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

CHAPTER XLII.

THE GATHERING MOVEMENT—1867-70.

Section 31 of the Act of 1867 implied the doom of Vaccination. It was bad enough to fine a parent for refusing to vaccinate his child; it was, however, a circumscribed annoyance; but to make of refusal a continuous offence until a child attained the age of fourteen was to set up a cause of quarrel that had to be fought out. Slavery in the United States is abolished, but slavery might have endured to this day had the Southerners been more forbearing; but, in the arrogance of their power, they imposed on the Union the Fugitive Slave Law, compelling the people of the North to surrender runaway negroes. This triumph of the slaveholders determined the fate of slavery. In like manner the arrogance of the vaccinators overcame their prudence. Resolved to subdue resistance to their rite, they drove resistance to extremity, and set up an irreducible insurrection. As a medical prescription accepted at discretion, vaccination might have survived unquestioned and paid for; but its transition into an aggressive statute removed it from the safe realm of professional mystery into the jurisdiction of common sense, common observation, and every man’s business.

Sec. 31, Act ’67, was quickly turned to account by the medical officials who had devised and imposed it upon the indifference of Parliament. They had, of course, to operate through local poor-law authorities—a painful necessity; but guardians were occasionally as fanatical as themselves, and exasperated, too, that their petty authority should be set at naught, and especially by parents in humble life. Consequently, here and there over the country continued prosecutions for refusing to vaccinate were initiated, stirring up strife, begetting sympathy with the prosecuted, and gradually converting vaccination into a living political question. Whatever may be thought of Sec. 31, Act ’67, all will allow that it drew a line and established irritation and conflict. Opposition to vaccination had hitherto to contend with nothing so deadly as apathy, but from that drawback it was now delivered. On the other hand, in many parishes, Sec. 31, Act ’67 was allowed to make no difference. Those who disliked vaccination were warned, or prosecuted once, and then let alone; but this leniency served to accentuate the severity practised elsewhere, and to render the law still more odious by reason of the flagrant inequality of its administration.

The scientific opposition to vaccination, initiated by Mr. John Gibbs in 1855, had for some years few accessions, and it required faith in truth in full measure to persist in its advocacy. The Jennerian tradition was so rooted in the public mind that to question it savoured of paradox or profanity. There were occasional manifestations of scepticism when smallpox attacked the vaccinated, but doubt was crushed down as impious and dangerous to established confidence. Mr. Herbert Spencer, for example, in Social Statics, published in 1851, observed—

To such matter-of-fact criticism, any answer must have taken form in the style of the bewildered divine, who exclaimed, “Dear brethren, what theology can we enjoy if such objections be entertained!”

Dr. Charles T. Pearce was one of the first to unite with Mr. Gibbs in his labours. As editor of a medical journal, he happened to receive an article from Mr. Gibbs which set him thinking, and as the result of his inquiries, he came out an enthusiastic anti-vaccinator. He made the question of vaccination completely his own, and lectured on the subject throughout the country, eager and ready for combat. In Northampton, in 1860, he held his first public debate, and under his influence the town became a centre of resistance to the compulsory law, so that Mr. Charles Gilpin, M.P. for the borough, addressing his constituents in 1870, thus expressed himself—

Tenacity was the distinction of Dr. Pearce. Undismayed by whatever odds, he maintained his position with deliberation and patience, and by neither historical, statistical, or physiological data was it possible to circumvent him. When he entered into the controversy in 1856, fool and fanatic was the summary designation of whoever ventured to dispute the salvation wrought by vaccination; but, living until 1883, he witnessed such epithets received with amusement as denoting the ill-humour and impotence of those who employed them.

An energetic advocate of the good cause appeared in Dr. W. J. Collins, who, after twenty years of service in London as public vaccinator, felt compelled to renounce the practice as useless and injurious. He stated his conviction frankly and forcibly before the St. Pancras Sanitary Committee in 1863,[290] and in an essay, vigorous with mother-wit, published in 1867,[291] he communicated much useful and unpleasant information to the credulous and deceived public. To contend with a judgment thus instructed and qualified was useless; and those who were affected by the exposure took care to avoid it. Nor considering the danger to the craft from discussion, was the policy injudicious. Truth has many adversaries, but none so hard to overcome as the non-resistant silence of timorous self-interest.

A leader and organiser of the opposition was wanted, and he appeared in Richard Butler Gibbs, cousin of John Gibbs, who, as we have seen, framed the first systematic indictment of vaccination in 1855. Mr. Gibbs, of Irish parentage, was born in London in 1822, and in the course of a commercial career became agent at Pease’s West Collieries for Joseph Pease of Darlington, the first Quaker M.P. It was in 1863, when a member of the Bishop Auckland board of guardians, that he first moved publicly against vaccination, and then less against the practice itself than against its prescription by the authority at that time vested in the Privy Council. He cautioned his colleagues that they were likely to become (as they since have) the tools of a central medical clique. Subsequently finding himself comparatively free from business, he devoted himself to the cause with which his name has been identified. Gathering together the scattered elements of resistance, he formed in 1866 the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League, and travelled over the country, lecturing and holding public meetings. The enactment of repeated penalties for non-vaccination, strenuously resisted by Mr. Gibbs, established “a raw,” and conferred on the League a grievance and purpose everywhere recognised as indisputable by the people. Sec. 31, Act ’67 was in a popular sense the making of the agitation against vaccination; and it has been maintained (in a sense fortunately) until even the withdrawal of the aggravation cannot save vaccination itself from ultimate rejection. What at the moment we like least, often in the end serves us best.

Mr. Henry Pitman of Manchester entered actively into the movement. He had observed the ill effects of vaccination upon one of his own children, and in connection with Mr. R. B. Gibbs organised public meetings in Manchester and other places. In 1869 he tried how far a penny journal would succeed, and started The Anti-Vaccinator which ran for eighteen weeks. As editor of The Co-operator, which he conducted for ten years, he gave prominence to vaccination news, and in 1870 adjoined Anti-Vaccinator to the title, which was continued until The Co-operative News was established in 1871, when he maintained the publication as The Anti-Vaccinator until the close of the year. In 1876 Mr. Pitman bore testimony to his convictions by going to the Knutsford House of Correction rather than pay the fine and costs imposed upon him for refusing to have his daughter, Violet, vaccinated, and in Prison Thoughts conveyed to others the lesson of his experience. Mr. Pitman has been remarkably successful in impressing public men with his opinions. Courteous and persistent, he has won consideration where rougher speech might not have prevailed.

Professor F. W. Newman was led to a knowledge of the dangers of vaccination by Mr. Henry Pitman; and those who have been observant of his career in later years know with what courage and consistency he has asserted his convictions. Having asked the Professor how he became concerned in the opposition to vaccination, he favoured me thus—

“The outline of my mental history in this direction is as follows. Circumstances had led me to respect Mr. Henry Pitman as a competent and truthful witness of fact. On a certain occasion he spoke publicly on the miserable state to which he had seen a poor lad, Ira Connell of Southport, reduced by vaccination. Ira’s parents, and his brothers and sisters, were all hale: his mother attested that previous to vaccination so was Ira. But after vaccination, Ira had never recovered its dreadful effects, three of his four limbs being crippled.

“Some years later, I myself saw Ira Connell at Southport. I think his age was then 25, but am not sure. He had only one leg sound, and hardly one arm. I will not undertake to describe his state exactly, but it was very pitiable. I am happy to add that in nine or ten years more he has gradually recovered, so as at least not to be visibly crippled.

“Previously I had refused to read anti-vaccination tracts, having too much already to read. I had never known or heard in my own circles of mischief from vaccination, and when some German ladies spoke of its ‘horrors’ I thought them absurd and fanatical; but now that Henry Pitman publicly attested a fact, this woke me up to the duty of further inquiry.

“I at once remembered that in my early youth or boyhood I had been staggered by reading in a medical journal that experience made it impossible to sustain Jenner’s doctrine that vaccination was a certain preventive of smallpox; but the writer nevertheless urged that it was valuable for making smallpox milder if it did follow. This struck me as an ugly shifting of the basis, and far from plausible. One school-and-college fellow of mine, after vaccination, had smallpox that marked him; but nothing further led me to pursue the argument.

“I now at once saw that compulsory vaccination was an infamy, since Parliament could not secure any one from Ira Connell’s fate: and I was indignant on learning that doctors pooh-poohed such miseries, as endured ‘for the general good,’ a theory which justifies any amount of tyranny under the influence of superstition; and I presently remembered that in Roman pestilences sacrifices were believed efficacious, and the arguments of the priests and senators were quite as good as those of our physicians.

“I find that in 1869 I had a sharp debate with a clever young student of Medicine, who poured out the doctrines of the Faculty, which he had been getting up. My respect for the whole Faculty has rapidly got less and less; it had long been declining. I need not obtrude on you the depth to which it has now sunk, excepting always a noble few, who are what Heretics were to the Mediæval Church.

“Next I saw that no Parliament or King has, or can have, any right (on medical theory) to stick a poisoned lancet into a healthy person; and that to fancy that Human Health can be improved by altering the natural blood of Health is an imbecile contemptible fancy. Moreover, that unless Vaccination is believed to remove the causes of smallpox, those causes would entail disease in other ways, and perhaps worse, by suppressing the natural eruption, which eruption alone is called ‘Smallpox.’ My mind was thus decided.

“I did not learn till some years later (what alone concerns Parliament) that the more active is smallpox, the less is the Total Mortality of any year; and conversely, the less active the smallpox, the greater is the Total Mortality. This is the only form of statistics worth attending to. All the rest is dust thrown in our eyes.

“Statistics not founded on a scientific principle are the commonest nidus of fallacy; but if any statistics are to be listened to, those of Total Mortality are the least open to suspicion. The primâ facie evidence is, that instead of Vaccination saving yearly 80,000 lives (Sir Lyon Playfair’s monstrous assertion) Vaccination does only harm; but that Smallpox saves every year many lives (some hundreds or thousands) by a natural eruption, under the morbid circumstances desirable.”

The Countess de Noailles contributed most efficient assistance toward opening the public mind and letting in light. In a communication her ladyship says—

“You ask me how it was that my name came to be connected with the present anti-vaccination movement.

“It was in this way. On my return to England in 1865, Mrs. Cowper-Temple, now Lady Mount Temple, asked me to visit the office of the Ladies’ Sanitary Association, which I had joined her in starting four years before. I had wished the Association to be called the Ladies’ Association for the Protection of the Health of the Children of the Poor; but that was thought too long a name, and was changed; and I mention it only to explain what my idea was in helping to form the Society. Well, on visiting the office of the Association, I saw among the sanitary tracts one with the title, When were you vaccinated? On reading the words, it struck me suddenly that vaccination was all wrong, but as I knew nothing whatever about it, and had heard naught but praise of the practice, I told the excellent secretary of the Association my misgivings on the subject, and she set to work to find out all that was known or thought on the question. Miss Griffiths soon learnt that three relatives—John, Richard, and George Gibbs—had for twenty years been writing and working against vaccination, besides Dr. Collins and others. Seeing that I was not alone in my conviction, I resolved to elicit more opinion on the subject by giving a prize for the best essay on the same, setting forth the supposed benefits, dangers, etc. Miss Griffiths went heart and soul into the question, and with the help of Dr. Druitt, I think, she had judges named and the prize of £100 offered. The judges were Mr. Marson, Dr. Richardson, and Dr. Francis Webb—all in favour of vaccination. The great length of the essay by Dr. Ballard gave it a claim for the prize, and the tremendous because unavoidable admissions as to the dreadful dangers of vaccination contained in this Prize Essay, have caused the doctors to try to suppress it—so at least I have heard.

“Miss Griffiths sent me in November, 1866, the Lancet, containing a horrible account of the poisoning of thirty-six children in Morbihan, Brittany, by public vaccination.

“My forebodings being thus so terribly confirmed, I tried to interest all the doctors who advised the Ladies’ Sanitary Association in the new difficulties in the way of this dreadful practice; but the only one who lent an ear to the sad tale was Dr. Garth Wilkinson, who began mildly, but afterwards waxed valiant in fight. May he and the little band which his genius has helped to bring into the field ‘soon put to flight the armies of the aliens.’

“In 1867 a letter from the Rev. W. Hume-Rothery against compulsory vaccination struck me, and he set to work at the question in the co-operative newspapers; and latterly in the Reporter, in which he has been ably helped by Mrs. Hume-Rothery, the daughter of the late Mr. Joseph Hume, M.P. The strength given to the bad law by Lord Robert Montagu’s Act in 1867 roused its enemies at the same time; and, feeling that my task was done, I left the contest to abler hands.

“I thus found that the Association I had inaugurated in order ‘to protect the health of poor children,’ was being made into an instrument to bind them through their mothers’ ignorance to the most wholesale plan for their degeneration, if not destruction, ever invented by the mind of man. It was in vain that I tried to get the ladies of the Sanitary Association to think over the matter. I was always met by the remark that it was a medical question and one which doctors alone could decide; and all I could obtain of them was to allow me to buy up the offending tract and to remain neutral in the question. When I left the Association a few years after, the tract was circulated again.

“The compulsory law seems to me well described in these words of Carlyle:—‘To decree injustice by a law—inspired prophets have long since seen, what every clear soul may still see, that of all Anarchies and Devil-worships there is none like this; that this is the “throne of iniquity” set up in the name of the Highest, the human apotheosis of Anarchy itself.’”

Dr. Ballard’s essay was of itself a notable achievement. Written in defence of vaccination, the difficulties, dangers and futility of the practice were so largely revealed, that any thoughtful reader was compelled to inquire, Where shall we find compensation for all this trouble, these risks, these sufferings? Dr. Ballard’s essay soon ran out of print, and the author was judiciously enlisted in the medical service of the Local Government Board.

In Dr. Garth Wilkinson the movement obtained the assistance not only of an able physician, but of one whom Emerson has described as “a philosophic critic, with a coequal vigour of understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon’s;” and “with a rhetoric like the armoury of the invincible knights of old.” Having asked Dr. Wilkinson how he came over to the side we identify with sound science and sound sense, he answered—

“The early History of my Opposition to Vaccination is, briefly, this—I had not considered Vaccination a question; but practised it when required. About 1865 the Countess de Noailles assailed my conscience on the subject, and her earnestness forced me to study it. She was backed by the late Mrs. Gibbs, then Miss Griffiths. Through Miss Griffiths I sent the following message to Madame de Noailles—‘Tell her Ladyship that the question is comparatively unimportant. Vaccination is an infinitesimal affair; its reform will come in with greater reforms.’ I also wrote to Madame that the only short way of getting rid of the Medical vested interest was by paying half a million or a million of money down to the Profession, and buying the slaves, the people, out, as the West Indian Blacks were bought out.

“After-studies extending over eighteen years have convinced me that I was wrong in my estimate of the smallness of the Vaccination question compared with other Evils. As forced upon every British Cradle, I see it as a Monster instead of a Poisonous Midge; a Devourer of Nations. As a Destroyer of the Honesty and Humanity of Medicine, which is through it a deeply-degraded Profession. As a Tyrant which is the Parent of a brood of Tyrants, and through Pasteur and his like a Universal Pollution Master. As a Ghoul which sits upon Parliament, and enforces Contamination by Law, and prepares the way for endless violations of personal liberty and sound sense at the bidding of cruel experts. Not denying other forms of Social Wickedness, I now, after careful study, regard Vaccination as one of the greatest and deepest forms, abolishing the last hope and resort of races, the new-born soundness of the Human Body.”

The agitation against compulsory vaccination prospered under the leadership of Mr. Gibbs. He sought help on all sides, and harmonised its various elements to the common purpose of the League. In his various labours he derived efficient assistance from his brother, Mr. G. S. Gibbs of Darlington, who displayed remarkable ability in the interpretation of vital statistics and in the exposure of their misapplications. Mr. Gibbs established branches of the League wherever there were adversaries of the practice, and was especially successful in the north of England. The relentless application of Sec. 31, Act ’67, in certain parts of the country did much to rouse public attention and sympathy. Parents were repeatedly fined for persistent refusal to have children vaccinated, and in default of payment had their property seized, or were committed to prison, sometimes with hard labour. Occasionally sentences were accompanied with gross insolence from the bench. For example, Mr. Bowman having pleaded at Newcastle his conscientious conviction that vaccination might prove injurious to his child, whilst it could never save him from smallpox, was compared to a thief by the magistrate, who said, “I once knew a man who had conscientious scruples against working so long as he could live by stealing; and I do not think conscience of that sort is entitled to respect.” Law on such terms naturally invites execration, and many who might hold by vaccination are thereby turned against it.

By some it was thought questionable whether Sec. 31, Act ’67, did afford warrant for repeated prosecutions. Mr. John Candlish, M.P. for Sunderland, who sat on the Committee of 1866 which dealt with the Bill which became law in 1867, maintained “that it was not intended that penalties should be repeated, but that one penalty should be a discharge from any obligation to submit a child to vaccination.” It is needless to say, an Act of Parliament is not to be interpreted by the intentions of its framers, but by its words. Moreover, if intentions are brought into question, it would be fair to set intentions against intentions. Several who were concerned in promoting the Act of ’67 had intentions more arbitrary than were conveyed in Sec. 31.

The question, was raised by the Rev. H. J. Allen, Primitive Methodist. He had been repeatedly before the bench at St. Neots, and was committed to prison for fourteen days, but, having paid the fine, £5, was liberated. In less than a month, he was summoned again, and fined £1 for each of his children, including costs. An appeal was made to the Court of Queen’s Bench in 1870, and judgment confirmed the severer interpretation of Sec. 31, Act ’67. Lord Chief Justice Cockburn held that a parent having been fined under the Act for disobeying an order to have his child vaccinated, may be proceeded against from time to time as long as the child remains unvaccinated. He declined to discuss whether vaccination was good or bad; the Legislature had treated it as a matter of great importance, and had passed Acts to ensure attention to it; that being so, he could not doubt that the intention of the Legislature was not merely to impose a penalty upon a person, once and for all, for having omitted to do that which the public health and safety required; but to enforce obedience to the requisitions of the law. He thought, therefore, the order to vaccinate might be renewed, and the penalties might be repeated until the order was obeyed. Mr. Justice Mellor and Mr. Justice Hannen concurred. The judgment in this case, known as Allen v. Worthy, has been repeatedly questioned and always reaffirmed.

Immediately after Mr. Candlish introduced a Bill to the House of Commons to amend the law, repeating his conviction that the construction put upon the Act of ’67 was never intended by Parliament, and that it was by mere verbal accident that penalties were made continuous. The Bill was introduced too late in the session (6th July, 1870) to be carried, but it led to discussion and a promise from Government that the question would be remitted to a Committee next year, 1871.