A report on vaccination and its results : based on the evidence taken by the Royal Commission during the years 1889-1897.

  • Royal Commission on Vaccination.
Date:
1898-
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A report on vaccination and its results : based on the evidence taken by the Royal Commission during the years 1889-1897. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

    23/512 (page 11)
    WOODVILLE, PEARSON, AND MARSHALL. is tlie histoiy of a series of smallpox cases putting on special characters, and that therefore the lymph used and distributed by Woodville and Pearson was in reality not cow-pox lymph but smallpox lymph. But a detailed discussion of all the facts such as will be found at pages 145—153, shows this view to be untenable. A review of all the evidence avail- able leads to no other conclusion than that, however much in Woodville^s, Pearson's and other cases, cow-pox was mixed up with smallpox, the lymph used and distributed by Woodville and Pearson and called by them cow-pox lymph (excluding of course all the cases, of which there were not a few, in which matter was taken not fromi the local cow-pox tumour at the seat of inoculation, but from one of the eruptive pustules) was veritable cow-pox lymph having the true characters of cow-pox lymph only. 23. It of course follows that the cases, both in Woodville's practice and in that of others, in which the inoculation of cow-pox matter was accompanied by an eruption of pustules, due to smallpox being present as well as cow-pox, when appealed to as showing immunity against smallpox (by the test either of exposure to contagion or of inoculation), furnished false evidence as to that immunity being due to cow-pox; it might have been due to the accompanying smallpox. So far then as the adoption of vaccination was assisted by cases of this description, it may be held to have rested on erroneous data. But the test of immunity, whether that of exposure to natural contagion or that of inoculation, was applied not only to the cases with eruption but to the cases without it, not only to cases where Woodville's lymph was used but to cases where lymph of other origin was used. We have no accurate records enabling us to distinguish these latter cases as regards immunity. Marshall makes a general statement that he found no difference between the cases inoculated with the lymph which we otherwise learn came originally from Woodville's case of Bumpus, and the cases in which the lymph employed was obtained from Clark's farm ; but, though we learn from many scattered records that cases vaccinated by different persons showed immunity, we possess.