possibility of the extremest rarity. The condemnation of Vaccination from arm-to-arm, and the resort to calves for virus, alike on the Continent and the United States, attest the reality and frequency of a danger which it is idle to gainsay. To appease the alarm excited in this country, the Government opened an estab- lishment in Lamb's Conduit Street for Bovine Vaccina-