Alfred Russel Wallace

“ It is a fact fully appreciated by medical men, that persons constantly exposed to small-pox very rarely contract the disease. In the case of physicians, health-inspectors, nurses, sisters of charity, hospital orderlies, and some others, this is the rule; and of over 100 persons who have been to my knowledge constantly exposed, some of them seeing as many as 1,000 cases, I have never personally known of more than one who has contracted the disease; but there are many writers who believe perfect immunity to be extremely rare. ”

“ The Commissioners repeatedly call attention to the fact that the mortality from measles has not at all declined and that other zymotics have not declined in the same proportion as small-pox, and they argue: “If improved sanitary conditions were the cause of small-pox becoming less, we should expect to see that they had exercised a similar influence over almost all other diseases. Why should they not produce the same effect in the case of measles, scarlet fever, whooping-cough, and indeed any disease spread by contagion or infection and from which recovery was possible?” ”

“ And if one medical man can record such a mass of injury and disease in which vaccination was the palpable starting-point and certainly a contributory cause, what must be the total mass of unrecorded suffering throughout the whole country? ”

“ If we admit that only the worst cases went to the hospitals, but also allow something for better treatment now, the result is quite explicable; whereas the other result, of a greatly increased fatality in the unvaccinated so exactly balanced by an alleged greatly diminished fatality in the vaccinated is not explicable, especially when we remember that this diminished fatality applies to all ages, and it is now almost universally admitted that the alleged protective influence of vaccination dies out in ten or twelve years. ”

“ For here we have on one side a population which the official witnesses declare to be as well vaccinated and revaccinated as it is possible to make it, and which has all the protection that can be given by vaccination. It is a population which, we are officially assured, can live in the midst of the contagion of severe small-pox and not suffer from the disease “in any appreciable degree.” ”

“ Quite in accordance with this influence of small-pox in rendering the patient somewhat more liable to catch the disease during any future epidemic, is the body of evidence adduced by Professor Vogt, showing that vaccination, especially when repeated once or several times, renders the persons so vaccinated more liable to take the disease, and thus actually increases the virulence of epidemics. ”

“ It is a question of fact, founded on ample statistics, which show us clearly and unmistakably—as in comparing Leicester with other towns—that vaccination gives no protection whatever, and that the best and most thorough revaccination, as in the Army and Navy, does not protect at all! ”

“ It is, perhaps rather a condition than a cause; but under our present social economy it is so universally associated with various causes of disease—impure air, bad drainage, bad water supply, unhealthy situations, unwholesome food, overwork, and filth of every description in houses, clothing, and persons—that it affords the most general and convenient indication of an unhealthy as opposed to a healthy mode of life, and, while especially applying to zymotic diseases, is also so generally prejudicial to health as to produce a constant and very large effect upon the total mortality. ”

“ VACCINATION AND SMALL-POX
Among the greatest self-created scourges of civilized humanity are the group of zymotic diseases, or those which arise from infection, and are believed to be due to the agency of minute organisms which rapidly increase in bodies offering favourable conditions, and often cause death. Such diseases are: plague, small-pox, measles, whooping-cough, yellow fever, typhus and enteric fevers, scarlet fever and diphtheria, and cholera. ”

“ But we know that a considerable proportion of persons in middle age are insusceptible to small-pox infection; besides which even those who most strongly uphold vaccination now admit that its effects die out entirely in a few years—some say four or five, some ten—so that these people who had had cow-pox so long before were certainly not protected by it from taking small-pox. Several other patients were farriers or stable men who were infected by horse-grease, not by cow-pox, and were also said to be insusceptible to small-pox inoculation, though not so completely as those who had had cow-pox. ”

“ This being [77] the case, it becomes really ludicrous to read the questions and answers and the serious discussions as to whether a “good vaccination” protects more or less than a previous attack of small-pox. Some think the protection is the same, but the greater number think [78] it is not quite so much. Even the most ardent vaccinists do not claim a greater protection. But none of them ever doubt the fact of the protection gained by having had the disease, and yet none of them, nor any of the Commissioners, thought that any evidence, much less proof, of the fact itself was needed. ”

“ It is an absolute law of evidence, of statistics, and of common sense that when two kinds of evidence contradict each other, that which [84] can be proved to be even partially incorrect or untrustworthy must be rejected. It will be found that all the evidence that seems to prove the value of vaccination is of this untrustworthy character. This conclusion is enforced by the fact that the more recent hospital statistics show that small-pox occurs among the vaccinated in about the same proportion as the vaccinated bear to the whole population ”

“ Not only are many persons apparently insusceptible through life to some of these diseases, but all the evidence goes to show that, if the whole population of a country lived under thoroughly healthy conditions as regards pure air, pure water, and wholesome food, none of them could ever obtain a footing, and they would die out as completely as the plague and leprosy have died out, though both were once so prevalent in England. ”

“ Now the Royal Commissioners make no remark whatever on these very suggestive facts, and they have arranged the information in tables in such a way as to render it very difficult to discover them; and this is another proof of their incapacity to deal with statistical questions. They seem to be unable to [42] look at small-pox from any other point of view than that of the vaccinationist, and thus miss the essential features of the evidence they have before them. Every statistician knows the enormous value of the representation of tabular statistics by means of diagrammatic curves. ”

“ When the small-pox mortality of more than 200,000 men, all revaccinated to the completest extent possible by the medical officials, shows no advantage whatever over the whole comparable population of Ireland, and a quite exceptional disadvantage in comparison with almost unvaccinated Leicester! ”

“ It is a common practice of vaccinists to quote the German Army as a striking proof of the good effects of revaccination; but as our own Army is as well vaccinated as the Army surgeons with unlimited power can make it, it is unlikely that the Germans can do so very much better. And there is some reason to think that their statistics are less reliable than our own. Lieut.-Col. A. T. Wintle, (late) R.A., has published in the Vaccination Inquirer extracts from a letter from Germany stating, on the authority of a German officer, that the Army statistics of small-pox are utterly unreliable. ”

“ Those who disbelieve in the efficacy of vaccination to protect against small-pox are under the disadvantage that, owing to the practice having been so rapidly adopted by all civilized people, there are no communities who have rejected it while adopting methods of general sanitation, and who have also kept satisfactory records of mortality from various causes. ”

“ Let any one examine this diagram carefully and say if it is credible that from 1760 to 1800 both declines are due to some improved conditions of hygiene and sanitation, but that after 1800, while the zymotics have continued to decline from the same class of causes one zymotic—small-pox—must have been influenced by a new cause—vaccination, to produce its corresponding decline. Yet this is the astounding claim made by [35] the Royal Commissioners! And if we turn to the other half of the diagram showing the period of registration, the difficulty becomes even greater. ”

“ It is thus completely demonstrated that all the statements by which the public has been gulled for so many years, as to the almost complete immunity of the revaccinated Army and Navy, are absolutely false. It is all what Americans call “bluff.” There is no immunity. ”

“ It is not easy to find a fairly comparable population, but after due consideration it seems to me that Ireland will be the best available, as the statistics are given in the Commissioners’ Reports, and it can hardly be contended that it has any special advantages over our soldiers and sailors,—rather the other way. I have therefore given a diagram, XII., in which a dotted line shows the small-pox mortality of the Irish people of the ages 15 to 45 in comparison with the Army and the Navy mortality for the same years. ”

“ I have first shown the nature of the tests which seemed to the early enquirers to establish the protective influence of vaccination, and have given the facts which the two greatest living specialists on the subject—Professor Crookshank and Dr. Creighton—consider to prove the fallacy or insufficiency of all the tests which were applied. This is followed by a statement of the abundant evidence which in the first ten years of the century already showed that vaccination had no protective power (pp. 10-12) . ”

“ All three operations were successful, and on the eighth day all three vesicles were matured “like a pearl upon a rose petal,” as Jenner described a perfect specimen. On that day, the eighth day after the operation, I visited my patient, and to all appearance she was in the soundest health and spirits, with her usual bright eyes and ruddy cheeks. Although I was much tempted to take the lymph from so healthy a vesicle and subject, I did not do so, as I have frequently seen erysipelas and other had consequences follow the opening of a matured vesicle. ”