The political side of the vaccination system; an essay read at the Birmingham Anti-Vaccination conference, October 26th, 1874 / by F.W. Newman.

  • Newman, F. W. (Francis William), 1805-1897.
Date:
[1874?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The political side of the vaccination system; an essay read at the Birmingham Anti-Vaccination conference, October 26th, 1874 / by F.W. Newman. 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.

    6/16 (page 4)
    Through our frequent ignorances injustice is often enacted without wrong intention. It is now a received principle in Christendom, that by way of safeguard against this result,—or rather, to lessen the probability of a legislature thus erring,—a fu-st indispensable condition of all legislation is, that it be exempt from arbitrary favouritism. As an obvious illustration ; if, in the belief that public danger requires it, men are violently forced into the army, it is a most reprehensible tyranny to exempt rich families and im- pose the violence on the poor only. Neither rank nor locality should be favoiu-ed : unfitness, or pre-occupation in higher public duty, is alone a right ground of exemption. Put another case. If a contagious disease is abroad, as plague, or an infectious leprosy for the public safety it may be justifiable to impose special restrictions on those innocent unfortunates, who are centres of infection ; but in that case it is unendurably unjust to exempt some of them from the law, who are as infectious as all the rest. If the legislators exempt themselves, when any of them are as certainly infectious as those whom they imprison or otherwise vex for the supposed public necessity, we can hardly be too severe in branding such dastardly conduct. Forsooth, a poor man, who is unable to defend himself, is to be made an object of the law's severity, wliile a legislator, who is as much a difFuser of pestilence as the poor man, is to be left at large and unmolested ! If such a case occur, it is either vile, malicious tyranny, and the talk about pestilence is a false pretence, or the legislators are so over-worked as not to know what they are about, being perhaps blind pupils of the blind, submissive to a clique of fantastic and ambitious phy- sicians. On either hypothesis, common sense will say that resist- ance to the law is a patriotic duty. Now, it is FIRST on this head that I confidently assail our exist- ing laws of Compidsory Vaccination,—falsely so called. It is confessed by Vaccinators that Jenner was totally mistaken in supposing that no vaccinated person can take the small-pox. Though many of them shamefully declare to the ignorant that vac- cination is an easy and sure preventive, the leaders of vaccination flatly contradict them by placarding every village (at Government expense, no doubt) with earnest recommendation to be re-vaccinated, whenever small-pox is rife ; and that, without any limit assigned of the time which the force of vaccination may be supposed to last. They dare not assert that it lasts seven years, nor iive years. li you press them, they have to confess that in a bad season they cannot guarantee that a person vaccinated the previous year is