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justify us in concluding with any degree of confidence that the
belief expressed had been sustained. On the other hand, a large
amount of negative evidence had been offered. Witnesses who
had been engaged through long series of years in the very extensive
practice of vaccination, bore testimony to their never in their own
sphere of observation having witnessed or heard of any case in
which the suspicion of Vaccination-Syphilis had occurred.
At the same time it is not to be forgotten that a natural reluctance
to register deaths as due to Syphilis may have prevented
some cases where recently vaccinated persons have died from that
disease from being made public.
Only a few items of the evidence produced before us appear
to require special notice; among these, the most prominent is
what has been known as the "Leeds case," upon which we have
heard the evidence of Mr. Ward, Mr. Littlewood, and Dr. Barrs.
The witnesses named regarded it as a case of Syphilis, conveyed
by vaccination, but all of them admitted that the course of events
was most unusual. We have carefully investigated this case,
and notwithstanding the opinion formed by the witnesses, there
appears good reason to doubt whether it was one of Syphilis. The
case was made the subject of careful inquiry by Dr. Barlow on
our behalf, who shared the doubt we have expressed. The view
taken by the Medical Inspector of the Local Government Board
who in the first instance investigated the case was that it was a
case of hereditary Syphilis. It seems certain, however, that the
parents of the child whose death was in question were not in any
way affected by Syphilis. The vaccinifer also appeared to be
free from any taint of that disease, and its family history confirmed
this view. The co-vaccinees from the same lymph also
exhibited no trace of Syphilis. These facts of themselves make
out a strong case against that having been the nature of the
disease. Coupled with the fact that it could not have been communicated
by the vaccinator himself, they seem to render it
practically impossible that Syphilis was the cause of death. If