Vaccination useless and injurious : a lecture delivered in the Temperance Hall, Sheffield, on February 11th, 1869 / by Geo. Sexton.

  • Sexton, George, active 1857-1887.
Date:
[1869]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vaccination useless and injurious : a lecture delivered in the Temperance Hall, Sheffield, on February 11th, 1869 / by Geo. Sexton. 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.

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    lov« for our own children, but to be positively actuated by a desire that a filthy and fatal disease should spread its ravages through the length and breadth of the land—the land, too, in which we ourselves reside, and whose dangers and disasters we must therefore share. Now, what wretched nonsense is this ! Let me tell these scandal-mongering scribes that we have as much love for our children as they have for theirs, are as much as themselves concerned for the good of the state, and are equally desirous of seeing the whole of society free as well from small-pox as from all other diseases. It is because we do not believe vaccination to have any effect in lessening the ravages of this malady that we regard it as useless ; and because we are convinced that it tends to spread and perpetuate other very dreadful diseases that we give it our un- qualified opposition. It never seems to occur to these people that we can be ' actuated by any other feeling than a wrong one ; whilst their own motives are, of course, of the very purest character. We are crotchety ; they are rational. We are prejudiced; they most impartial. Our views are silly whimsicalities ; theirs profound breatliings of wisdom, before whose brilliant light Solon or Lycurgus would have to extinguish their small lamps. ()nly to-day I was noticing a paragraph that is going the round of the papers, copied from the British Medical Journal, which winds up as follows:—We think that, with the overwhelming proof before us of the efficacy of vaccination, it is quite time that some means should be devist^d for putting a stop to the injurious agitation which is being carried on by those mischievous and ignorant persons who style themselves the Anti-Vaccination League. The overwhelming proof of the efficacy of vaccination is exactly what we have not before us, and what we challenge the whole British Medical Asso- ciation, in whose organ this statement appears, to produce. The moment these so-called proofs are examined, they fade away into thin au*, and in their place we can discover nothing but unreasoning dogma, and a tyrannical Act of Parliament. Overwhelming proofs did you say, Mr. Editor? Yes, there are proofs overwhelming enough, but not of the efficacy of the filthy operation in question; but that vaccination is no protection whatever against the disease for which it is said to be an infallible prophylactic; and that it has tended most terribly to increase other and even more fearful maladies. We are mischievous and ignorant. Of course! How could we be otherwise since we refuse to be crushed beneath the wheels of this medical Juggerna,ut ? Are we to be allowed to exercise no private judgment in a matter that concerns the health of our famihes, without being called ignorant; and no free speech to express the honest convictions at which we have arrived, after careful examination, but we must be branded as mischievous ? We had thought that, at least in medical theories, society had advanced beyond the assumption of infallibility by a clique, and the demand that all persons should give their assent to the ipse dixit of any man or set of men ; but we find we are mistaken. So, as we dare to think and speak for ourselves, we must be put down. Some scheme must be devised for putting a stop to us ; we must have our mouths closed as u ell as our hands tied. Kind and considerate Editor. Are you not content with sending your emissaries into our houses, invading the sanctity of our private homes, and dragging our children away to be inoculated with a filthy and poisonous virus, but you must want to place the gag in our mouths, so that we may not be able even to protest against the pleasant operation? The days when an Englishman's house was his castle, were before the Compulsory Vaccination Act; and they who smg Britons never shall be slaves, have surely not made the acquaintance of the Editor of the British Medical Journal. But we don't intend to be put down, nor to have our mouths stopped. On the contrary, we mean to repeal this unjust and iniquitous Act of Parliament. Thousands of earnest men in the country have made up their minds on thi^