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As in Sweden at large, so in Stockholm, a fall in

On the other hand, here are eighteen years small-pox had set in, and was continued into the when the deaths were over a thousand:

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The death-rate from small-pox, which fell to 212 per million in 1841-50, rose to 862 per million in 1851-60, to 867 per million in 1861-70, and, owing to the epidemic of 1873-74, the worst in Sweden since 1801, the last decade, 1871-80, will exhibit a much higher average.

In presence of these statistics, it is fair to repeat the inquiry, "Why was small-pox declining before vaccination was introduced; and why has small-pox revived and increased in 'the best vaccinated country in Europe '?"

Again, too, we must call attention afresh to the fact of the irrelevant influence of small-pox upon the national mortality. Mr. P. A. Siljeström has published a diagram of the course of mortality in Sweden from 1774 to 1878, with the part smallpox has played in that mortality, from which it is manifest (to all who choose to use their own eyes) that the action of small-pox as a destroyer of life has been wildly exaggerated. Bad years of small-pox are not years of a high death-rate, nor are years with little small-pox years of a low death-rate. When small-pox is prevalent, it appears to replace other forms of disease, and when not prevalent, to be replaced by diseases of greater fatality. Wherefore, argues Mr. Siljeström:

"Of what use is it to the public that a smaller number of citizens die annually from small-pox (supposing that this result is brought about by vaccination), if an equally large number, nevertheless, die from other diseases? We can see no further advantage in it than there would be in a battle, if none of the men fell before the fire of artillery, but all the more died from the fire of the line. To the individual it may possibly be more agreeable to die of any other disease than small-pox, and it ought, therefore, to be allowed to everyone to save himself, through vaccination, or any other lawful means, from an eventuality which he fears; but this cannot possibly, in itself, be regarded as the business of the State."

Sweden is a large country, and its diseases must be subject to many local variations; but Stockholm, representing a compact population, exhibits much the same phenomena. In some years of last century the city was severely afflicted with small-pox, as the deaths in these years show :1778 639 1783 714

1784 411 1787 414

1795 447 1800 703

* "Tables relative to Vaccination in Sweden, 1774-1778." London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination. Price 2d.

new century, until years appeared without a single death; for which vaccination had the credit, and the disease was proclaimed "stamped out," none dreaming of reverses ahead. By-andby it began to revive, and deaths were thus registered :

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And then came the dreadful epidemic of 1874, when 1,191 perished, and 317 in 1875.

Thus, in two years, 1,382 perished in a population of 150,000-a death-rate of 7,916 per million -against 2,430 per million in London during the memorable epidemic of 1871, the severest outbreak of small-pox in the century in "the best and most-vaccinated population in Europe!"

Apparently strong, the case for vaccination in Sweden altogether disappears under examination; and by Mr. P. A. Siljeström the examination has heen conducted with a precision, a thoroughness, and a judicial temper that leave nothing to desire. His treatise was translated into English by Miss Frederica Rowan, and published in 1875, under the title of "The Vaccination Question: an Essay towards determining the Boundaries within which a Scientific Theory may rightfully claim to have effect given to it by Legislation;" and a skilful abridgment was produced by Professor F. W. Newman; but the original, which extends to no more than 104 pages, should be studied by all who are seriously interested in the vaccination question. Sweden, through the possession of a long series of vital statistics, offers special facilities for a comprehensive study of the phenomena of small-pox, and in Mr. Siljeström's essay there is science and philosophy, instead of the inadequate and catchpenny stuff current in this country "truth about vaccination."

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In Finland, the story of vaccination is much the same as in Sweden, with the difference that there was no natural subsidence of small-pox to be placed to its credit. Wherefore, as concerns Finland, it is the habit of vaccinators to preserve a discreet silence, the facts not tending to edification in the Jennerian faith.

Vaccination was introduced to Denmark at the same time as Sweden, and was made compulsory in 1810. As in Sweden, small-pox was falling off, and, as in Sweden, the vaccinators were loud in their outcry over their success; but their claim was absurd. The population of Denmark in 1801 was 925,680, and up to 1810 no more than 118,782 persons had been vaccinated, whilst the births in the same period were 283,905. It was, therefore, assumed that the vaccination of less than a tenth of the population in eight years bad reduced and extinguished small-pox among the unvaccinated nine-tenths! It is clear that where there is a disposition to believe, anything may pass for credible.

Subsequently to 1801 there was little small-pox in Copenhagen, and from 1811 to 1823 not a

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Iceland, as a dependency of Denmark, is often cited as evidence for the virtue of vaccination. It is admitted that the Icelanders have suffered severely from epidemics of small-pox; but it is to be remembered that the disease was epidemic, and not endemic, and that the outbreaks were often separated by many years. That similar seasons of exemption should have been enjoyed after the introduction of vaccination need not surprise us, nor be attributed to vaccination. Let us wait and see. The inhabitants of Copenhagen and Stockholm were convinced that they too were delivered from small-pox, but in due time they discovered that they had been dwelling in a fool's paradise. Moreover, it is absolutely silly to isolate small-pox as a cause of death, and disregard its correlation with other causes. It may be more offensive to die of small-pox than of some other forms of zymotic disease, but that seems the only reason for considering it specially objectionablea reason that would not, we think, have much force with Icelanders.

From the preceding details, we see how far vaccination in Scandinavia was from answering the claim made on its behalf by Jenner and his adherents. He, it is true, died in 1823, before the more emphatic refutations of his fancy had come forth; but, as said, it is questionable whether he ever realised that the names of countries stood for millions of men, women, and children whose inoculation was a work of organised labour, only accomplished in the process of years. His various boasts, therefore, of vaccinated nations and exterminated small-pox are to be taken as proofs of defective arithmetical capacity and of that rare scientific imagination that runs with matter of fact and possibility.

EX CATHEDRÂ.

Mr. Young received the following note :

"Horfield Rectory, Bristol, Nov. 8, 1881. "The Rev. F. Bingham returns the post-card, with its untrue and false statements as to the liability of deaths amongst the unvaccinated from small-pox. It is a pity Mr. Young and those who have joined his Society have not the capability of understanding the immense service rendered to humanity by the practice of vaccination. Not one nurse in any small-pox hospital, who was revaccinated on entering on her duties, suffered from the disease."

It is odd that any one should take the trouble to address Mr. Young in these terms; for it is because he and his associates know that what Mr. Bingham asserts is untrue, that they labour to expose the inutility and the dangers of vacci nation.

LORD CLIFTON

ON REPEATED PROSECUTIONS. THOUGH I have had a very brisk little skirmish with the Home Office, and English and Irish Local Government Boards, about sec. 31 of the English Vaccination Act, which is sec. 147 of the Irish Public Health Act, I am now convinced that the law is against us. Perhaps you will insert this admission of mine in your next INQUIRER, for the question which I got Mr. Burt to put in the House, and my own remarks on sec. 31, have drawn much attention from anti-vaccinists in many parts of the country. Mr. L. Atherley Jones has drawn up a very complete opinion on the points raised, and he is convinced that the "continuous default" and the "repeated offence under the Act of 1867 are one and the same thing, default after a penalty constituting a fresh. offence in the eye of the law, however late the guardians may be in noticing it. It seems it is not open for the parent to say, after paying a penalty for a child, that he continues to neglect the law, and yet does not commit a fresh offence. The law says, "If you admit neglect, you admit a fresh offence." Although the intention of the parent not to vaccinate may be continuous, it seems that each penalty constitutes a new epoch, after which the non-compliant parent reappears as "guilty of a fresh offence."

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But I do not advise anti-vaccinists to despair on finding the letter of the law so firm against them. Literal law and natural equity are two very opposite things. The defeat of every attempt to circumvent the letter of the Act of 1867 ought to point out to us a new and more equitable line of defence.

The Act of 1853 authorised one full penalty and costs to an anti-vaccinist father for every babe with which his good lady might present him! Was this Arcadian simplicity and Utopian justice ?

Are we to say, comparing the periods before and after 1867:-"Quam bene vivefant Saturno rege priusquam ?"

Surely we ought to substitute for the miserable compromise hitherto proposed under the names of Candlish, Forster, Pease, and Dodson, the more equitable proposition that the sacred family principle be respected, and that no parent, however full his quiver may be, shall be forced against his conscience to send a single one of his children "through the fire to Moloch!" The key to the position is the words "neglect" and "offence" in sec. 29. Parental care and parental neglect are at opposite poles.

If anti-vaccinists throughout the country will present the magistrates with affidavits or affirmations of their determination to protect their children, the Act, which is based on a conception of stupid neglect, not of deliberate protection, will become a dead letter.

Cobham Hall,

Nov. 20, 1881.

CLIFTON.

ENGLISH ARMY REGULATION.-When recruits are vaccinated, they are allowed a week off duty to recover from the effects. Some require a much longer vacation.

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THIS is not a caricature. It is a serious picture published in furtherance of the trade in CowPox. It represents Dr. Stephen C. Martin, of Brookline, Massachusetts, extracting virus from the posteriors of a diseased heifer for the inoculation of credulous and ignorant Americans.

This infamous trade is pursued under cover of the authority of Edward Jenner, but falsely; for Jenner taught nothing more distinctly than that Cow-Pox was of no avail whatever against Small-Pox.

The case stands thus

Jenner lived last century at Berkeley, in Gloucestershire; and the dairy-maids in that neighbourhood believed that if they caught Cow-Pox in milking cows, they could never afterwards catch Small-Pox.

Jenner, when a young man, was inclined to accept the dairymaids' faith; but when he discussed it with his medical acquaintance they ridiculed it.

They said, "We know that such is the dairymaids' faith, but it is untrue; for we know dairy-maids who have had Cow-Pox, and after

wards had small-pox, in spite of their CowPox."*

Jenner was convinced, and said no more about Cow-Pox.

Still, he hankered after the notion that some sort of animal pox might be brought into use as a mild substitute for the small-pox then employed for inoculation.

He tried Swine-Pox on his son, and to all appearance it answered; for when he inoculated him repeatedly with small-pox, it did not take -a proof, so he thought, that the child was fortified against small-pox.t

But somehow he was not satisfied with SwinePox. He wanted to make his fortune, and probably feared that the public would not hear of anything so nasty as Swine-Pox.

Toward middle-life he had what he conceived to be a happy thought. Cow-Pox as Cow-Pox he had dismissed as impracticable; but there was a variety of Cow-Pox which he resolved to recommend.

* Baron's "Life of Jenner," vol. i., pp. 48 and 125. t Ib., vol. i., p. 130.

Cows in Gloucestershire were milked by men as well as by women; and men would sometimes milk cows with hands foul from dressing the heels of horses afflicted with what was called grease. With this grease the dirty fellows poisoned the cows' teats, and the pox which followed was pronounced by Jenner to have all the virtue against Small-Pox which the dairymaids claimed for Cow-Pox.

According to Jenner, then, the dairy-maids were right, and they were wrong. They were right when the pox they caught was derived from the horse through the cow; they were wrong when the pox they caught originated on the cow without the horse.

Thus Jenner discriminated a double poxCow-Pox of no efficacy against Small-Pox, and Horse-Grease Cow-Pox of infallible efficacy.

Further, in this connection, it is to be observed, that farriers believed that when they got poisoned in handling horses' greasy heels, they too, like the dairy-maids, were safe from Small-Pox.*

It is not therefore for Cow-Pox, but for HorseGrease Cow-Pox that Jenner is answerable. In Cow-Pox he had not, and could have no faith.

One day taking his nephew into a stable, and showing him a horse with greasy heels, he said, "There is the source of Small-Pox."+

Not from the cow, therefore, but from the horse did Jenner derive that milder pox, which he commended to the world as a substitute for small-pox inoculation, and as a life-long defence from Small-Pox.

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Nor did Jenner always care to pass the virus from the horse through the cow. He used it neat. Having received a supply of horse-grease from a pupil, he thanked him for it as the true and genuine life-preserving fluid." Numerous children were inoculated with horse-grease, and the virus conveyed from their arms to other arms; and as this virus has passed into general circulation, there must be millions equinated, who believe themselves vaccinated.

We have entered into these details to prove beyond possibility of dispute that to claim Jenner's sanction for Cow-Pox is deliberate imposture. What Jenner stands accountable for is

HORSE-GREASE COW-Pox,

and subsequently for Horse-Grease neat, or, as his followers more exactly explain, for HorsePox.

* Jenner's "Inquiry," pp. 26, 27.

+ Baron's "Life of Jenner," vol. i., p. 135. Ib., vol. ii., p. 227.

It is notorious that Vaccination is falling into discredit. It is admitted on all sides that it does not prevent Small-Pox as originally asserted. Hence has arisen the cry for Re-Vaccination. To be effective, it is said, Vaccination must be repeated: some say every seven years; others every three years; and others annually: presently it will be prescribed twice a year, in spring and autumn.

It is said that through innumerable transmissions from arm to arm, the virus has deteriorated, and worse than deteriorated. To its original foulness it has added other foulness, even the worst of foulness, communicating a disease to which death is often preferable; so that Sir Thomas Watson, M.D., has to say:

"I can readily sympathise with, and even applaud, a father who, with the presumed dread or misgiving in his mind, is willing to submit to multiplied judicial penalties rather than expose his child to the risk of an infection so ghastly."

Further some forty years ago Ceely and Badcock took it into their heads that virus for vaccination might be created by inoculating cows with small-pox. They tried and succeeded. The virus they produced was recognised as true Cow-Pox, and was accepted by Government, and passed by public vaccinators into general circulation.

Thousands of thousands have been inoculated, and continue to be inoculated with this SmallPox Cow-Pox; and now many physicians maintain that a frightful blunder has been committed. They say that Small-Pox though passed through cows remains Small-Pox; and that those who are inoculated with it are not vaccinated, but variolated; and that SmallPox is thereby diffused and kept alive among the people.

A striking testimony on this point was delivered by the Irish Local Government Board. The Galway Guardians in 1879 ran short of virus for vaccination, and it was proposed to raise a stock by inoculating a calf with SmallPox.

As soon as the Board in Dublin became aware of the project, it was instantly forbidden, on the ground that such virus would communicate Small-Pox to the inoculated, and render the operator liable to prosecution for spreading the disease.

Yet this virus denounced as dangerous and illegal in Dublin is officially current from

London!

* Nineteenth Century, June, 1878.

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"A healthy and well nourished calf, about three months old, is hired from a butcher, and vaccinated in the usual way on its shaved abdomen in about sixty places. Upon the punctures thus made vesicles form, as from ordinary vaccination on the human body. These vesicles run their due course, and the vaccine virus which they contain is ripe and fit for use about the fifth or sixth day of that course-for use, namely, from the living animal in direct vaccination, and for collection in a fluid state into tubes, or in a dry state on ivory points, for the After purpose of vaccination which is indirect. seven days the calf is returned to the butcher, none the worse for what has happened."

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How the public will relish veal after such treatment remains to be seen.

Dr. Charles Cameron, M.P. for Glasgow, is the leading advocate of Cow-Pox, and has driven the Government to undertake its production and issue.

The heads of the Vaccine Department in Whitehall are without confidence in Cow-Pox; but they fear to offer too much resistance lest the public faith in Vaccination, already so shaky, should altogether disappear.

They also know that when they confessedly issue virus of two qualities, 1st and 2nd class, they will excite suspicions and difficulties of which it is impossible to foresee the results.

The situation is one of great perplexity. They hesitate to condemn the Mixed Pox in use, foul though it be, and to commit themselves unreservedly to Cow-Pox, which they are well aware is quackery.

The audacity, whether of ignorance or craft, with which Cow-Pox is recommended is almost

incredible.

For example, Dr. Cameron, at the Social Science Congress in Dublin, said that in CowPox they would once more possess the means wherewith Jenner wrought his wonders, and

* Nineteenth Century, June, 1878.

The virus thus produced, and sold on ivory points, is called calf-lymph, but it is not calf-lymph. It is the serum of a particular disease of the calf thrown out upon the skin. Calf

that Jenner's wonders they might confidently expect to repeat.

The answer is, that whatever wonders Jenner wrought, it was not with Cow-Pox. He knew that Cow-Pox was of no avail against SmallPox, and because it was of no avail, he resorted to Horse-Grease and to Horse-Grease Cow-Pox. Here is another example of similar audacity.

Dr. Martin, the American Cow-Pox Manufacturer and Contractor, appeared before the recent meeting of the British Medical Association at Ryde, and proclaimed to the doctors there assembled, that in America he had restored vaccination as practised by Jenner; adding that his Cow-Pox never excited erysipelas, the common curse of ordinary and degenerate vaccination.

Never excites erysipelas, does it not? Why, Jenner regarded erysipelas as one of the proofs of true and effective vaccination! In describing the inoculation received by milkers from spontaneous Cow-Pox, he says:—

"The pustules are of a much milder nature than those which arise from the contagion which constitutes the true Cow-Pox. They are always free from the bluish or livid tint so conspicuous in the pustules of that disease. No erysipelas attends them.

"This disease is not to be considered as similar in any respect to that of which I am treating, as it is incapable of producing any specific effect upon the human constitution.

"It is of the greatest consequence to point this out, lest the want of discrimination should occasion an idea of security from the infection of Small-Pox, which might prove delusive." *

Mark-No erysipelas attends them! Exactly what Martin claims for his pox. Thus Jenner's note of impotent Cow-Pox is set forth by Martin as a positive merit, and Jenner's name used as warrant for the defect!

Jenner never pretended that vaccination was other than an inflammation and a fever, slight

perhaps, but certain; the price to be paid for exemption from Small-Pox. But now the CowPox quacks assure us that even so much inconvenience may be dispensed with, whilst the security is the same. What is this but the speech from everlasting of smooth deceivers!

And here is another example of the same quackery equally wonderful.

Dr. George Wyld opened a shop for the sale of Cow-Pox in Oxford Street, London, and in a letter to the Boston Guardian of 26th April, 1878, he wrote:

"The profession all over England inundate us with applications for lymph, and, with the

lymph is the natural fluid that circulates in the lymphatic help of God, I will succeed in silencing the

vessels of the calf; a healthy thing, as reniote from scabs as day from night. Be not deceived by wrong words.

* Jenner's "Inquiry," p. 7.

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