Report of the executive committee for the period from July 1st, 1903, to December 31st, 1904 / The Jenner Society.

  • Edward Jenner Society.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Report of the executive committee for the period from July 1st, 1903, to December 31st, 1904 / The Jenner Society. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    THE period covered by the present Report and the accom- panying Financial Statement has been, for the Jenner Society, one of quiet work, pending the outcome of the effort, initiated in 1903, to induce Parliament to legislate on the vaccination question. For on the result of this effort depended the course which the Executive Committee of the Jenner Society would have considered it desirable to take in regard to the Society’s future course. Unfortunately the effort has not been successful. The Government, probably from pressure of more imperious claims, have not seen their way to take up the question of vaccination in any form, or even to/ give special facilities for passing a Re-vaccination Bill, though the Minister who would probably have been charged with the conduct of the Bill through the House of Commons expressed his sympathy generally with its objects. The efforts which Mrs. Garrett Anderson personally has made to promote this Bill are beyond all praise, and the support she has received shows, what could hardly have been doubted, that, so far as public opinion is represented by the better educated section of the community, there are not two opinions, outside of those who object to vaccination altogether, as to the necessity for promoting general re-vaccination, about the age of twelve years, if we are to escape recurring epidemics of small-pox throughout the kingdom. But. in political matters, intellecual sympathy is no guarantee of political influence. And so long as the Anti- Vaccination League is able, by the substantial contributions of its supporters, to carry on its misleading propaganda, and so long, also, as the personal enthusiasm of its more active members in various local centres continues to intimidate candidates for Parliamentary honours by an assumption of political influence which they do not possess, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to bring Parliament up to the point of facing this unquestionably complicated and difficult problem. Moreover, it is useless for the advocates of vaccination to conceal from themselves the fact that the great mass of the working classes, with whom the voting power of the constituencies resides, exhibit at best a general indifference to its value, whilst they are often actually hostile, to it; and this, too,curiously enough, even when small-pox is in their own immediate neighbourhood. For such a state of things there is only one