Some leading arguments against compulsory vaccination / Issued by The London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination.

  • London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Some leading arguments against compulsory vaccination / Issued by The London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

    19/30 (page 17)
    it by the Statistical Society was in June, 1882, when the late Dr. Guy read a paper, which then and there received at the hands of Dr. Collins a criticism which many present held to have been utterly destructive, and which was judiciously not reported by the Society's reporter. Finally, Mr. Ritchie declines an open inquiry because, to put his argument in brief, they know all about this question at the Local Government Board. They certainly ought to know a good deal, for the opponents of the practice of vacci- uation have been at much pains to teach them. They have been supplied with information as to the syphilization of 58 Zouaves in one regiment in Algiers. They have been told of the communication of severe skin disease to 320 children and adults in Riigen, by vaccination with oflicial lymph obtained from the Vaccine Institute at Stettin. They have been informed of the cases of death and injury disclosed by the censuses all over England. They are aware that a recent Medical Inquiry, conducted by medical men, of whom Dr. Drysdale, the well-known pro-vaccination controversialist, was chairman, brought to light 30 medical witnesses to death and 242 to injury, due to vaccination. They know the terrible series of cases evidenced by Mr. Jonathan Hutchinson in his Illustrations of Clinical Surgery/' They cannot but know that Dr. Cory, their own Chief Instructor in vaccine, with a devotion worthy of a better cause, syphilized himself in an endeavour to prove vaccino-syphilis impossible. They must know that the cases proven at Misterton, at Darley, at Norwich, 13 in all, show 13 deaths from vaccination, of which deaths only one gave rise to a death certificate with Vaccination on the face of it ; the proven proportion of suppression of the truth to the revelation of it being thus 12 to 1. They know that Mr. Henry May, Medical Officer of the Aston Union, advised in cases of death from vaccination to omit all mention of it from the death certificate in order to save vaccination from reproach. They know that, nevertheless, the Registrar-General has received 290 certi- ficates of death from Cowpox and other effects of vaccination in the last five years. They know that 290 x 12 = 3,480. They know that Mr. John Simon pro- mised us that under this'law there should bo no loss to count (Papers,^, lxvii.). All this and much more to the same purport they know, and further inquiry should certainly be needless. Space only remains for a very few more points very shortly treated. We may be asked about Montreal, which in former years resisted vaccination, and which has recently been visited with a severe smallpox epidemic. The answer is, that B