The Story of a Great Delusion in a Series of Matter-of-Fact Chapters

CHAPTER XXVI.

BARON’S LIFE OF JENNER.

We owe much to Baron’s Life of Jenner, but as a collection of evidence rather than as an organic biography. It is verbose and loosely put together, and would never be read unless by some one in quest of information, or with nothing better to do. Fortunately Baron was reverent and not critical. Jenner was to him a sacred being, admirable in all relations, whose only contention was with “the blindness and wickedness of his traducers.” Lives written in this temper are often most instructive. Tales are told and letters produced in pious simplicity that biographers of the judicious order discreetly suppress.

Baron made Jenner’s acquaintance in the summer of 1808 when he was living at Fladong’s Hotel, Oxford Street, revelling in a fool’s paradise as to his importance in the formation of the National Vaccine Establishment. Baron had recently come from Edinburgh, and says,—

The passage is a long one, but it has some value in itself, and exhibits Baron’s habitual attitude toward his hero. In his private relations, Jenner was amiable, but it is with his public life that we are concerned, and find so reprehensible. Mischievous leaders and teachers are frequently distinguished by private graces; and austere personal virtue is frequently associated with bland indifference to conventional immoralities; and we need not go far to discover counterparts of Jenner in ordinary life. Nothing is commoner than suavity combined with self-love that is malignant and mendacious when thwarted. All is pleasant as long as admiration prevails, but with dissent or resistance the sunny temper vanishes, and clouds of contempt and fury overspread the spiritual sky. A sharp test of character is a man’s disposition to his adversaries; and Jenner was never magnanimous. His conduct to Pearson, Woodville, and Walker has been sufficiently described; and similar jealousy and spitefulness were displayed to whoever dared to impugn his infallibility in the prevention of smallpox. No one, for instance, could have brought forward the fact that smallpox occasionally succeeded vaccination with more simple good faith than Goldson; yet Jenner wrote of him with insufferable insolence—an insolence that is thrown into stronger relief by the knowledge that what Goldson testified is accepted at this day, even by vaccinators, as indisputable matter-of-course. His bully, too, John Ring, attacked Goldson, and Jenner, in writing to Dunning, 23rd December, 1804, thus excused his brutality—

In the same spirit he wrote to Baron, 6th November, 1810, of Brown of Musselburgh, who had reported certain cases of smallpox after vaccination in a London newspaper—

As applied to Brown, sagacious and sincere, this was the very ecstasy of abuse. Even Brown’s adversaries within his own neighbourhood, ultimately yielded to his contention. In the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal of July, 1818, we read—

In short, calm discussion of vaccination with Jenner was never possible. Inquiry was borne down with clamour, and scepticism denounced as malevolence. “He could not altogether escape,” says Baron, “from the annoyance occasioned by the blindness and wickedness of his traducers”[208]—and all were traducers who were not believers. Indeed, Baron could only account for the perversity of those who did not recognise Jenner as the saviour of mankind from smallpox by a resort to the doctrine of inbred depravity, saying—

Purified and strengthened, and the affinity with falsehood dissolved, it became possible for the understanding to appreciate the virtue of cowpox and the veracity of its advertiser!

Jenner, it may be said, instinctively resented investigation. He was uneasy in conscious duplicity. He knew there was no safety in vaccination as practised; for the cowpox employed was not the horsegrease cowpox he had commended as efficacious. What he had prescribed was disregarded; what he had condemned was approved; but, strange to say, he was praised and rewarded by the world as if cowpox had been his specific! Jenner accepted the situation, and possibly came to believe (after a fashion) that he was enjoying no more than his own; but under the circumstances it was not surprising that he shrank from criticism, kept his early publications out of the way, and resorted to scolding and shrieking whenever scrutiny appeared imminent.

Worse even than his behaviour to investigators and opponents was his treatment of those who converted vaccination to practice. The Inquiry was no handbook, and Pearson, Woodville, and other early vaccinators, had to make their own way, not only unassisted, but with Jenner ready to appropriate their successes and to reproach them with their failures. Baron avers that nothing in the art of vaccination was due to any one but Jenner himself, qualifying this praise with a slight exception in favour of Dr. Bryce of Edinburgh, who made the discovery that if a subject under vaccination is re-vaccinated, the subsequent inoculation is caught up and brought to maturity with the precedent—a phenomenon that as Bryce’s Test was used to ascertain whether true vaccine fever was operative. But even Bryce received scant acknowledgment, and Baron tries to make out that Jenner was possessed of the fact ere it was announced.[210] Jenner’s meanness toward those who displayed any intelligent independence in co-operation with him is written at large in Baron’s biography, but with such innocence that it would be absurd to describe it as indecent. His good faith is perfect, and it is only a critical reader that finds out how he is identified with Jenner, seeing merit nowhere save in his abject servitors and feminine claque.

Vaccinators at this day allow that the influence of vaccination wears out and ought to be renewed; yet Jenner would not listen for a moment to such a modification of its perpetual prophylaxy. Baron writes—

When in 1813 Lord Boringdon introduced his bill to Parliament for the restriction of variolation, Lord Ellenborough observed—

In this declaration the Chief Justice was not singular, but expressed the general conviction of the public who held by vaccination in spite of the manifest failure of the early promises made for it. Nevertheless Jenner was extremely annoyed: it was to him as the formal deliverance of judgment. Baron says—

Thorough was Baron in his defence of Jenner: no inconsistency appalled him. He records in capitals (as produced) the following as Jenner’s solemn and final testimony, written, a few days before he expired, on the back of a letter, bearing the post-mark, 14th January, 1823—

Self-deception after this pattern is far from uncommon, and is proof against evidence and death itself; but Jenner was not quite so crazy as his words imply. From his first opinion about vaccination, and its absolute efficacy against smallpox (unlike anything hitherto known in medical experience) he had retreated considerably. Even so early as 1804 he had reduced his claim for vaccination to equality with variolation. In that year he observed—

And again Baron cites him as saying—

Jenner presumed freely on the forgetfulness of those he addressed. In a document so well known as his petition to the House of Commons in 1802, he expressly claimed that a person inoculated with cowpox was thereby “rendered perfectly secure from the infection of smallpox through life”; nor would the furore which attended the introduction of the practice have been possible had it been set forth as no more than a milder form of variolation. That cowpox was equivalent to smallpox for inoculation was laughed at by the variolators; but that a vaccinated person was as safe from smallpox as one who had passed through the disease, was true in no other sense than that Jenner wished it to be true, and prophesied accordingly. It was by such contrivances that he broke his own fall, and alleviated the disenchantment of the credulous.

Oddly enough Jenner’s fiction, that vaccination was as good against smallpox as smallpox itself, was revived in the innocence of ignorance by Sir William Gull before a committee of the House of Commons in 1871. “Vaccination is as protective against smallpox as smallpox itself,” said the fashionable physician. Confutation was, however, at hand. Mr. Marson (for thirty-five years resident surgeon of the Highgate Smallpox Hospital) attested that cases of smallpox after smallpox were comparatively rare—not 1 per cent.; whilst 84 per cent. of those admitted to the Hospital in 1864 were vaccinated. An instructive contrast between the logic of fancy and matter of fact!

Baron, with unscrupulous disregard of evidence, complains that vaccination should ever have been represented as an infallible preventive of smallpox; so that as pointed out in the Report of the Royal College of Physicians in 1807, “the fate of the new practice was made to hang on the occurrence of a single case of smallpox”; and goes on to observe—

The summary answer to this statement is, that it is untrue. Jenner anticipated no failures. On the contrary, he vehemently denied them; and when denial could no longer avail, he invented a variety of excuses, such as spurious cowpox and omnipresent herpes, to account for their occurrence; though always ready (as we have seen) to hark back to his original assertion that vaccination was “an infallible preventive of smallpox.” Baron did not like the word “infallibility.” He writes—

Whether he did make use of the word “infallible” is of slight importance. There are various modes in which the same meaning may be conveyed, and Jenner’s was unequivocal. It was in 1801 that appealing to the rigid scrutiny that had taken place in the first professional circles of Europe, he deliberately proclaimed it as certain—

When Lord Ellenborough in 1813 described vaccination as affording no more than a temporary security from smallpox, he merely expressed the diminished confidence of the community in the practice; but it is the habit of adventurers to ascribe adverse manifestations of public feeling to petty causes; and thus Jenner held that the Chief Justice was indulging a personal grudge when he threw doubt on the perpetual efficacy of his prescription. On one occasion, so ran the story, Ellenborough was relating in a company at St. James’s how Jenner had so little faith in cowpox that he had used smallpox to inoculate his own child, when he was suddenly confronted by an irate personage, who exclaimed, “I am Dr. Jenner, and what you have stated is not true!” whereupon Ellenborough slunk aside in confusion. The fact of the rencontre in the sensational form, we may credit as we please; but about the variolation of Jenner’s child there is no doubt whatever. We have the circumstance recorded by himself with such explanation as he considered adequate.

Turning to the Inquiry, we find under Case XXII. that Robert F. Jenner, aged eleven months, was vaccinated on 12th April, 1798, and that he did not receive the infection. The operation was not repeated, and he remained unvaccinated. Some time afterwards, whilst Jenner was residing at Cheltenham, Mr. Cother, a surgeon, happened to drop in, and having taken the child in his arms, mentioned in the course of conversation, that he had just left a family suffering from smallpox. “Sir,” cried Jenner, “you know not what you are doing! That child is not protected.” What was to be done? “There was no doubt on my mind,” says Jenner, “that the boy was infected;” and having none of the precious horsegrease cowpox in his possession, he held that he was without alternative, and by Mr. Cother the lad was immediately inoculated with smallpox.

The fact in due course got abroad, and, as Baron relates, was made the most of by the opponents of vaccination—

Such talk was very natural, nor was it without justification. Jenner ought to have proved his sincerity by the vaccination of his son; and he who denounced variolation and variolators with such bitterness might have accepted the risk of infection from Mr. Cother rather than have compromised himself so injuriously. Moreover (as was asked at the time) if the child was infected, what was the use of inoculation? Variolation and vaccination (it was argued) may be serviceable in keeping off smallpox, but are of no avail after infection.

Vaccination has been described as a remarkable survival of superstition in hygiene—many, who disowning all other dodges for the maintenance of health, holding by it. Of course Jenner knew nothing of hygiene in the scientific sense—it was revealed after his time; but it is noteworthy that in none of his publications or letters is there any anticipation of the truth that has proved so fruitful in our experience, namely, that ill-health indicates ill-living, and that the misery of disease is only remediable in so far as we come out of the conditions of disease. Whilst of such truth he knew nothing, he might have known something. It lay plainly before him that smallpox was an affliction of the poor, and of the prosperous in so far as they shared the conditions of the poor, but he never recognised the fact. On the contrary, he cherished the fantasy that various diseases were derived from association with animals; and that thus smallpox originated in cowpox, which in turn came from horsegrease. “There,” said he to his nephew, pointing to a horse with greasy heels, “there is the source of smallpox.”[220] To entertain such an opinion was to be stone-blind to the true causes of disease, and therefore we have no reason for surprise that the Jenner household lived in chronic ill-health, piously submissive to what they supposed the divine will. Typhus fever was recurrent in the household without a suspicion that anything was amiss on the human side. There was a genius named Dawes Worgan, whom Jenner received into his family as tutor to his son, but ere a year had elapsed the poor fellow had two attacks of typhus, and finally succumbed to pulmonary consumption in 1809, in his nineteenth year. Chantry Cottage, Jenner’s residence at Berkeley, was no temple of Hygeia: on the contrary, such a place at this day would be a terror to a respectable neighbourhood, and subject to the attention of the sanitary inspector.

The principle of vaccination conceded—that health may be purchased by disease, it was not surprising that it was thought that measles and scarlet fever could be extirpated by similar treatment. Sir Humphry Davy suggested that hydrophobia might be anticipated by the inoculation of another animal virus, but Jenner held that cowpox should be tried—“nothing like leather.” It was reported from Constantinople that the plague itself was stayed by vaccination, and that experiments, exactly like those used to demonstrate its power against smallpox, had been repeated with complete success. There was not, however, enterprise in the East for the development of the quackery.

Jenner taught that distemper in dogs was preventible by vaccination, and accumulated a variety of “first-rate evidence” in proof. It was no transitory whim. He vaccinated twenty of the King’s staghounds in 1801, and in 1809 contributed a paper to the Medico-Chirurgical Society on the subject, wherein he expressed the opinion that the disease had only existed in England for the past half century. Several great fox hunters had their hounds vaccinated, and the results were pronounced satisfactory.[221] Why, then, was the practice not continued? Why is not distemper exterminated? May we not say the reason is plain? The first-rate evidence was illusory. Men are apt to create the facts they wish for, but as desire subsides, they recover their normal eyesight. Cowpox, we are persuaded, was as good against distemper in dogs as against smallpox in human beings, and but for extraneous causes, it would have been abandoned for the one as for the other.

For Jenner it has to be said, that if deceived, he had much to excuse his self-deception. There are men possessed of convictions which they maintain in the face of an indifferent or antagonistic world, but Jenner was not such a man. If his Inquiry had gone the way of waste-paper, he would have offered no resistance; but instead, it was proclaimed by Pearson as worthy of universal attention, and the hour being propitious, the middle-aged country doctor suddenly found himself treated as the deliverer of mankind from smallpox, whilst Pearson, his promoter, was swept aside as a half-hearted worshipper of the new divinity. Adulation was administered without measure, and if Jenner took it for true, and was led to imagine that he had more in him than he ever imagined, what marvel! He became the centre of a European craze of a character and intensity that is perhaps without parallel. Emperors and kings, statesmen and philanthropists, men of science, and in short the whole educated world conspired to do him reverence. The craze gradually abated, and the abatement was most decided in the country of its origin, and chiefly in London where cowpox and its advertiser were most closely scrutinised. Jenner abhorred London. There he had proposed to flourish as a West-End physician, and there he had encountered a dismal failure. There, too, his antagonists were active, and their demonstration of the futility of his assertions most conclusive. We see his temper toward London in such a passage as the following from a letter to Dunning, dated Cheltenham, 21st February, 1806—

Whilst the doors of almost every scientific corporation in the world were thrown open to receive him, the Royal College of Physicians of London maintained an honourable reserve; and when in 1814 his claim to admission was strongly urged, the majority insisted that, if received, he should submit to the usual examination—a sufficient check in Jenner’s case.[223] The College has been reproached for its treatment of “the immortal benefactor of the human race,” but it is forgotten how intimately the leading members were acquainted with his immortality, and with what disgust they must have received his confession in 1807 as to the non-existence of spurious cowpox.

Toward the close of his life, Jenner rarely appeared in London. His last visit took place in 1814, when he was presented to the Emperor of Russia. “I am happy to think,” said Alexander, “that you have received the thanks, the applause, and the gratitude of the world;” to which Jenner made answer, “I have received the thanks and the applause, but not the gratitude of the world”—the absent gratitude being a periphrase for absent cash, and a hint to the Czar that he might repeat the superb munificence of his grandmother, Catharine, to her inoculator Dimsdale. The Emperor, however, gave nothing, and Jenner retired keenly disappointed. Whatever the imperial disposition, Jenner did little to render it more propitious by using his audience to denounce Walker and the Friends by whom vaccination was at that time chiefly promoted; for as Alexander said, “I love the good Quakers: they are my friends, indeed;” and whoever slandered them was not likely to advance in his favour.

With all he got Jenner reckoned himself ill-paid; and taking the words of his admirers for sincere, he was ill-paid. Many a successful slayer of his kind had much more from the House of Commons with less fuss than their ideal preserver; but there is often a measure of sincerity within insincerity, and many of those who praised Jenner most rapturously felt that he had not been dealt with illiberally as the advertiser of cowpox.

Jenner’s wife died in 1815, an ailing, pious, affectionate woman, and thenceforth he dwelt in retirement until his death on the 26th of January, 1823, at the age of seventy-four. “Never,” he wrote to his friend Gardner on 13th January, a week before his demise, “Never was I involved in so many perplexities.” Hailed with acclamation in 1800-2 as the saviour of mankind from smallpox, during the remaining twenty years of his life he underwent a steady course of discredit as failure after failure was recorded and attested against vaccination. Appropriate therefore was his farewell to the world in 1823, “Never was I involved in so many perplexities.” There was not enthusiasm left to effect the interment of his remains in Westminster Abbey, and the funeral took place at Berkeley. An attempt was made to obtain a grant from Parliament for a monument, but the proposal fell flat. Baron then set on foot a subscription for the purpose, but it met with little encouragement. The only public bodies which contributed anything were the Edinburgh Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, the first sending £50 and the second £10. With much difficulty sufficient was scraped together to order a statue from Sievier, which was set up at the west end of the nave of Gloucester Cathedral. The front panel of the pedestal originally bore the dates of birth and death, but Baron had them removed, considering the word Jenner all significant.

In latter times, in 1859, a statue was erected to his memory in Trafalgar Square, London, close by the College of Physicians, but it was felt to have an air of possible quackery about it, and by and bye was quietly removed to a corner in Kensington Gardens. There is, as I have remarked, a measure of sincerity even in insincerity; and it is impossible for any one with a lively sense of veracity to know Edward Jenner and entertain for him any respect.