The Objections to Vaccination Answered.

1. Vaccination alleged to be a failure.—A favourite cry of anti-vaccinationists is that vaccination has been a failure, that after an experience of more than half a century, small-pox still does its deadly work in our midst. In answer to this objection we have only to point to the statistics already adduced. We freely admit that vaccination has not quite realised the reasonable expectations of its discoverer; but that it has been to some extent a failure is an excellent argument for its more efficient performance—none at all against the operation. In a word, small-pox still exists because vaccination is sometimes wholly neglected, sometimes imperfectly performed, and in most cases too long delayed. But of this more anon.

2. The second objection we have to notice has more weight with parents than every other consideration; and if it can be shown that it is a groundless one, we shall have gone a great way in repopularising vaccination. Diseases, it is said, foreign to the infant's constitution are introduced along with the vaccine virus. If this were true to any appreciable extent, it would be necessarily fatal to the operation, for no parent would be justified in exposing his child to an immediate urgent danger for the sake of preserving it from a remote and casual one. Happily this question has been searchingly investigated by the most eminent medical men everywhere, and they are quite unanimous in deciding that the objection cannot be sustained. Moreover, every alleged case in which disease or death has been attributed to vaccination has, on strict investigation, completely broken down. Our own experience confirms these views. During three months that we attended the Faculty Vaccination Station at Glasgow, where we performed or saw performed many hundred cases of vaccination, in not a single instance did we see evil result. Our experience in Dunedin, where we have vaccinated hundreds of children, has been equally favourable. But let us see what men of the largest experience believe regarding this objection. Dr. Seaton says that although he has investigated many of such alleged cases, he has never yet in a single instance found that the child from whom the lymph was taken was suffering from the disease it was said to have imparted. Mr Marson states that in the performance of 40,000 vaccinations, he had never seen any other diseases communicated with the vaccine virus, nor did he believe in the popular reports that they are so communicated. Sir W. Jenner, at University College Hospital, London, in six years, in 13,000 cases, and Dr West in seventeen years, in 26,000 cases, both say that in no single case page 11 had they reason to believe that any constitutional taint had been conveyed from one person to another by vaccination. According to Sir James Paget, the worst that can be charged against vaccination is, that sometimes it evolves a constitutional affection till then latent in the system. Even this, he adds, can very seldom be charged with truth.

Finally, actual experiments have been made with a view of testing if disease is really communicable through vaccine virus. Persons suffering from constitutional diseases in an active state have been vaccinated, and with the lymph taken from them healthy individuals have been vaccinated, and in no single instance has it been found that the disease was so communicated from one to the other. It must therefore be considered proved, both by experiment and authority, that the danger of communicating infection through vaccine virus is so infinitesimally small as to be practically non-existent.

3. As a third objection, it is urged that erysipelas frequently results from the practice of vaccination. We have to reply, that although some cases of erysipelas, and even fatal cases, have followed vaccination, they have been so few in proportion to the millions of vaccinations that have been performed as hardly to deserve notice. Besides, the erysipelas is not due to the vaccine virus, but to the slight scratches or wounds that are made with the lancet. It is well known that this disease, in a fatal form, sometimes follows the most trifling surgical operation. We have seen erysipelas and death result from the amputation of a finger, in the practice of one of the best surgeons in Scotland, and we have seen tetanus follow the removal of a toe nail. But would any reasonable man argue that, because surgical operations sometimes eventuate untowardly, all surgical operations should be condemned? We have shown that thousands of lives are saved annually by vaccination, and millions protected from unseemly pitting. Is it reasonable to expect that this great result can be gained without here and there a child getting erysipelas from its vaccination? Even this, in our opinion, can be prevented by adopting a method of vaccination which we shall recommend below.

4. A fourth objection we have to notice is, that a skin eruption frequently breaks out subsequent to vaccination, which is therefore considered by the parents the fons et origo mail In most cases, our experience has taught us that the vaccination and eruption are not even remotely connected with one another, the latter being due to dentition or disorder of the stomach, liver, or kidneys, or inherent defect in the constitution. Even when no other cause can be assigned for the eruption than the vaccination, parents must not hastily assume that the vaccine lymph employed has been bad. No page 12 such thing. But inasmuch as vaccination causes a certain amount of irritation, from this irritation a skin affection may result in sensitive subjects. We have had two, or at most three, cases in which an eruption on the head has followed vaccination; but having kept a record of the vaccine lymph employed, we were able to prove that the vaccine virus was not at fault, as it had been used in other cases without evil effects. Moreover, the children so affected were not vaccinated till the fifth and six months; and this fact will give us a clue to a remedy which will be noticed below, when we come to speak of reform in the practice of vaccination.

5. Anti-vaccinationists have strongly urged in late years that although the mortality produced by small-pox has been reduced, yet the infantine mortality of other diseases has increased, so that no real gain of human life has followed from vaccination. We notice this objection only for the sake of exposing the disingenuousness of the opponents of Jennerism. For if these gentry had only consulted statistics before committing themselves to such a statement, they would have found, as has been conclusively shown by Mr Simon, that the mortality of measles, scarlatina, scrofula, and other infantile diseases has really diminished since the introduction of vaccination. And this is what scientific deduction would have led us to expect, because thousands of children who happened to survive smallpox had their constitutions so weakened that they fell ready victims to the next disease which attacked them.

Other objections still more absurd have been put forward by zealous anti-vaccinationists. For instance, vaccination has been said to have produced mental and physical degeneration of the human species, to have evolved diseases before unknown, to have diminished men's stature, to have rendered them incapable of supporting the same fatigue and exposure as their ancestors; and, let teetotallers mark this, to have driven men for consolation to dram-drinking and tobacco-smoking. All such objections have been gravely put forward from Jenner's time downwards. They prove the weakness of the case they are designed to support, and are so palpably false and inconsequent that we shall net stop to refute them, but merely leave them to the intelligence of our readers.