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

  • Schamberg, Jay Frank, 1870-1934.
Date:
1909
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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    ■ 5FWCAL j j i UBRAHY V VACCINATION AND ITS EELATION TO ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION JAY FRANK SCHAMBERG, M.D. PHILADELPHIA /. VACCINATION Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1806 to Edward Jenner, the discoverer of vaccination, said: ''Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome smallpox has existed and by you has been extirpated. The pre- diction of this sagacious statesman would ere this have been fulfilled if vaccination and rcvaccination had been universally practiced. Despite one hundred years of incontrovertible testimony of the efficacy of adequate vaccination as a safeguard against smallpox, and de- spite an almost complete unanimity of opinion among scientific medical men of the century, there still remain some laymen and a few physicians who dissent from the generally accepted view. In writing, therefore, on the increase of our knowl- edge of vaccination and smallpox in its relation to ani- mal experimentation and research, it will be desirable to preface the same by a discussion of the efficacy of vac- cination as a prophylactic measure against smallpox. In order to appreciate the importance of Jenner^s dis- covery of vaccination, it is necessary to comprehend how extensive and fatal was smallpox in the prevaccination period. The date of the origin of smallpox, as is true with many of the pestilential diseases, is involved in some obscurity. While there are references in literature to diseases suggestively corresponding to smallpox dating back many centuries, we have no trustworthy record of the extent of its prevalence before the fifteenth century. The probabilities are that it made its first appearance in the Orient and was thence introduced into Western Europe. Epidemics of this disease became progressively more