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

CHAPTER V.

WOODVILLE, PEARSON AND JENNER.

Another early and earnest examiner of Jenner’s Inquiry was Dr. William Woodville, physician to the London Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital. He was a Cumberland man, born at Cockermouth, 1752; a member of the Society of Friends. An ardent botanist, he turned two acres of the ground around the Hospital at King’s Cross into a botanic garden, which he maintained at his own expense. He died of a chronic pulmonary complaint in 1805, and in his last illness had himself removed from his house in Ely Place to the Hospital for the sake of the garden and the country air.

Woodville was eager to try cowpox, but Jenner had no supply, nor could any be had elsewhere. He therefore resorted to horsegrease, but could make nothing of it. In his own words—

Thrice in person did Woodville submit to inoculation with horsegrease, but in vain. Others in London and elsewhere attempted to raise pox on cows in the same way without result save malediction on Jenner for originating such a troublesome quest.

Thus closed 1798 with many anxious to try the new prescription whenever there was a chance. Early in the new year, there was a cry in London, ’Tis found! ’tis found! In Harrison’s dairy, Gray’s Inn Road, close by the Smallpox Hospital, cowpox was discovered, and thither hastened Woodville, Pearson, Sir Joseph Banks, Sir William Watson, Dr. Garthshore, Dr. Willan, and other medical men; and in their presence, on 19th January, Woodville inoculated six patients with the pox.[107] The eruptions on the cows’ teats were diligently compared with the description and plates in Jenner’s Inquiry, and pronounced identical. Four-fifths of the 200 cows in the dairy became affected, those not in milk escaping the disease; likewise some of the milkers, the first being Sarah Rice, who had undergone smallpox in childhood—a proof that smallpox did not prevent cowpox. “At the same time,” wrote Dr. Pearson, “I received the agreeable intelligence that the disease was also raging in the largest stock of cows on the New Road, near Paddington, to which no one could gain admittance but myself.”

With cowpox thus provided in abundance, Pearson and Woodville set to work—Woodville at his Hospital, and Pearson in private practice. Be it observed, however, that this London cowpox was not Jenner’s cowpox. It was not horsegrease cowpox, but the variety stigmatised by Jenner as spurious. How Pearson and Woodville pressed forward with their enterprise appears from the following letter, enclosing cowpox threads, sent by Pearson to two hundred medical practitioners throughout the United Kingdom—

Jenner was of an indolent disposition, but the part Pearson was playing stung him to action. His nephew, Rev. G. C. Jenner, wrote to him from London, and thus roused his jealousy—

Jenner at once communicated the alarming intelligence to his friend Gardner with a sly suggestion for counter-action—

As human nature exists, it was not extraordinary that Jenner should feel anxious over the occupation of ground he considered his own; but at the same time it is obvious, that Pearson had done nothing wrong, nothing that was not allowable, nothing indeed that was not praiseworthy. He allowed Jenner full credit for having advertised the Gloucestershire faith in cowpox, and for the production of certain evidence for that faith; but he set aside Jenner’s prescription of horsegrease cowpox, and was making use of a form of cowpox that Jenner had explicitly condemned. Whilst Jenner, too, had excited curiosity, he did nothing, or could do nothing, to satisfy it; and it was idle to expect the world to await his convenience: nor was Pearson the man to rest content where action was possible. As he said—

Jenner was not slow to respond to his nephew’s summons to London. He left Berkeley on the 21st of March, and remained in town until the 11th of June, visiting medical men, asserting his own claims, and counter-acting the operations of Pearson and Woodville.

In Dr. Pearson’s circular, it will be observed, that he described inoculation with cowpox as attended with eruptions in some cases, which could not be distinguished from smallpox. So far as Pearson and Woodville were concerned, it was an unfortunate statement, and gave Jenner an advantage over them which he used unsparingly to their discredit.

Jenner’s claim for inoculation with cowpox was, that it excited a fever that was not infectious and was without pustular eruptions; and here was Dr. Pearson setting up as his critic, and Dr. Woodville assuming to develop his practice, and producing a disorder that was indistinguishable from smallpox! Such presumption and ignorance deserved to be hooted.

What was the explanation? Simply this: that Woodville conducted some of his cowpox inoculations in the variolous atmosphere of his Hospital, and that he thereby communicated smallpox and cowpox simultaneously. In a scientific sense, the experience was valuable; it proved that it was possible to have cowpox and smallpox at the same time—that neither disease superseded or nullified the other.

Woodville tried to vindicate himself, and in his failure magnified Jenner’s triumph still further. Yet he had much that was reasonable to say for himself. For example, he had transmitted to Jenner some of the virus from one of the first of his cowpox inoculations in January, and with it Jenner operated on twenty persons, reporting to Woodville—

Nevertheless, wrote Woodville—

Woodville also argued, that “Cowpox, as casually produced by milking infected cows, differs considerably from that which is the effect of inoculation”; which Jenner attested in saying—

Others maintained that the cowpox which saved milkmaids from smallpox was a much severer affection than that induced by Jenner’s lancet, and that it was folly to assume their equivalence. There was force in the argument; for every one then knew how much the issue of smallpox inoculation depended on the mode of its performance. The infection when communicated through the skin was usually much less severe than when communicated by incision; and Jenner related how a country inoculator, who liked to “cut deep enough to see a bit of fat,” was the death of his patients on every side. The human body is of infinite delicacy and complexity, and we are sure to find ourselves at fault when we deal with its mysteries according to our crude and inanimate logic. It is by experiment and not by syllogism that physiological truth is verified.

Whatever might be the perils, immediate or remote, of inoculation with cowpox, it was not attended with smallpox eruption; and at last it became manifest to Woodville himself, that the virus he had used, and the virus he had distributed, which had produced such eruption, was the virus of smallpox.

After much controversy and many experiments these conclusions were arrived at—

1. That when a person was inoculated with smallpox and cowpox about the same time, both inoculations proved effective. There was a pustular eruption on the skin from the smallpox, and the cowpox vesicle reached maturity in the usual number of days.

2. These effects took place, without much variation, in all cases where the interval between the two inoculations did not exceed a week; but—

3. When the smallpox matter was inserted on the ninth day after the inoculation with cowpox, its action seemed to be wholly precluded.[110]

That is to say, for a time—until the influence of the vaccine fever had worn off. Some fancied that smallpox when inoculated with cowpox generated a hybrid pox that was more efficacious than either. There was occasionally some interaction of the diseases, as of a subdued activity in each, but generally they proceeded together unaffected, the cowpox maintaining its characteristics in the midst of a crop of smallpox.

One point of great significance in Woodville’s experience was overlooked. He inoculated with cowpox in the Smallpox Hospital, and some of his patients there contracted smallpox, who certainly were not inoculated with smallpox, either accidentally or by design. The lesson of this experience was unperceived, and though it has been repeated again and again, is rarely acknowledged. Vaccination in presence of smallpox, or in an epidemic of smallpox, is often a means of inducing the disease it is intended to prevent. It lights the fire; and when the fire is lighted, it is said, “Ah! it must have been a-light before.” When we have a mind for an excuse, our sophistry is usually equal to the requisition.

The New Inoculation, as it was called, grew in favour daily. Woodville and Pearson did the real work of publicity and promotion—Pearson especially. Within seven months, January to August, 1799, they performed 2000 inoculations. In the Philosophical Journal, August, 1799, Pearson observed—

Nor did Pearson limit his efforts to his native land. He wrote—

Jenner regarded much of this activity with a jealous eye: it did not sufficiently make for his glory. He was anxious, fretful, helpless. “It is impossible for me, single-handed, to combat all my adversaries,” was his whine. “I am beset on all sides with snarling fellows, and so ignorant withal that they know no more of the disease they write about than the animals which generate it.” In order to keep his name to the fore, he published a second pamphlet in the spring of 1799, in which are several details of biographical interest.