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CHAPTER XXI.

MOSELEY, ROWLEY AND SQUIRREL.

It may be well to devote a chapter to those antagonists of Vaccination who, though right in their contention against cowpox, did more or less to discredit their cause by scurrility and extravagance. The faults of these men are frequently adduced as evidence of the absurd and brutal resistance with which Vaccination was encountered, but it is forgotten how intense was their provocation, and how the bad on one side was matched by the bad on the other. It was a contest between Smallpoxers and Cowpoxers, alike ignorant of the conditions of physical well-being. It is plain, however, in the light of our later experience, that much that was asserted by the Smallpoxers of the uselessness and harmfulness of cowpox must have been exactly and painfully true, though persistently and ferociously denied.

In the Edinburgh Review for October, 1806, appeared an article entitled “Pamphlets on Vaccine Inoculation,” which may be taken as a reflection of the state of the controversy at that date, and as an index to the chief offenders against propriety. The article was written by the editor, Francis Jeffrey, and was a product of that perspicuous intelligence, which reduced to order whatever was subjected to its action, in much the same way that a housemaid “sets to rights” a library by ranging the books according to their sizes and bindings, and assorting the papers so that they lie neatly disposed. As is the habit of able editors, a view of the variolous controversy was evolved that might be comfortably accepted and confidently repeated by his readers—the evolution of such rational mirage being regarded for the time as veracious matter-of-fact.

First we may take the reviewer’s evidence as to the extent and fury of the controversy—

Furious was the controversy, but why was it furious? There are often great fights over little matters, but the reason is that the little matters are vitally related to the self-love of the combatants; and thus it was with the Cowpoxers and the Smallpoxers. The Cowpoxers set out with the absolute assertion that whoever submitted to their prescription would be secure from smallpox for life. Without proof, or with powerful sham proof, the assertion was endorsed by the mass of the medical profession, and there followed the conversion of the community in that sort of faith-panic which is described by Carlyle as Swarmery—

People thus enchanted do not like to be brought to their senses; and medical men, who in 1800 attested the perpetual prophylaxy of cowpox, were naturally very unwilling to be proved deceivers and deceived. When cases of smallpox were reported as following vaccination, they at first denied the possibility, saying that either there had been no vaccination, or that the smallpox was not smallpox. On the other hand, the Smallpoxers who had been snuffed out by the Cowpoxers, revived in presence of the discovered impotence of the new practice, and stoutly maintained, and cruelly demonstrated that unquestionable vaccinations were followed by unquestionable smallpox. It needs little acquaintance with human nature to see unlimited elements of bitterness in these conditions. To be convicted of imposture does not beget equanimity, nor contradiction as to plain matter-of-fact; and thus convicted were the Cowpoxers and thus contradicted were the Smallpoxers.

The Edinburgh reviewer described Dr. Moseley’s treatise on cowpox as blending “the ravings of Bedlam with the tropes of Billingsgate.” Some Billingsgate I concede, but not Bedlam at all. Much however depends on the point of view. Vaccination if regarded as a blessing in which the inspiration of heaven was consummated in the salvation of the human race from smallpox,[170] resistance thereto might appear, as Carlyle observes of creatures under enchantment, as “malignantly insane.”

Dr. Moseley’s book,[171] it is to be allowed, was singularly exasperating. He had spoken against cowpox from the outset, and was charged with condemning that of which he knew nothing; to which he cogently replied that he could scarcely know less than the gang of medical men who attested its perpetual efficacy in the newspapers in 1800 before they had any proper experience of it whatever. If his scepticism was premature, what was their credulity? Moseley had patience: no argument could be heard in the rage that set in for the new salvation. “Cowpox, I admit, is not contagious,” he said, “but cow-mania is.” When, however, in process of time it was seen in hundreds of cases that cowpox conferred no immunity from smallpox, he published in 1804 Lues Bovilla—a somewhat pompous treatise, with frequent touches of superfluous learning, and permeated with the irritating superiority of the true prophet—“You see it has turned out just as I predicted.” Nor was he content to make general assertions: he specified the names and addresses of those who had been correctly vaccinated, or had taken cowpox from the cow, and had subsequently suffered from smallpox with their neighbours; also of cases of severe illness, injury, and death resulting from vaccination. Bluster was idle in presence of such facts. Even the Royal Jennerians had to eat humble pie, for in their Report, dated 2nd January, 1806, we read—

With so much admitted by such furious fanatics, what might not be inferred!

Moseley was held in high esteem alike by the profession and the public, and his judgment enforced by so much serious evidence contributed heavily to the discredit of vaccination, and unfortunately to the resumption of variolous inoculation. That the reaction was extensive, especially in London, appears from numerous contemporary testimonies, which Moseley confirms in saying—

Rowland Hill was a religious and philanthropic notable in those days, and in common with many of his kind, was an enthusiastic vaccinator. A leading spirit in the Royal Jennerian Society, he had the school-room of Surrey Chapel constituted a vaccination station whereat Dr. Walker officiated. Nor was he content to patronise the practice, but was himself an energetic operator. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Jennerian Society, 17th May, 1806, he said—

Hill and Jenner were great friends. Hill visited Jenner at Berkeley, and Jenner heard Hill when he preached at Cheltenham. Introducing Jenner to a nobleman, Hill remarked—

“Allow me to present to your Lordship my friend Dr. Jenner, who has been the means of saving more lives than any other man.”

To which Jenner, being of a pious turn, sighed with meek effusion—

“Ah! would I, like you, could say souls.”[172]

So committed and so possessed, Hill naturally resented the growing distrust of vaccination. It cut him deeply to be supposed a quack; and in 1806 he issued a pamphlet[173] relating his experiences as a Jennerite, defending his practice, and denouncing those who treated it despitefully. Moseley especially was subjected to severe and contemptuous condemnation. Hill’s sanctimony and virulence, his vigour and venom compose a piquant mixture, and if we could tarry for amusement we might produce it abundantly from a variety of elegant extracts. Consider, for instance, this his adjuration, and its pitiful object—

Hill’s latent assumption throughout his discourse was—

First, that all must have smallpox; and

Second, that all the vaccinated who escaped smallpox, owed their salvation to their Jennerisation.

It never apparently occurred to him that before Jenner was heard of, many passed through life exempt from smallpox; nor, consequently, did he inquire how they escaped; nor why, when vaccination was introduced, escape should be placed to its credit.

The belief in the vicarious influence of vaccination comes out strongly, too, in Hill’s pamphlet. Of Londoners there were then over 1,000,000, and of these, he says, at least, 100,000 had been vaccinated, and with this effect—

Thus one in ten being vaccinated, smallpox was reduced throughout the unvaccinated 9-10ths; and as soon as the vicarious operations dropped, up went the rate of mortality! Nor was Hill singular in this persuasion. He cited his friend Dr. Lettsom as writing to him, 25th March, 1806—

And again I find Lettsom wrote to Moseley, November, 1808—

Talk evidently sincere, and widely repeated, but with how little consideration for truth!

To return to Moseley. He was not the man to endure Hill’s aggression submissively, and in a pamphlet entitled An Oliver for a Rowland,[174] he made a terrific reprisal. The public were delighted with it, and in the course of a few months it ran through ten editions. Hill was generally regarded as a clerical mountebank, with more impudence than piety, and to see him knocked over, kicked, and rolled in the mire, was sport that carried many sympathisers. Moseley’s opening address gives the key to the whole performance—

Paid he was with interest—gross and Rabelaisian; and Hill, when he had picked himself up and recovered his senses, discreetly retired from the combat.

Spite of his pomposity and buffoonery, there was good sense and humour in Moseley, and his resistance to the Jennerian mania was not ineffective. As he wrote in 1808—

In Dr. Munk’s Roll of the Royal College of Physicians we read, that Dr. Moseley was appointed physician to Chelsea Hospital in 1788, “an office which he filled with the highest éclat for more than thirty years”—until his death in 1819—

Are they? For what else is Dr. Moseley remembered? So that a man does his duty in the world, whether he be forgotten or remembered is not worth a thought; but Moseley’s early and steadfast resistance to the Cowpox Imposture will long constitute his title to grateful recollection.

Dr. William Rowley, Physician to the Marylebone Infirmary, also left his mark in medical history as a determined opponent of vaccination. He had seen the profession and the public go mad about so many absurd novelties, that it did not surprise him that they should go mad about cowpox: and after due experience and investigation he delivered judgment on the craze and its pernicious effects in a pamphlet entitled Cowpox Inoculation no Security against Smallpox,[177] containing two coloured engravings representing the Cowpoxed Ox-Faced Boy, and the Cowpoxed Mangey Girl. Much ridicule was expended on these pictures, and to this day whoever wishes to be funny and create giggle over the early resistance to vaccination tells how one Dr. Rowley maintained that Jenner’s benign virus induced the face of an ox on a boy; but like the majority of comic anecdotes, it is untrue. The engraving represents a comely lad with a swelling on the upper part of his left cheek, which was thought to give that side of his face an ox-like expression. Many a medical practitioner among the poor would at this day have little difficulty in presenting living examples of affliction answering to Rowley’s pictures—and worse. It was, moreover, the fear or fancy of many at the time that inoculation with cowpox might beget bovine characteristics in the human species, and the fear or fancy was turned to inevitable account in jest and earnest. The jest is visible in some of Rowlandson’s caricatures, and stories like this got into circulation—

In order to discredit Rowley, it is thought fair policy to connect him with such nonsense, and to have it supposed that he rested his case upon “the cowpoxed ox-faced boy:” it was far otherwise. He diligently tracked the vaccinators, and accumulated 504 cases of smallpox and injury after vaccination with 75 deaths, particulars being accurately specified. Nor was he content merely to report what he had ascertained. “Come and see,” was his forcible argument. “I have lately had under my care,” he wrote, “some of the worst species of malignant smallpox in the Marylebone Infirmary, which many of the faculty have examined and know to have been vaccinated.” His trust in “Come and see,” he still more powerfully exemplified in an exhibition of the injuries inflicted by vaccination in his Lecture Room in Savile Row in October, 1805. “Knowing,” he said, “the caviling character of the Cowpoxers, I determined to leave them no hole for retreat”; and therefore he brought together Joules, “the ox-faced boy, who also had a terribly diseased elbow-joint”; Marianne Lewis, the mangey girl, “who was covered with blotches like a leopard”; “a load of children in a cart from the south of London,” and others accompanied by their parents, and displaying their various maladies, said, “Behold the effects of the new disease that has been taken from the cow and implanted in humanity!” This painful exposition was continued over two days, and as he records, “the scene was truly affecting and distressing to all who witnessed it.” An antagonist like Rowley is a serious factor in any controversy, and we may estimate the havoc he wrought by the extreme anxiety of the Jennerites to have him estimated by the supposed absurdity of the ox-faced boy.

To a man of practical temper like Rowley, the enthusiasm with which vaccination was at first advocated appeared akin to delirium—

The fury had subsided in 1805, and Rowley held that many medical men were deeply ashamed of the extravagance into which they had been committed, but lacked courage to make frank confession.

Rowley died in 1806, and the regard in which he was held was manifest in the crowds who flocked to his funeral. In the Roll of Physicians, Dr. Munk observes—

The obstacles interposed were matters-of-fact, and as matters-of-fact were recognised and prevailed.

The controversy that followed the introduction of Vaccination “gave birth,” says the Edinburgh reviewer, “to an infinite number of publications of all descriptions” from which he could only select the most characteristic. Among these we find Dr. Squirrel, whose book is described “as the most entertaining of the whole”—

Turning up Squirrel’s pamphlet[178] I find little or nothing to warrant this description. It is not ill-written, if judged by the standard of medical literature, and the “springiness” is a conceit of the reviewer’s to sport with the Doctor’s name. My own impression is that Squirrel was a dull fellow, jealous of cowpox as injurious to the trade in smallpox inoculation, and that he availed himself of the depression in the vaccination business to assert its superiority. He admits, indeed, that he kept silent during the Jennerian furore, “but the overwhelming torrent being gradually reduced to a feeble current,” he reckoned that he “might now promulgate his opinion with a reasonable hope of success.” He cites Jenner’s account of the origin of cowpox in the greasy heels of horses, and proceeds to argue that the disease is scrofula, which its inoculation is certain to diffuse, whilst affording no protection from smallpox. He then adduces a number of cases in proof that inoculated cowpox had not averted smallpox, and had in several instances brought on serious and fatal ailments.

Jenner in a letter to Moore from Berkeley, 28th February, 1810, thus refers to Squirrel—

Jenner’s contempt was of a miraculous quality, operating insensibly upon those to whom it was applied. Some might fancy it was his idleness and others his cowardice; but he knew that it was his contempt, and that it blasted his adversaries in much the same way that vaccination blasted smallpox.

There is the woeful monotony of truth in these old pamphlets, not merely in the occurrence of smallpox after vaccination, but in the sadder stories of acute and chronic blood-poisoning. We recognise the narratives as true, for they are reproduced among us continuously by the same means, with the same miseries and agonies, and with the same death for grateful release.

It is clear from the testimony of Moseley, Rowley and Squirrel, confirmed too by others and by the Jennerites themselves, that the extension of vaccination met with a decided check in London. It was proved to many in a fashion that did not admit of dispute, that vaccination conferred no security from smallpox, whilst it was attended with dangers to health, certain if as yet undefinable. Variolous inoculation was again reverted to, but by diminished numbers; for that practice never had prevailed with popular good-will, but through sedulous medical persuasion as duty of dire necessity. Vaccination afforded excuse for hesitation, and, between rival claims, many contrived to elude either form of pollution. Thus indirectly as it were, vaccine inoculation set aside variolous, and when in 1840 the latter was forbidden by law, there was little of the practice left, whilst at the same time the majority of the population existed without Jennerian protection.

It is not to be forgotten that the early resistance to vaccination proceeded entirely from inoculators with smallpox. It was as yet unimagined that smallpox and other fevers were preventible, that their causes lay within control, and that health was the best defence of health. The world as yet lay in darkness as to those truths which we now recognise as laws of health, hygiene, and sanitary science; nor has the darkness rolled away, but is rolling away, and the time is not distant when to be vaccinated in order to be safe from smallpox will be accounted the drollest of absurdities.

Going back to the Edinburgh Review, we remark with curious interest how the chief position then asserted was the abiding efficacy of vaccination. Inoculators were ready to concede that it might possess a temporary prophylaxy, inasmuch as until one blood fever had subsided another was unlikely to supervene; but this view Jeffrey declined to entertain—

Yet what in 1806 was accounted “contrary to all analogy,” and “completely refuted and discredited by facts,” is precisely what vaccinators now admit. Hence their cry for re-vaccination—septennially, triennially, annually. Dr. Lionel Beale, a great authority in the matter, recently owned to having been vaccinated ten times, and in terror of an epidemic was about to be vaccinated once more—a striking exemplification of contemporary theory and practice. To have foreseen such an issue would have confounded the early vaccinators. When re-vaccination was mentioned to Dr. Pearson, he denied its possibility; “for,” said he, “Vaccination is equivalent to smallpox, which cannot recur. If a child can be re-vaccinated, then it can take smallpox; ergo vaccination is not an equivalent for smallpox; and where then is the good of it?” Where indeed!

The Edinburgh reviewer was sufficiently impartial to recognise violence alike among Cowpoxers and Smallpoxers, and specified John Ping, Jenner’s bully, as an offender, describing his Treatise on Cowpox as “one thousand and forty chaotic pages in defence of the new practice.” Ring verified the criticism by issuing a pamphlet, The Beauties of the Edinburgh Review alias the Stink-Pot of Literature; reminding us of the man who writing to his wife from an inn-parlour remarked, “I must conclude, for an unmannerly Irishman is looking over my shoulder and reading every word I write;” an observation that was immediately clenched with, “You are a liar, sir; a liar!”