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A Paper read before the Second
International Congress of Anti- Vaccinators, held at Cologne, October 12,
1881,
By WILLIAM TEBB.
AT the first International Anti-Vaccination Convention, held last December
at Paris, I had the honour of explaining the existing state of the opposition
at that period to the Compulsory Vaccination Acts in England. My first thought
on the present occasion was that I might appropriately continue the same theme,
with a record of the important events which have occurred since our last
convention, including the acceptance by Mr. P. A. Taylor, the leader of the
Anti-Vaccination party in the House of Commons, of the position of President of
the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsion, together with a glance at
the conferences and public meetings in the metropolis and elsewhere, the public
demonstrations at Brighton and Leicester, the considerable accessions of active
support from influential quarters, the issue of important Parliamentary returns
confirmatory of our position, and the publication and distribution of
literature, at least five-fold that of any similar period in England, with
other indications of encouraging progress, which, if detailed, would constitute
an interesting chapter in the history of our agitation. I have preferred,
however, to take a wider range, and to address you on the subject of
"Sanitation versus Vaccination, as a preventive of Small-pox."
One of the most serviceable arguments in use by our opponents the
pro-vaccinators is, that prior to Jenner’s discovery, small-pox was a scourge
of the first magnitude, a relentless and fell decimater and destroyer of the
human race. I shall not attempt to inquire how much of this is true, and how
much is due to a lively imagination, except to mention one testimony, that of
Dr. James Moore, who, in his "History of Small-pox (a work dedicated to
Dr. Jenner), says that inoculation has occasioned the loss of millions of
lives. These points have been dwelt upon by abler pens than mine, and their
testimony is before you.
Sanitation, which has for its end the prevention of disease by the removal
of the causes of disease, is a science which of late years in England, America,
France, and Germany, and in other countries has engaged the attention of some
of the ablest and most thoughtful minds. It is not, however, a new discovery.
It was taught by the Jewish lawgiver, Moses, in numerous stringent regulations
for the tent and camp, and by the Greeks and Romans, as their systems of baths,
aqueducts, and drainage-works testify. In Rome the remains of the Cloaca
Maxima are pointed out to every stranger as one of the sights of the city.
With the decline of the Roman Empire, sanitation became one of the lost arts,
and for many centuries plagues and epidemics carried off countless thousands in
all the large centres of population, and were regarded as visitations of God
with which it was presumptuous to interfere. Macaulay, in his "History of
England," showing the conditions of life two centuries ago, says :
"Cabbage-stalks and rotten fruit accumulated in heaps at the thresholds of
the Countess of Berkshire and Bishop of Durham. Rubbish was shot into Lincoln’s-inn-fields,
and St. James’s-square was a receptacle for all the offal, dead cats and dogs
of Westminster ; and these were deposited under the windows of the great
magnates of the realm—the Norfolks, the Pembrokes, and the Ormonds."
"Men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast
of Guinea."
Other writers confirm this testimony. The streets were mostly unpaved, with
open gutters, cesspools under houses, stagnant ditches, polluted streams,
tainted wells; and the air was contaminated with effluvia arising from the
decaying bodies of the dead, interred in close proximity to living urban
populations.
Mr. BUcKLE says, that the smells in London were so bad that sweet herbs and
perfumes were kept in the rooms to neutralise them. Nor were the interiors of
our houses much more wholesome than their exterior surroundings. "The
floors," says a writer of the sixteenth century, "generally are made
of nothing but loam, and, are strewed with rushes, which, being constantly put
on fresh, without a removal of the old, remain lying there, in some cases, for
twenty years with fish-bones, broken victuals, the dregs of tankards, and
impregnated with other filth underneath from dogs and men." Clothing was
seldom changed, and was pervaded with unwholesome odours; linen and cotton were
aristocratic luxuries; the food was coarse and badly cooked; two centuries ago
there were no fresh vegetables grown in England, small quantities being
imported from Holland for the exclusive benefit of the rich. These were days
when the plague, sweating sickness, black-death, remittent fever, small-pox,
and all forms of zymotic diseases, engendered by filthy habits and unwholesome
surroundings, abounded. Violation of the laws of Nature breeds its own cure
through manifold chastisements, but it was not until the severe visitation of
cholera in 1831, that attention was awakened in England to the importance of
the subject.
And in 1848 public opinion had sufficiently advanced to enable Parliament to
pass what was called the "Nuisance Removal Act," as well as the
"Public Health Act," by which was established the General Board of
Health, and thenceforward the furtherance of sanitation became one of the
recognised duties of the State. A series of amending Acts of Parliament have
been passed relating to the public health, embracing cleansing of streets,
removal of nuisances, construction of sewers, building of streets and houses,
ventilation of public buildings, regulation of lodging houses, prevention of
river pollution, and similar matters, and if the authorities had been content
to fight disease by preventive measures of this kind alone, the zymotics might
by this time have been deprived of their epidemic power; but, unfortunately, in
an evil hour Parliament was induced to listen to a faction of the medical
profession, who, unable to obtain the public acceptance of their theories on
their own merits, determined to do so by the authority and assistance of the
State, and were enabled to force upon everybody a disease called the cow-pox,
because, as it had been pertinently said, somebody might catch the small-pox.
In 1853 the Vaccination Acts were introduced by a private member, and passed
into law, without notice or public discussion, and it is no exaggeration to say
that a more wretched and obnoxious edict has not been foisted on the
English-speaking race since the passage of the atrocious Fugitive Slave Law in
America thirty-five years ago. Vaccination, which is a spreading of disease,
became thenceforward, by a strange perversion of the fitness of things,
officially associated with sanitation.
Several of the diseases I have mentioned have now practically disappeared,
without any medical preventive, but solely by the effect of improved
sanitation; yet small-pox, which vaccination promised to stamp out, is still
raging, notwithstanding the lavish expenditure of millions among the medical
profession; and the fell disease is a standing disproof of the Jennerian
predictions. Reposing on a State-endowed remedy, which has been insolently
called the greatest discovery in medical science, all special investigations
into the causes of small-pox have been officially considered superfluous.
During the present epidemic in London, June 10, 1881, a member of the English
Parliament, Mr. Daniel Grant, asked in the House of Commons whether the
Government would appropriate a sum of money to inquire into the causes of the
outbreak. The President of the Local Government Board replied that the Board
had no funds for that purpose; yet the official vaccination grants amount to over
£100,000 a-year! Were it not for the determination to uphold vaccination at all
hazards, the official excuse that the cause of small-pox lies in unfathomable
mystery would long ago have been summarily set aside.
In a recent number of the Leicester Free Press, it is said :—"
So far as we are concerned in Leicester, a town containing 120,000 inhabitants,
with many thousands of unvaccinated children, smallpox seems to be about the
least dangerous of all diseases, and is not to be named by the side of scarlet
fever, measles, whooping cough, diarrhoea, or even consumption. If a case of
small-pox is discovered, instant isolation is adopted, and during the last five
years we have hardly had five deaths. That being the state of the case, one
need not wonder that the fear of the disease should disappear, or that
resistance to vaccination should increase."
Dr. FARR, in his official report for 1876, says :—" Experience has
shown that the various forms of plague are influenced to a large extent by
sanitary conditions. All zymotic diseases are most fatal in the densest
districts, and although this may be due in part to contagion, it is certainly
due in part to the concentrated impurities of towns."
And Professor PLAYFAIR says :—" No epidemic can resist thorough cleanliness."
Those who have intelligently watched the course of zymotic outbreaks, and noted
the localities where they have arisen and the causes by which they are
engendered, are convinced that it is within the power of Governments by means
of scientific sanitary appliances and methods to stamp out small-pox
altogether. Supposing vaccination to be abandoned, this revolution would be
brought about, for it is the opinion of many of the ablest opponents of the
vaccination laws in England that one cause of the perpetuation of small-pox in
our midst is the application of this alleged remedy of vaccination. Every one
now admits that a considerable portion of vaccination in England is
variolation, i.e., small-pox matter passed through the cow, and that
what is called vaccination is nothing but modified small-pox. In no part of
England has submission been so rigorously enforced as in the English
metropolis, where, in addition to the energetic efforts of vaccination officers
and public vaccinators, stimulated by special awards, there has been
inquisitorial house to house and school to school visitation; the remorseless
cow-poxing in the work-houses even of infants scarcely a week old; the hunting
of unvaccinated fugitives from parish to parish, like slave-hunting in the United
States ; and the relentless prosecution of the parents of un-vaccinated
children in every police-court in the metropolis. And what is the result? Has
small-pox been stamped out, as all the Jennerian prophets in succession have
loudly predicted? On the contrary, in proportion as public money and State
machinery have been diverted from sanitation (the only scientific adversary of
small-pox), to vaccination, or the unscientific treatment by poisoning the
blood, the disease has spread with the result shown by the Registrar-General in
his annual summary for the year 1880, which tabulates the small-pox mortality
of London for the last thirty years as follows:
Decades. Estimated Mean Small-pox
Population. Deaths.
1851-60 2,570,489 7,150
1861-70 3,018,193 8,34.7
1871-80 3,486,486 15,551
The last decade showing an increased small-pox mortality of 80 per cent. It
must not be supposed, however, that this mortality is equally spread over the
Metropolis, or that it exists in all classes of habitations alike. In the princely
mansions of South Kensington, Hyde Park, and Regent’s Park, in the aristocratic
districts of Bayswater, Notting Hill, Haverstock Hill, the open and airy slopes
of Hampstead [Dr. EDMUND GWYNN reports (Lancet. Nov 5, 1881) the
death-rate for Hampstead, with a population of 45,436, at 12.6 per 1,000 for
1880, as compared with 22.2 in the metropolis generally] and Highgate, in the
salubrious suburbs of Ealing, Clapham, South Hornsey, [Dr. JACKMAN, Medical
Officer of Health for the South Hornsey district, states that the death rate of
the district is only 10.7 per 1,000 living, and the birth-rate is equal to 39.0
per 1,000. Special inspections of the houses in the district are made from time
to tune by Mr. ABRAMS, the Sanitary inspector, and a proposal is now on foot to
procure for the inhabitants a constant water supply.—Lancet Nov.. ,1881]
Sydenham Hill, Wimbledon, Chislehurst, and Finchley, cases of small-pox are of
the rarest occurrence. The epidemic is found amongst the poor, ill-fed,
uncleanly, intemperate, over-worked populations of Hackney, St. Giles’s,
Bethnal-green, Poplar, Shadwell, Bermondsey, and Southwark, amongst those who
live in the courts and alleys, in old and decayed habitations, and in the
miasmatic atmosphere in which the neglected residuum of this immense city are
reduced to dwell. Amongst the denizens of these tin-wholesome districts will be
found the largest proportion of the specially unhealthy children, the offspring
of the diseased and vicious to whom the so-called protection, vaccination, is
prohibited by official instructions. These children have no vitality to resist
small-pox and other zymotic diseases, hence it is that a larger number of the
unvaccinated or unhealthy children die of small-pox than the general average.
This pretended protection must needs be given not to the weak and sickly, who
most require protection, but to those whose physical strength is itself an
all-sufficing safeguard.
The British Medical Journal, an ardent pro-vaccinating advocate, in
its issue of Oct. 23, 1880, says, "It is probable that a larger proportion
of unvaccinated persons is to be found amongst the ignorant, dirty, and
wretched inhabitants of the slums of London, and very few amongst the educated
and better fed members of society. The disease is much intensified by
over-crowding." Thus the highest vaccination medical authority vitiates
and overturns the entire fabric of Dr. BUCHANAN’S figures which, both in
England and Germany, seemed a few months ago to have galvanised the vanquished
Jennerians into a spasmodic vitality. When Dr, SOUTHWOOD SMITH, Mr. EDWIN
CHADWICK, Mr. H. D. DUDGEON, and other leading sanitarians, commenced their
work thirty years ago, by showing that filth, bad drainage, impure water, and
overcrowded dwellings were the causes of zymotic diseases, the rank and file of
the medical profession ridiculed their theories with unsparing scorn. Evidence,
nevertheless, as to the truth of the theory and contention accumulated, so
rapidly indeed, that had not many of the doctors. relinquished their fatuous
objections, they must have placed themselves outside the intelligence of the
age. The vaccinators yielded to public opinion reluctantly, and so far as
small-pox is concerned, many of them still audaciously defend their
oft-exploded theories. One of the most striking proofs in support of my
contention is that afforded in a letter written by our esteemed friend and
colleague, the energetic sanitary reformer, Dr. OIDTMANN, illustrating the
enormous advantages of sanitation in preventing small-pox in the German
invading army, and the dangerous consequences of the neglect of these
precautions in the French army ; the conditions as to vaccination being alike
in both cases.
In the Natur-Arzt, published at Dresden in 1873, Dr. OIDTMANN says
:—" In my numerous marches and halts in the campaign of 1870-71, I
directed my particular attention to the health statistics. After the taking of
Verdun, I noticed that the rooms in which the French hospital patients were
miserably decimated during the bombardment, were inexpressibly close and
ill-smelling—breeding places of small-pox poison. The only German physician of
the garrison being unwell, it fell to my lot to root out these filthy
lurking-holes of pestilence. At a later period, after the battle of St. Quentin,
I was physician of the garrison staff of that place, and all the statistics of
the French, German, and International Hospitals for six weeks in succession
passed through my hands. The number of French who, during that time, died in
these hospitals of pyaemia (blood-poisoning) and phlegmonia (blood impurities)
was so wonderfully great in proportion to the small death-rate of the German
hospitals, that the vaccination statistics of your English newspapers can
hardly admit of comparison with it. What then was the cause of the ‘protection’
of our people from these two diseases? Had they been inoculated for pyaemia and
phlegmonia? Certainly not. But, whereas in the French hospitals a veritable
pest atmosphere reigned night and day, yet at Abbeville, on the contrary, where
we had no French army doctors, and where the arrangements of the hospital were
in the joint hands of myself and the medical men of the place, the statistics
of recovery from small-pox were highly favourable, and indeed equal for French
and Germans. The enormous difference between the small-pox mortality of the two
armies, was caused by the crying neglect of hygienic precautions in the French
military department, and by the excessive concentration of their system of
stationary sick depots, as opposed to the freshness of the hygienic
arrangements of the German hospitals, and the ambulatory movements of their
scattered troops. No more decisive proof can exist of the correctness of my
theory— that the strength and spread of small-pox is both proportioned to and
progressive with the fostering and shutting in of the small-pox vapour—than
these statistics of the Franco-Germian War."
Proofs of the truth of the value of sanitation are, however, nearer at hand,
and a satisfactory demonstration is afforded by the associations in London
which have devoted their attention to improving the dwellings [Dr. SOUTHWOOD
SMITH, referring to the improved conditions of the inhabitants of the model
dwellings, at p.17 of his "Results of Sanitary Improvements." says.:—’There
has been in the improved dwellings complete exemption of typhus, cholera, and,
it may be added, small-pox; yet it must be admitted, that other forms of
zymotic disease—scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, and diarrhoea—have
occurred, though rarely, and these maladies have in no instance spread."]
of the poor. A wholesome habitation in a crowded district is shown to diminish
the death-rate by a third or half, as compared with that of the occupiers of
old houses in the same locality. I have before me a report of the thirty-sixth
half-yearly meeting of the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company, held at the
Mansion House, London, August 5, 188i. This association controls 3,681
tenements or habitations (with a population of 18,000 persons), nearly all of
which are located in the denser parts of London, and the mortality is only 16.7
per thousand, while the death-rate of the adjoining houses is 30 to 35.
Although the report is for a year when there was a severe epidemic of small-pox
the secretary, Mr. JAMES MOORE, informs me that only one death from that
disease occurred. The thirty-seventh report of another, the Metropolitan
Association for improving the Dwellings of the Industrial Classes, read June 6,
1881, gives the death-rate of an average population of 5,675 at 155 per
thousand. And as the average mortality of the entire metropolis is 23 per
thousand, there has been a saving of life of seven or eight per thousand. In
the last-named association there has not been one death from smallpox during
the past ten years, while the surrounding habitations have often been the
hotbeds of contagion. An equally satisfactory result has been achieved by the
Victoria Dwellings Association, which has been in existence six years. Their
buildings are situated at King’s Cross, a crowded centre of the Metropolis, and
at Batter-sea, one of the outlying suburbs. The average population has been
2,500, out of which only twenty-four deaths occurred during the past twelve
months, or less than half the Metropolitan death-rate, and not a single death
from small-pox since the association was formed. The facts prove the truth of
my contention, that sanitation is sufficient to prevent and stamp out all
zymotic diseases including small-pox; and even if it could be shown that
vaccination would do the same, it is nevertheless wholly unnecessary. Earl
SPENCER, in opening the Sanitary Exhibition in London, on July 16, said that
already in Great Britain the death-rate had been so much diminished during the
past ten years that 300,000 lives have been saved, as compared with the
previous decade, and this was largely due to improved sanitation. An official
report on the sanitary condition for 1881, says that more than three-fourths of
the reduction is due to the decrease of severe zymotic diseases, the product of
filth, which good sanitation can remove.
It is clear, therefore, from the foregoing facts, that small-pox can be
extirpated by means of sanitation alone, a remedy which, besides being
absolutely efficacious, can be adopted by municipalities and by individuals
with the certainty that it is attended with none of the dreaded evils
inseparable from the compulsory injection of lymph of doubtful origin and
unknown virulence and power. The testimony of Dr. FARR and Professor PLAYFAIR,
both pro-vaccinators, and the evidence deduced from the death-rate of the
various improved dwellings associations, leave Governments without excuse for
continuing a system which, besides being of non-effect as a preventive, is
often the cause of ineradicable mischief. Compulsory medicine, according to the
testimony of Mr. MACLAREN, the late Lord Advocate for Scotland, and other high
authorities, is opposed to the ancient constitution of England, and is,
therefore, a gross infraction of the liberty of the Citizen and of parental
rights. The work of our Congress is to assist in restoring the birthright of
our citizens, to give back to parents their highest duty and privilege—the
sacred right to protect and defend their offspring from evil, and to
liberate the oppressed of many nations from an ignorant, unjust, and
indefensible tyranny.
The laws which I arraign are overbearing, but being founded on injustice,
must ere long crumble before a growing public opinion, which now demands, and
will soon compel, their unconditional repeal ; and the pretended duty of
experimenting upon our neighbour’s children will cease to supersede the real
duty of protecting our own.
[Smallpox] [Tebb] [Smallpox books]
ALL
INFORMATION, DATA, AND MATERIAL CONTAINED, PRESENTED, OR PROVIDED HERE IS FOR
GENERAL INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED AS REFLECTING THE
KNOWLEDGE OR OPINIONS OF THE PUBLISHER, AND IS NOT TO BE CONSTRUED OR INTENDED
AS PROVIDING MEDICAL OR LEGAL ADVICE. THE DECISION WHETHER OR NOT TO
VACCINATE IS AN IMPORTANT AND COMPLEX ISSUE AND SHOULD BE MADE BY YOU, AND YOU
ALONE, IN CONSULTATION WITH YOUR HEALTH CARE PROVIDER.