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REAL AND SHAM VACCINATION.

 

eal vaccination is a rarely failing preventive of small-pox. This is a cardinal truth, of which the public always requires to be reminded; but particularly at present, when the returns of the Registrar-General proclaim that the loathsome and fatal pestilence is rife among us. There is another fact of still greater importance which ought to be impressed upon the public, and acted upon by the administrators of our sanitary affairs: it is this, that the community is served to a very large extent with a sham, in place of a real, prophylactic.

By the Public Health Act of last session, the strictly medical duties of the Board of Health—insignificant and few in number—were permanently transferred to the Privy Council. Very comprehensive powers were at the same time given to the Privy Council in respect of vaccination, and other matters of sanitary police. It was authorised to issue regulations for securing the due qualification of vaccinators contracted with by guardians, and for enforcing their efficient action. Provision was made in the same statute for punishing those who evaded or neglected the provisions of the compulsory vaccination act. The Privy Council, acting under these large powers, have just issued important and seasonable ordinances. From their publication, if they be vigorously carried out, and duly amended from time to time according to public emergencies and legislative changes, will date a new and a better era in British State Medicine. Henceforth, as we read the rules, vaccination is to be universally enforced—not the sham, but the reality.

Before we recite the substance of the new rules, it may be useful to give, in a few simple sentences, an account of what vaccination is, and of the epithets “real” and “sham” as applied to it. Real vaccination is the communication of small-pox in a modified and harmless form. The morbid poison, by passing through the system of the cow, becomes so changed as to produce an affection remarkably mitigated in severity, and quite altered in its phenomena. The disease, however, retains the character of generally exhausting in one attack the susceptibility of the constitution to receive it: and therefore the cow-pox, that is to say, the modified small-pox communicated by vaccination, equally preserves, permanently, or for a long period, from a subsequent affection either by cow-pox or small-pox. This is now universally recognised as the true pathological explanation of the protective power of vaccination. The doctrine has been abundantly proved by reliable experiments performed in this and other countries. Four names are pre-eminent in this interesting inquiry; viz., Gassner, Thiele, Ceely, and Badcock.

Although Jenner used the term variolæ vaccinæ, or “small-pox of the cow,” there is no evidence that he comprehended the doctrine in the precise form in which it has been established by the experimenters just named. He had, however, undoubtedly arrived very nearly, if not altogether, at the exact truth; for Baron, his admirable biographer, says of him, that “he always considered small-pox and cow-pox as modifications of the same distemper, believing that in employing vaccine lymph we only make use of means to impregnate the constitution with the disease in its mildest, instead of propagating it in its virulent and contagious form, as is done when small-pox is inoculated.” The history of the principal researches by which the identity of small-pox and cow-pox has been placed beyond doubt, is thus succinctly and impartially given by Mr. Simon. He says: “As early as 1801, Dr. Gassner, of Günzburg, after ten unsuccessful trials of small-pox inoculation on cows, had at last succeeded in infecting one; and with matter taken from the resulting vesicles of this animal had inoculated four children; who thereupon had developed in them the ordinary phenomena of vaccination, furnishing vesicles from the lymph of which seventeen other children had been similarly infected. Dr. Gassner’s discovery remained for forty years almost entirely unknown or unbelieved; but at length, Dr. Thiele of Kasan repeated the experiment with equal success, and rendered it still more complete, by supplying a necessary test of the nature of the process. He showed, namely, that the lymph engendered in these experiments possessed not only the local infectiousness, but likewise the protective powers of cow-pox; that persons recently inoculated with it might with impunity be let sleep in one bed with small-pox patients, or be inoculated with small-pox virus; that, in short, it was true protective vaccination which they had undergone. The result of these investigations was not published before the beginning of 1839; at which time other experiments of the same kind, independent and equally conclusive, were being conducted in this country by Mr. Ceely, of Aylesbury, of whom I am glad to repeat the praise expressed by a high authority, that he ‘has done more to advance the natural history of vaccination than any other individual since the days of