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this Circular with a letter dated 23rd December, 1929, urging vaccination
by the staff of the Public Health Departments in London, in order
to prevent any delay through referring contacts to the Public Vaccinator.
The fact that very few persons will agree to be vaccinated,
whoever offers the operation, is apparently immaterial to the Ministry,
provided both the objectors and critics of vaccination on the one hand,
and the supporters of vaccination on the other, are quiet.
A great deal of opposition to vaccination has arisen from complaints
of sore arms, an unnecessary and very infrequent sequel to
vaccination, and an evil, even though transient, and also from rumours
with regard to the alleged ill effects of vaccination, and it is desirable
that the actual clinical work done should receive some measure of
supervision from the Public Health Department. But the Ministry
insisted on striking out from the contracts of the Public Vaccinators a
clause requiring them to supply clinical particulars of the results of
vaccination or method of vaccination, or any such further information
as the Medical Officer of Health may reasonably require as regards
any vaccinations performed by them. The Ministry of Health, however,
had approved without demur a clause on analogous lines with
regard to the work of the Tuberculosis Officers employed at the Hospital
Tuberculosis Dispensaries in the Borough.
The facts with regard to nervous disease, which resulted in the
issue of Circular 1025 by the Ministry of Health, are described in the
Report of the Committee on Vaccination, in which it was pointed out
that 175 cases of acute nervous disease, from December, 1922, to the
end of the second quarter of 1929, occurred among recently vaccinated
persons and caused 91 deaths. Approximately 5,500,000 vaccinations
took place in the same period. Thus there occurred three cases of acute
nervous disease among every 100,000 persons vaccinated. Moreover,
during the same period there were notified some 22,300 cases of acute
nervous disease among persons who had not been vaccinated or revaccinated
recently. In other words, these cases could not have had
any connection whatever with vaccination.
It is known, of course, that diseases such as measles and scarlet
fever also act in the direction of "lighting up" in unvaccinated persons
this type of nervous disease which has been so stressed in connection
with vaccination, but even if these 175 cases were entirely connected
with vaccination, which they obviously were not, the proportion
is so small as to be negligible.
The late Professor Wynn, Medical Officer of Sheffield, speaking
on the outbreak of smallpox in Sheffield in 1925, reported in the
Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute, October, 1927, which outbreak
was cut short by vaccination, states: "it is particularly important
to note that this first recourse to vaccination on a fairly extensive
scale was in 1925, or after the very serious outbreak of encephalitis in