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54
It is a curious thing to see numbers of people waiting about
the Town Hall to get their vaccination exemption certificates
signed on the same evenings that the Health Committee is meeting
to take measures—such as the notification of chickenpox, etc.—for
the prevention of smallpox.
Our experience in Barking is that smallpox at the present time
is a very minor disability and that the disability of vaccination is
quite comparable with smallpox itself, in which circumstance the
general public, who can hardly be expected to weigh impersonal
altruism in the scales against maternal love, can both be understood
and appreciated even where their decision may be misguided.
It is also a curious thing in this country that people will swallow
excessive amounts of nauseous liquids and other preparations at
great personal inconvenience and sometimes to their own detriment,
and yet they have an ill-founded antipathy to the more scientific
medicaments which can only be efficiently administered through
that most dreaded of all sugical instruments—a hollow needle.
There is no doubt that drugs in a bottle are looked upon with
superstitious awe and the public are not prepared yet to receive
the results of much painstaking scientific research where these
require anything other than a dose of nasty physic.
Objection to vaccination as such is due to superstition, and it
cannot be too often emphasised that this is unreasonable and that
vaccination does prevent smallpox.
The best means of carrying out vaccination and the degree of
protection it is most desirable to obtain and other questions are
certainly before the country for very serious debate, and I do hope
these questions will be explored from every possible point of view,
and I am happy to believe that whatever may be the public's
decision in the future it will be based on information rather than
on the ignorance which has hitherto directed the present antipathy
to vaccination.
That vaccination is not without some danger has been known
for a very long time. We are beginning to know exactly what that
danger is and perhaps it will be possible to prevent it.