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164
DR. JENNER—VACCINATION
[Chap. v

subject. In London he was so fortunate as to study under John Hunter, to whom he communicated his views. The advice of the anatomist was thoroughly characteristic: "Don't think, but try; be patient, be accurate." Jenner's courage was supported by the advice, which conveyed to him the true art of philosophical investigation. He went back to the country to practise his profession and make observations and experiments, which he continued to pursue for a period of twenty years. His faith in his discovery was so implicit that he vaccinated his own son on three several occasions. At length he published his views in a quarto of about seventy pages, in which he gave the details of twenty-three cases of successful vaccination of individuals, to whom it was found afterwards impossible to communicate the small-pox either by contagion or inoculation. It was in 1798 that this treatise was published; though he had been working out his ideas since the year 1775, when they had begun to assume a definite form.

How was the discovery received? First with indifference, then with active hostility. Jenner proceeded to London to exhibit to the profession the process of vaccination and its results; but not a single medical man could be induced to make trial of it, and after fruitlessly waiting for nearly three months, he returned to his native village. He was even caricatured and abused for his attempt to "bestialize" his species by the introduction into their systems of diseased matter from the cow's udder. Vaccination was denounced from the pulpit as "diabolical." It was averred that vaccinated children became "ox-faced," that abscesses broke out to "indicate sprouting horns,"