It is now more than 80 years since vaccination was declared by the most prominent members of the medical profession to be an absolute safeguard against smallpox. Its discoverer was patronised by royalty, rewarded by Parliament, and lauded throughout the civilised world as the saviour of mankind from a terrible and destructive malady. The practice was gradually accepted by the public, glad to escape from the admitted dangers of inoculation; it was spread by uncritical philanthropists and supported from the public purse, and when after a time faith in its virtue diminished, it was first rendered compulsory, and then penal, on the positive representations of the medical advisors of the Government that by these strong measures the disease would be completely extirpated. We all know that these predictions have not been fulfilled. So far from smallpox having disappeared, epidemics are constantly occurring among populations said to be almost completely vaccinated, and the terror of infection is everywhere so great that all real faith in the protective influence of vaccination to individuals must have ceased, although with strange inconsistency it continues to be urged upon us, in the time-honoured words of the original creed, as the one and only safeguard. Surely the time has come when the alleged effects of vaccination should be independently investigated by means of the 80 years' experience we now possess; and as an introduction to such an inquiry I propose to take a brief review of some suggestive features in the history of the practice, and of the means by which Parliament has been induced to legislate in its favour. The first introduction of vaccination to the medical profession was in Jenner's "Inquiry," published in 1798, which contained the record of 23 cases of persons having had cowpox, or horsepox, either naturally or artificially produced, and who were afterwards found to be insusceptible to inoculation with smallpox. This was termed "the variolous test," and the conclusion was thence drawn that cowpox was a complete protection against smallpox during life, the fact that large numbers were constitutionally proof against smallpox inoculation being ignored. The practice was soon adopted by the medical profession, and in 1802 a number of eminent physicians and surgeons in London gave evidence before a parliamentary committee strongly in its favour, on the strength of which Jenner was awarded £10,000, and a few years later £20,000 more in the firm belief that vaccination was the greatest medical discovery ever made, and that it would, as soon as it became general, absolutely extinguish smallpox. In 1807, the Royal College of Physicians reported, that general vaccination "secured towns and districts of country from epidemic smallpox," and that where the disease had occurred after vaccination it had been remarkably mild. Such statements as these we now know must have been based on the most absurdly inadequate evidence. Towns which are at least ten times as well vaccinated as they could have been in 1807 have suffered again and again from the most terrible epidemics, while the records of numerous hospitals prove that the average mortality of smallpox patients is quite as great now as it was before vaccination was discovered. Even before Jenner's alleged discovery the belief of dairymen that cowpox was a safeguard against smallpox was not unknown to many practitioners, but was rejected as a rural superstition, because numerous examples of its inefficacy had been met with. Similar failures to protect continued to occur, no less than 504 cases, with 75 deaths, being published in 1805; but once the medical profession had committed itself to vaccination such failures were always concealed or explained away, and the most unfounded and often palpably erroneous statements as to the efficacy of vaccination were put forth from time to time and are continued to the present day. As it is above all things necessary to shake the public faith in the unsupported dicta of those who alone benefit pecuniarily by vaccination, a few examples of these false or misleading statements must be given. In 1804 Jenner declared that smallpox was already "totally exterminated in some of the largest foreign cities and wide-extended districts round them." In 1817 Jenner's intimate friend, Surgeon Moore, declared that vaccination had "extinguished smallpox in the whole of Ceylon which belonged to Great Britain;" yet in 1843 Dr. George Gregory reported severe epidemics in that island in 1819, 1830, 1833, and 1836, and that in one of these out of 460 attacked 341 had been vaccinated. In order to magnify the benefit of the operation, the mortality from smallpox in the last century has been persistently exaggerated, and the alleged great diminution in the present century imputed wholly to vaccination. But Dr. Farr, the greatest authority on a question of this kind, has stated that "smallpox began to grow less fatal before vaccination was discovered, indicating, together with the diminution of fevers, the general improvement of health then taking place." And this, remember, in spite of the practice of inoculation, which is acknowledged to have artificially fostered and increased the disease. In the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, London smallpox mortality, according to Dr. Farr, averaged 1,740 annually; in the first decade of the present century it had decreased to 1,250, and in the second to less than 800; but as at this time not more than one-tenth of the population were vaccinated, this operation could not possibly account for more than one-tenth of the decrease.

    Now let us see how the National Vaccine Establishment, under the auspices of the most eminent physicians and surgeons of the day, dealt with these facts in their annual reports. In 1811 they gave "the average deaths by smallpox in London previous to vaccination" as 2,000 annually. In 1828 they state it to have been "about 4,000 annually." By 1836 we have a further imaginary development, since we find the following statement: "The annual loss by smallpox in the metropolis before vaccination was established exceeded 5,000," and in 1839, "4,000 lives are saved every year in London since vaccination."

    These falsehoods, gross and palpable as Falstaff's men in buckram, would be only laughable if put forth by an individual and if they stood alone, but they appear in the official reports of a medical institution backed up by great names, and they are merely early examples of a system of utter recklessness of misstatement in defence of vaccination which has continued to this day. Dr. Lettsom, a contemporary of Jenner, calculated that the smallpox mortality of England and Wales before vaccination was 36,000 annually, a number which he obtained by taking 3,000 (instead of 1,740) as the average London deaths, and multiplying this number by 12, for the proportional population of the kingdom, although it is and was notorious that the smallpox mortality of London was enormously in excess of that of the country. Yet this palpably incorrect estimate is now still further increased and paraded as fact, the National Health Society having quite recently issued a handbill, with the approval of the Local Government Board, in which they state, without qualification, that "before the introduction of vaccination smallpox killed 40,000 persons yearly in this country." Sir Lyon Playfair, in his last great speech in Parliament, gave 4,000 per million as the average London death rate before vaccination, a number nearly double that of the last decade of the century. Still more amazing is the statement made by Dr. W. B. Carpenter, in a letter to the Spectator, of April 1881, "that a hundred years ago the smallpox mortality of London alone, with its then population of under a million, was often greater in a six-months' epidemic than that of the twenty millions of England and Wales now is in any whole year." The perfectly well-known facts are, that the highest smallpox mortality in London during the last century was 3,992 in the year 1772; while it was 7,912 in 1871, and in the same year in England and Wales over 23,000!

    Another great medical authority, Mr. Ernest Hart, rivals Dr. Carpenter in his amazing power of exaggeration. In his much-lauded pamphlet, "The Truth About Vaccination," he states at p. 35 (on the alleged authority of Dr. Farr) that "In the forty years, 1728-57 and 1771-80, the annual mortality from smallpox in London was equal to nearly 18,000 per million living." This is nearly four times as great as the actual well-known mortality, and it is no misprint or slip of the pen, for it is dwelt upon over a whole page and compared triumphantly with modern rates of mortality. Not content with taking a series of years when smallpox deaths were nearly three times as numerous as they became in the last twenty years before vaccination was adopted, he multiplies this exaggerated number by four, and sets the result before a bewildered and terrified public as--"The Truth About Vaccination!"

    Dr. Buchanan, the medical officer to the Local Government Board, in an official memorandum in 1881, adduces Mr. Marson's statement that the death-rate of vaccinated hospital patients was 7 per cent, and of the unvaccinated 35 ½ per cent, and he adds, "As no one suggests that the vaccinated and the unvaccinated classes live under conditions differing from each other in their influence on smallpox, unless it be this one condition of vaccination, it follows for a first inference that the vaccinated are much less liable to die of smallpox than the unvaccinated." The assumption in this passage is palpably untrue. The unvaccinated consist very largely of infants under vaccination age, or such as are too weakly or diseased to be vaccinated, among whom smallpox mortality is so great that an experienced physician, Dr. Vernon, of Southport, has declared that he never knew an infant under one recover from smallpox, and besides these it includes a large proportion of the vagrant and criminal populations who live under the most unsanitary conditions. The vaccinated, on the other hand, consist largely of adults, among whom smallpox mortality is always very much less. The excess of mortality in infants under one year is not peculiar to smallpox; it occurs in other epidemic diseases where it would be manifestly absurd to attribute it to want of vaccination or to an insufficient number of marks. This simple and obvious explanation accounts to a large extent for the greater smallpox mortality of the unvaccinated quite independently of vaccination; yet it has been systematically overlooked or concealed by the official advocates of the practice.

    The most telling of the promises of the vaccinators, and the one most relied upon by them for obtaining popular favour and approval, was the statement, spread broadcast through the land, that one mark, or one developed vaccine pustule, was sufficient for a life-protection. And it was with the immunity of the one-marked people that the unvaccinated were originally contrasted. As time passed on the one-marked people were found to suffer greatly in smallpox epidemics; and therefore, in the hope of keeping up the proportionate percentage as against the unvaccinated, the protection was astutely limited to the two-marked people. This also failing, people were told that three marks were required. And now we are officially informed, in view of the large number of vaccinated persons in the public hospitals, that it is only the four-marked people who are in a position to feel themselves possessed of the modicum of protection, admittedly declining to nothing in ten years, which the operation still professes to give them. And the inflexible demand of our Government officials for four marks as the minimum necessary to ensure protection now stands in direct contradiction to the recent declaration of the German Commission of medical experts, who have unconditionally decided that for the population of the German Empire two well-developed vaccine pustules are sufficient. Um einen ausreichenden Impfschutz zu erzielen, sind mindestens zwei gut entwickelte Impfpocken erforderlich.

    I think I have now adduced a body of easily-verified facts which prove that the statements and figures of those who are professionally interested in vaccination are entirely untrustworthy. I do not charge them with wilful false statements, but with a carelessness and recklessness of assertion which, considering their responsible position and the influence they possess over the public and the legislature, is almost equally reprehensible. The facts and assertions on the strength of which vaccination was adopted have, one after another, been proved to be valueless. The public and the legislature have been alike misled by systematic misstatements of the facts on which alone a sound judgment can be founded. It is surely time that an independent inquiry should be made, and, as it is purely a question of the statistical results embodied in our forty-six years of official registration and reports, the inquiry should be entrusted to men whose studies or special training have accustomed them to deal with complex masses of facts and figures, and to deduce from them sound and trustworthy conclusions.

    My own prepossessions in favour of vaccination having been entirely overthrown by an examination of facts and statistics during the past few years. I feel convinced that men so qualified will find little if any evidence of the efficacy of vaccination in preventing or ameliorating smallpox.