effect the purpose professed, nor yet that it will produce no injurious results. The public vaccinators are told in their Orders that they must hold themselves responsible for the quality of the lymph they use. But where is there one who would think of doing so when he can but know that the operation is accompanied with risk? Therefore what right have they to interfere with healthy children? (Cheers.) Remember, the Order is most distinct to public vaccinators that it is only healthy children that are to be diseased. (“Shame.”)
History of the Movement.
Thomas Carlyle has told us “that no error is fully confuted until you have seen not only that it is an error, but also how it became one.” It will, therefore, be as well for me to take you over something of the history of the movement, and give an idea how this gigantic superstition and this monstrous fraud of vaccination came to be enforced, and came to be adopted by the profession and the public. The “discoverer” so-called was, as you all know, a man by the name of Edward Jenner, who lived at Berkeley, in your own county. He was not, however, the discoverer. The whole thing was a superstition of the Gloucestershire dairymaids years before Jenner was born—(laughter)—and the very experiment, so-called, that he performed had been performed by an old farmer named Benjamin Jesty twenty years previously. Now this man Jenner had never passed a medical examination in his life. He belonged to the good old times when George III was King—(laughter)—when medical examinations were not compulsory. Jenner looked upon the whole thing as a superfluity, and he hung up “Surgeon, apothecary,” over his door without any of the qualifications that warranted the assumption. It was not until twenty years after he was in practice that he thought it advisable to get a few letters after his name. Consequently he then communicated with a Scotch University and obtained the degree of Doctor of Medicine for the sum of £15 and nothing more. (Laughter.) It is true that a little while before he had obtained a Fellowship of the Royal Society, but his latest biographer and apologist, Dr. Norman Moore, had to confess that it was
OBTAINED BY LITTLE LESS THAN A FRAUD.
It was obtained by writing a most extraordinary paper about a fabulous cuckoo, for the most part composed of arrant absurdities and imaginative freaks such as no ornithologist of the present day would pay the slightest heed to. A few years after this, rather dissatisfied with the only medical qualification he had obtained, Jenner communicated with the University of Oxford and asked them to grant him their honorary degree of M.D., and after a good many fruitless attempts he got it. Then he sent to the Royal College of Physicians in London to get their diploma, and even presented his Oxford degree as an argument in his favour. But they considered he had had quite enough on the cheap already, and told him distinctly that until he passed the usual examinations they were not going to give him any more. This was a sufficient check in Jenner’s case, and he settled down quietly without any diploma of physician.
