official world down to the appointment of the last Royal Commission.
I next give the reasons why doctors are not the best judges of the effects, beneficial or otherwise, of vaccination, and follow this by proofs of a special capacity for mis-stating facts in reference to this question which has characterized them from the beginning of the century down to our day. The successive annual reports of the National Vaccine Establishment give figures of the deaths by small-pox in London in the eighteenth century, which go on increasing like Falstaffs men in buckram; while in our own time the late Dr. W. B. Carpenter, Mr. Ernest Hart, the National Health Society, and the Local Government Board make statements or give figures which are absurdly and demonstrably incorrect (pp. 13–18).[1]
I then show the existence of so unreasoning a belief
- ↑ To the cases I have already given I may now add two others, because they illustrate the recklessness in making assertions in favour of vaccination which scorns the slightest attempt at verification. In the first edition of Mr. Ernest Hart's Truth about Vaccination (p. 4), it is stated, on the authority of a member of Parliament recently returned from Brazil, that during an epidemic of small-pox at the town of Ceara in 1878 and 1879, out of a population not exceeding 70,000 persons there were 40,000 deaths from small-pox. This was repeated by Dr. Carpenter during a debate in London, in February, 1882, and only when its accuracy was called in question was it ascertained that at the time referred to the population of Ceara was only about 20,000, yet the M.P. had stated—with detailed circumstance—that "in one cemetery, from August 1878, to June 1879 27,064 persons who had died of small-pox had been buried." Gazetteers are not very recondite works, and it would have been not difficult to test some portion of this monstrous statement before printing it. Jenner's biographer tells us that he had a horror of arithmetical calculations, due to a natural incapacity, which quality appears to be a special characteristic of those who advocate vaccination, as the examples I have given sufficiently prove.
Another glaring case of official misrepresentation occurred in the Royal Commission itself, but was fortunately exposed later on. A medical officer of the Local Government Board gave evidence (First Report, Q. 994) that the Board in 1886 "took some pains to get the figures as to the steamship Preussen" on which small-
