Failure of vaccination. : An enquiry into the causes of failure in vaccination, with suggestions relative to the means of ensuring its full protective influence. / By Charles Severn.

  • Severn, Charles.
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Failure of vaccination. : An enquiry into the causes of failure in vaccination, with suggestions relative to the means of ensuring its full protective influence. / By Charles Severn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    produces the same destructive ravages, except when modified by the influence of vaccination,— vaccination itself has undergone no change; forgetting that small-pox remains in the human constitution wherein it is naturally developed, it therefore has undergone no alteration, and lost none of its virulence in the last 200 years. If small-pox were communicated to another spe¬ cies of animal, and, after being transmitted through a series of 70,000 of them in descent, were then found to possess all its original pro¬ perties, and manifest precisely the same appear¬ ances, the cases would then be similar, and the inference just; but as the two diseases exist at present, none can be more perfectly distinct in their origin, nature, circumstances, and peculi¬ arities, and, consequently, no just inference can possibly be drawn from a comparison between them. To render the circumstances analogous it would he necessary to inoculate 70,000 cows in descent with small-pox matter, and to wait forty years for the result—the cases will then be parallel, but at present there is no analogy between them whatever. Indeed all analogy seems to be in favour of the progressive deteri-