Walter Hadwen

“ On the one hand we have a section, who form, I am bound to say, the majority, who believe that the only remedy for small-pox is vaccination with all its risks. On the other hand there is another section, the minority to which I have the honour to belong, which believes that the remedy for small-pox is not vaccination but sanitation which is accompanied by no risk at all. We protest against the diseasing of children by Act of Parliament. We say that small-pox is a filth disease, and that if we get rid of the filth we shall get rid of the disease. ”

“ I do not believe the doctors of the present day are less competent than those of a hundred years ago; and therefore why double and treble the number of unvaccinated patients who are slipping through their fingers as compared with a century before? It is not for me to explain this. Let them explain it themselves. Mitigation is therefore a sham. I remember that the Duke of Connaught, although vaccinated with the very finest and the most recherché lymph, had the small-pox afterwards, and they could not understand it. ”

“ We have had almost as many animals suggested for the purpose of supplying lymph as there were in Noah’s Ark—a regular menagerie of them; the vaccinators are in as big a muddle about it as ever, and yet they say "You must have the genuine variety or you will be sure to catch the small-pox." "Pure lymph from the cow!" It reminds me of the notice one sometimes sees, "Pure milk from the cow; animals milked on the premises." "Pure lymph" calls to mind the green fields and pastures of the country! ”

“ How are we to know how severely a person is going to have small-pox? If everybody who had been vaccinated had it in a milder form and every person who was unvaccinated had the smallpox more severely, there would certainly be some ground for the argument. But we know well enough that long before vaccination was dreamed of the usual kind of small-pox was the mild ”

“ In 1853 they managed to pass that Compulsory Vaccination Act which we are here to protest against to-night. I think one of the most serious complaints against the whole system is this: They dare not trust it to its own merits. Do people want small-pox? If the System is any good it will speak for itself; if it is bad they have no right to enforce it. ”

“ The theory was this Cow-pox is small-pox of the cow; therefore, if you give a person this cow-pox it is the same as small-pox, only in a very mild form, and it is not infectious. Sir John Simon, the great high priest of the vaccine cult in England for many years, said that the reason cow-pox prevents small-pox is because it is small-pox, and that a person who has had cow-pox has really passed through small-pox. And Jenner himself absolutely declared that it is not that cow-pox is a preventive of small-pox but it is small-pox itself. ”

“ Remember that the Vaccination Act does not deal with the drunkard; it is the best classes of the country, the earnest, honest people, the Sunday school teachers, who love their children and their homes. ”

“ The Guardians of Gloucester are being urged to re-commence prosecutions, and I appeal to them to make a firm stand against it.
There is one thing about this Vaccination Act which I don’t like: it’s an unequal law—it presses hardly upon the poor. The rich man can pay his sovereign fine and feel none the worse for it; but the poor man has to either submit or have his goods seized, or go to the prison cell in default of paying his fine. ”

“ At last the Royal Commission heard of the case and sent down independent investigators, who found that there was not a vestige of syphilis in the remaining children, and that the charge against the mother was false. It is a terrible thing, I say, that not only have you to stand the chance of losing the child who is dear to you, but you have to stand the chance of the powerful machinery of Government being turned on in order to take away the character of your wife. ”

“ We are told that the intelligent portion of the population is against us; it’s false. That "crazy cry" is ascending higher and higher, into a raging and tremendous storm; that liberty which has been won by the blood of our forefathers for the theological conscience, is the liberty we demand for the scientific conscience. ”

“ Those who had cow-pox and did not have small-pox afterwards were those who had had the genuine disease. This was a very clever and specious kind of argument, and the next thing that Jenner had to do was to find out where the genuine cow-pox could be found. Accordingly, on going into a stable one day he found that a cow had been affected with a very peculiar kind of disease that was produced in this way. It seems that a man had been seeing to the grease upon a horse’s heels, and had gone to milk the cows without washing his hands. ”

“ It is a most extraordinary coincidence that the more marks the patients had the more they died from something else than small-pox. And when you come to the four mark patients, of whom there were only eleven, absolutely ten died of "super-added disease," and there was only one left for the record of small-pox, and that one was made to record a fatality of three-quarter per cent. This has been the sheet-anchor of the medical profession for years; these are the statistics dinned into the ears of the medical students to prejudice their future career in the medical profession ”

“ Creighton has well described him when he tells us that he was vain and petulant, crafty and greedy, a man with more grandiloquence and bounce than solid attainment, unscrupulous to a degree, a man who in all his writings was never precise when he could possibly be vague, and never straightforward when he could be secretive. ”

“ I will give you some statistics with regard to Sheffield as far as one can gather them, which I take out of this very report. There were ten cases of small-pox under one year old, 87 cases under five years of age—vaccinated all of them—and 241 cases of vaccinated small-pox between the ages of five and ten. In spite of what is said about vaccination protecting up to 14 years of age, this splendid report, that Dr. Bond speaks of with such admiration, declares that Dr. Bond’s theory is as false as anything can be, for it gives no less than 338 cases of vaccinated small-pox under ten years of age. ”

“ Therefore we have not merely children dying primarily from vaccination, but from a concurrent disease. The question is asked, "Cannot you get any pure lymph which will really answer the purpose?" Well, they have tried all sorts. They have tried cow-pox, horse-pox, horse-grease cow-pox, also goat-pox, and that from the sheep; they even went to the buffalo, but the buffalo-pox stank so horribly that they had to give it up. Surgeon O’Hara even advises that we should get some lymph from the donkey. ”

“ There is not a medical man in the kingdom but will admit there is a risk. Before the Royal Commission 6,000 cases of injury from vaccination were presented, with 800 deaths. This is the condition which we have upon the most reliable statistics, and that represents a very sorry fact. We are told by Dr. Bond that we should have calf lymph; but we must not forget that some of the most disastrous results which have ever occurred, and which have been recorded only recently, have been the result of the use of calf lymph ”

“ We also declare that when a person is ill the doctor is justified in doing all he possibly can for his patient; but when a person is well he has no right whatever to interfere with the normal functions of the human body as he does when he introduces disease, especially the disease of an inferior animal, unless he can give a distinct and absolute guarantee, not only that the operation will effect the purpose avowed, but also that it will produce no injurious results. ”

“ She is in a far better position than her patients who, as a rule, come from insanitary places, from the slums and dens of our cities; and it is not, therefore, to be wondered at that the nurses should be able to resist the small-pox. Even in the time of the plague, when vaccination was not dreamed of, it was remarked in all the old writings that the doctors and nurses rarely if ever caught the disease. ”

“ That child who was vaccinated, died, and a coroner’s jury having held an inquest, it was brought in conclusively that she died from syphilis, as the result of vaccination. A certificate to that effect went up to the Government, who sent an inspector down to investigate the case; he took photographs of the teeth of the other children, declared they were syphilitic, and reported that it was not vaccine lymph which produced the syphilis, but that the fault lay with the mother herself. ”

“ Sanitation did for Prussia what 35 years of compulsory vaccination was unable to accomplish. At the present time in Prussia small-pox is almost extinct. It is not that people ‘are being vaccinated more; they are vaccinated less. They hate it in Germany as we English people do; and you can now get out of vaccination there by the payment of a shilling fine. ”

“ In Gloucester you have practically no vaccinated children to suffer. It depends upon the constitution and the amount of resisting power to the disease. The nurse is a selected person—she will never be likely to be taken on as such unless she is perfectly healthy; As I said, she is frequently taken from the ranks of the small-pox patients, but otherwise is perfectly healthy; she has good food, regular exercise ”

“ As soon, however, as he came back with his paper the cow doctors were at him. They said this was all rubbish and began to pour on him hundreds of cases, just as we pelt the pro-vaccinists with figures showing that 90 per cent, of those who have had small-pox have already been vaccinated.
So Dr. Jenner soon found he would have to change his whistle, and invented a novel idea. The idea he started was this: he said there are two kinds of pox. One is the genuine kind and the other spurious, and those who have had cow-pox and yet have had small-pox afterwards, have had the spurious variety. ”

“ In the old herb books, for instance, we find that if you want to prevent suffering from the bite of a mad dog you must carry a herb called hound’s tongue, and again, to prevent the ill-consequence of a dog bite you must take a portion of the root of a dog rose. ”

“ Now, you test the mitigation theory by malignant cases. Mr. Alexander Wheeler proved before the Royal Commission that of those said to be vaccinated 82 per cent died, and of those with good marks 85 per cent died; so that the well marked patients come worse off when vaccination is most needed. The argument we generally get is this: If a person happens to have been vaccinated and he goes through life without catching small-pox they say, "What a splendid thing it is that he was vaccinated" ”

“ That is the spontaneous cow-pox, which Jenner himself said was practically useless.
With regard to the other kind of cowpox, which is commonly used, you put the matter from a child’s arm into the calf’s abdomen; and you stand a chance of getting some human diseases of the worst kind as well as cattle disease into the bargain. The third kind is small-pox virus itself with which Badcock inoculated no less than 20,000 people under the name of vaccination. ”