Facts about small-pox and vaccination : issued by the Council of the British Medical Association, January 19th, 1898.

  • British Medical Association. Council.
Date:
[1898]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Facts about small-pox and vaccination : issued by the Council of the British Medical Association, January 19th, 1898. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Vaccination Vindicated, pp.115,117,123-7. nationists have been declaring that there was a great want of sanitation in Gloucester. What was wanting was vaccination. For convenience the Registrar-General many years ago grouped together places whose death-rate was low and classified them as “healthy districts.” They were nearly all found to be sparsely populated rural districts where though houses may be damp and overcrowded and other insanitary conditions prevail, there is little opportunity for infection. In such places, in spite of bad sanitation, there is a lower death-rate than in towns, because, independently of sanitary effort, the atmos¬ phere is purer. Also there is less small-pox, and it comes at a later average age, because there is less facility for spread of infection on account of the smallness of the population and the distance of house from house and village from village. In such circumstances, though there is little sanitary effort, there is little small-pox, and unvaccinated persons have a better chance of escaping small-pox aitack than they have in large towns where sanitary arrangements are more elaborate. 11. Though isolation of small-pox cases in hospitals is useful auxiliary to vaccination it is no substitute for it. In an unvaccinated nation it would be utterly impracticable to provide sufficient small-pox hospitals. For whooping cough and measles hospital accommodation has not been seriously attempted, though these diseases cause an enormous mortality. Where, owing to vaccination, liability to small-pox is limited, hospitals are very useful and help to give time for general revaccination. But in an unprotected community,their almost certain breakdown is obvious. Who would have attended to the sick in Leicester if all nur?es had had the same experience as the nurses who refused revaccination? In an unprotected community instead of small-pox being limited, it would spread in rapidly widening circles. Where a person protects himself by vaccination and revaccination he can defy small-pox. He carries his protection with him wherever he goes and a father can obtain protec¬ tion both for himself and his family. Even if isolation in hospitals were made more stringently compulsory than vaccination has ever been in this country there could be no complete security. The protection of the individual might fail at any moment. It would depend not on himself but on other people. His cordon of protection would be a chain the measure of whose strength would be its feeblest link, and over not one link would he have efficient control. Failure o! parents to observe the symptoms of illoess ; failure to call in a doctor; failure of the doctor to recognise small-pox; failure in promptitude of removal; inadequacy of hospital accommodation; insufficiency ol disinfection of persons and things—these would be among the risks to which even a law of compulsory isolation would leave him exposed. Obviously the risk of collapse of voluntary isolation would be much greater. 12. Vaccination is very safe. Nothing done by human beings is entirely without risk, but the risks of vaccination have been grossly exaggerated. Some of the earliest anti vaccinationists held that the countenance of a vaccinated child might be transformed so as to assume “ the visage of a cow.” Later on, in the ’fifties, vaccination was accused of making people bald-headed, shortsighted, lazy, and of causing degeneracy in music, painting, oratory, poetry, &c. Still later, the habit has been to get statistical returns of increasing and decreasing diseases from the Registrar-General, and to attribute the increasing diseases to vaccina¬ tion, and to use the decreasing diseases to illustrate the view that small-pox also might decrease without vaccination. But a disease