The vaccination question : a letter addressed by permission to the Right Hon. H. H. Asquith / by Arthur Wollaston Hutton.

  • Hutton, Arthur Wollaston, 1848-1912.
Date:
1894
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The vaccination question : a letter addressed by permission to the Right Hon. H. H. Asquith / by Arthur Wollaston Hutton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    vaccinate hundreds and thousands of children, and yet never have any real evidence in any single case that the operation has averted or modified an attack of small-pox. People are perhaps misled in this matter by the use of the word successful. When a doctor certifies that he has successfully vaccinated a child, he does not mean that he has succeeded in protecting it against small-pox, though it may be his opinion that he has done so; he merely means that he has succeeded, by the subcutaneous insertion of the cow-pox virus, in raising the small bladder-like structure known as the vaccine vesicle, which contains a further supply of the virus, or lymph, that may be used in subsequent operations. That is all he knows about it at the time, and, in the vast majority of cases, all he ever does know about it. Occasionally a family doctor, who has his eye on his patients from infancy to mature age, has the opportunity for inferring more, should a small-pox epidemic happen to invade his district. But even then, since immunity from small-pox was known before vaccination had been invented, and since, moreover, contact with the infection cannot be taken for granted without proof, his inference would fall far short ot a demonstration of the value of vaccination, unless he could adduce a variety of cases in which, amidst other differing circumstances, vaccination was the condition of escaping and non-vaccina- tion the condition of catching the disease. Such evidence, it need hardly be said, may be sought for in vain. The question is, in fact, far less easily disposed of than people are ready to imagine, if it is treated as a scientific one, and not as one settled long ago in the affirmative by authority. The critic's first difficulty is to establish the proposition that there is any question at all; so prone are the majority to treat vaccination as a simple subject perhaps of no great importance, but anyhow one on which