Human and animal variolae : a study in comparative pathology / by George Fleming.

  • Fleming, George, 1833-1901.
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Human and animal variolae : a study in comparative pathology / by George Fleming. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    control experiments were resorted to, as with those of the Lyons and Turin Commissions, and what may have looked like Vaccinia was accepted as Vaccinia. In no other way can I account for what must now be considered a grave error. In insisting upon the correctness of this view, and urging its importance not only with regard to comparative pathology, but also the prevention of an odious and destructive human plague, I am well aware that I am placing myself in an attitude of antagonism to very high and estimable medical authorities in this country ; and especially Sir Thomas Watson, who, in a paper in the Nineteenth Century (which paper has been recently republished in a small volume), says, “ The truth is, that the vaccine disease is really Small-pox rendered mild by passing through the system of the cow; the great object of inoculating the Small-pox was to produce a benignant form of the disease by diminishing the number of its pustules.” I have shown that there is no relationship between the prevalence of Cow- pox and Small-pox, and that the one may, and does, prevail in localities, and at times when and where the other is not seen. In Denmark, for example, Small-pox is all but extinct, and yet cases of Cow-pox are far from rare. The difficulty experienced by those who believe in the unity of the two diseases, in accounting for this circumstance, is attempted to be got over in various ways. Bollinger, for instance (Sammburg. Klinischer Vortrag, No. 116), thinks that Cow-pox owes its existence sometimes to humanised vac¬ cine—the most extended and extensive of all the forms of variolic contagium, he says. “We must look,” he writes, “to humanised vaccine as the source from which the greater number of cases of bovine Variola have their origin.” A few instances are certainly recorded in which, apparently, accidental in¬ fection of cows by recently-vaccinated people has occurred. Osiander alludes to the case of a cow which was so infected by a boy who had been vaccinated a short time previously. In the Prussian veterinary reports on contagious diseases among animals for 1870-71, Koch reports that the vac¬ cination of the people on a farm occasioned the infection of the cows with Cow-pox, and in the same reports for the following year an outbreak of Vac¬ cinia was announced as having taken place among a lot of cows, consequent on the re-vaccination of three dairymaids. In three weeks the disease appeared, and gradually extended, so that in fourteen days, of twenty-six cows, only three escaped. The majority of the cows had only a few pustules upon the teats, but others had a number upon the teats and udder. In the same reports for 1874-75, Damman describes an outbreak of Vaccinia in several sheds in the Rugen Kries, while in the district many children had been vaccinated, and the vaccine vesicles were fully developed. Schneider informed Bollinger that in 1876, after several children in a certain locality had been vaccinated, four cows in two sheds in the same place became affected with Cow-pox ; two dairymaids became accidentally inoculated from these, and one of the women communicated the infection to her children, who had not been vaccinated. Reiter also told Bollinger that in cowsheds where he vaccinated cows, several non-vaccinated animals showed the