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contract by McCulloch and Nassau, Cobden and Bright, is a glaring
instance of the length to which humane men of high character will go
in support of an economic theory."
There should be no freedom to spread disease. It is useless to
pretend that recent vaccination, properly performed, is not a real
safeguard against smallpox; the evidence is overwhelming. The
Societies which disseminate misleading literature and garbled information
to members of the Council whenever a Local Authority endeavours
to carry out its duty of protecting the public, are in the main
composed of persons without the slightest experience of smallpox or
any other infectious disease, and by no means interested in the stamping
out of any infectious disease.
The principal supporters of vaccination are the persons concerned
with the treatment of smallpox cases, in particular the doctors,
matrons, and nurses who have had experience in smallpox hospitals.
Dr. Wanklyn, formerly in charge of the M.A.B. Smallpox Hospital
Service, stated: "The writer, with an experience of 15,000 cases of
smallpox to draw on, has never known one of many hundreds of hospital
attendants to contract the disease, though they have been
breathing, eating, and living in an atmosphere reeking with infection.
This immunity is solely due to vaccination." All Medical Officers and
other members of the staff of the smallpox hospitals bear out this
statement from their experience. No Medical Superintendent of a
smallpox hospital would consider employing an unvaccinated staff, or
staff vaccinated only in infancy, or of permitting their immunity to
wane by neglect of revaccination, through lapse of time.
Nobody pretends that vaccination is desirable in itself. In the
case of a person exposed to smallpox it is a choice between vaccination
and smallpox. If vaccination is refused, many of the unvaccinated
may escape, particularly if the degree of contact has been slight, and
the others spread the disease, widening the circle of infection. During
the Boer War more persons died from typhoid fever than in the
fighting. The use of vaccines against typhoid fever made the incidence
of this disease negligible in the British Army during the Great
War. No one would suggest that typhoid vaccination should be
brought into London at the present time. Vaccination is only desirable
as a protection against smallpox, and there must always be a
certain amount of risk in such an operation, just as there is in the
drawing of the milk tooth of a child, or in sending a child on an
errand which takes him through London traffic.
Smallpox is, and always will be, a menace so long as the Eastern
countries remain huge reservoirs of disease, and all medical men—with
the exception of the few, who have had no actual experience of smallpox,
who prove the rule—take care to protect themselves, their families,
and those among their patients who will accept protection. Whatever