lapse of some little time, testing its protective power by inoculating smallpox, the failure of which to produce the dread disease affording the final proof of the value of vaccination. From the lymph taken from this boy’s arm, he drew and put in circulation the new life-protecting agent. All the early vaccinations were made from him, and indeed there can be no doubt that a large quantity of the vaccine matter at present in existence took its rise from the ferment promoted in the boy’s blood by the original operation performed in 1796. In justice, a bas-relief of this bold youth should have been placed on the basement of the statue to Jenner, as a reward for allowing so doubtful an experiment to have been tried upon his own person for the good of mankind.
Although he suspected the fact, it was not certainly known to Jenner, that smallpox and cowpox were the same thing; or rather, that the latter is only a modified form of the former, its venom having been destroyed by passing through the body of the cow.
In the year 1801, Dr. Gassner, of Gunzburg, after many trials, managed to inoculate smallpox into a cow, and from the lymph thereby produced, he vaccinated four children successfully; and forty years afterwards Dr. Thiele, of Kasan, not only repeated this experiment, but carried it a step farther by placing the vaccinated children in the same bed with smallpox patients, and even had them vaccinated with smallpox matter, with perfect impunity. Since that time, Mr. Badcock, of Brighton, has put this discovery to a highly practical use, inasmuch as by inoculating cows with smallpox he has from time to time been enabled to put large quantities of vaccine lymph into circulation,—a very important matter, as there can be little doubt that the old stock has become deteriorated, and has ceased to be so protective in its influence as heretofore.
Dr. Jenner, we know, put upon record “his full and perfect confidence that it (the protective influence of vaccine lymph) might be continued in perpetuity by inoculating from one human being to another in the same way as smallpox,” and this opinion the Vaccine Board has very lately endorsed. Theoretically this is perhaps true; nevertheless, there is good reason to doubt the fact practically, as operators sometimes take their lymph from imperfectly formed or overripe vesicles, a known cause of enfeeblement of its action. It is well known, at all events, that fresh lymph from the cow “takes better,” gives signs of producing more constitutional disturbance, and forms a truer Jennerian vesicle, the great proof of successful vaccination, than is produced by lymph which has passed through a long descent from the cow. As this is a statement which especially refers to the comparatively deficient quality of the general current lymph of the country, it is highly important, and, as Mr. Simon very justly says, it points “to the necessity for a periodical renewal of lymph.”
It is pretty generally allowed, however, that even when vaccination is performed on children in the most perfect manner with the purest lymph, there is a necessity for a re-vaccination about the age of puberty; hence the rush we see for a re-assurance against infection during the existing epidemic.
We have no longer, it is true, the absurd charges against vaccination so strongly urged at the commencement of the present century. Boys are no longer instanced who, in consequence of the influence of the “beastly vaccine matter” introduced into their blood, have been “heard to bellow;” we hear no more of patches of hair resembling cow’s hair; horns have ceased to grow from children’s foreheads; but the cry is not altogether dead, and we hear from time to time of eruptions over the head and body following the lancet’s puncture.
These are mild charges, faults which the great discovery can afford to have placed to its debit, even when untruly made; but in France a far graver offence has been of late imputed to vaccination, and one which has attracted the attention of all the scientific professors of medicine. It was asserted that vaccination was chargeable with inoculating a loathsome disease into the blood. The evidence given was pretty conclusive, and for a time Jenner’s discovery seemed to be placed once more upon its trial. The discussion which ensued did not reach the public ear, but it was fierce enough to shake the faith for a moment of good men and true. At last, however, to the intense relief of medicine, it was ascertained that although the disease had undoubtedly been transmitted with the vaccine lymph, yet it had not been transmitted in it,—an unskilful vaccinator having removed some of the blood as well as the lymph of an infected child, the consequence was that the next child vaccinated received a double infection. This was no charge against vaccination, but only against the manner in which the act had been performed. As there is but one blood disease that can possibly be thus inoculated, and that but under the rarest possible combination of circumstances which may never recur again, all fear under this head may be said to have gone by.
Thus the last chance has passed away of justifying the extraordinary epitaph erected in the church of Hood-lane, City, by the sister of Mr. Birch, one of the surgeons of St. Thomas’s Hospital, which commemorates that “the practice of cow-poxing, which first became general in his day, undaunted by the overwhelming influence of power and prejudice, and the voice of nations, he uniformly and until death (1815) perseveringly opposed.” Mankind are fond enough of proclaiming themselves true prophets after the event, but perhaps this is the first instance on record in which a man’s friends have been so proud of his having been a false prophet as to proclaim the fact in enduring stone.
But, it will be asked, how was it, vaccination having been so thoroughly proved an absolute protection against smallpox, that we meet persons in crowded places with the eruption still full upon them, and that more people died in the months of March and April last, from a disease we had fondly imagined banished, than in any two previous years? Nay, so severe has it become, especially among children, that there has been a regular