As we have said, there was little living confidence in vaccination. Jenner’s undertaking, “that the person inoculated with cowpox is rendered perfectly secure from the infection of smallpox,” had been everywhere conspicuously belied. But latterly a new faith had come into existence as to the preventibility of disease and the possibility of its suppression; and, thus persuaded, the public were less disposed to be sceptical toward new or revived prophylactic impostures. Favoured by this disposition of the public mind, a clique of vaccinators, operating under cover of the Epidemiological Society, were able to obtain concessions from Parliament which, prior to the sanitary evangel, were unattainable. It was only when too audacious, they proposed to set up a Vaccination Office, endowed from the Exchequer, with inquisitorial and punitive functions, that they suffered check.
To resist doctrine it is necessary to possess doctrine. People might distrust or dislike vaccination, but they were at a great disadvantage against aggressors until prepared to justify their distrust and dislike in definite and scientific form, setting evidence against assertion, and veracious against factitious statistics. Unfortunately the mischief of coercive legislation was consummated ere opposition was organised. The first to frame a comprehensive indictment against vaccination was John Gibbs, an Irish gentleman. It took the form of a letter addressed to Sir Benjamin Hall, dated from Maze Hill Cottage, St. Leonards-on-Sea, 30th June, 1855. On the motion of Joseph Brotherton, M.P. for Salford, the letter was ordered to be printed by the House of Commons, 31st March, 1856.[286]
Mr. Gibbs opened his letter with drawing attention to the fact that whilst the Compulsory Act of 1853 was the first direct attack upon personal liberty in medical matters, there was “no subject upon which so many otherwise well-informed persons betrayed such ignorance and credulity as upon vaccination.” Indeed, upon nothing were the legislators who enacted compulsion so frank as in their confession of ignorance and submission to medical instruction. What was there to justify legislation on terms thus abject against their fellow-countrymen?—
Why is Vaccination held in abhorrence by so many? Have those who reject it no weighty reasons to justify their rejection? They do not believe that it affords an efficient and assured protection against the invasion of Smallpox; they have a natural disgust to the transfer of a loathsome virus from a diseased brute, through they know not how many unhealthy human mediums, to the veins of their children; they have a dread, a conviction, that other filthy diseases, tending to embitter and shorten life, are frequently transmitted through the vaccine virus; they cannot bring themselves to believe that the true way to health can be to corrupt the blood and lower the vital energies by the infusion of a poison and its consequent train of morbid influences; and further, they have a conscientious conviction that voluntarily to propagate disease is to set at naught the Divine Providence and violate the Divine Will.
Are such scruples and objections entitled to no respect? Should they be permitted to have no force? Are they capable of no justification? Should the sole answer to them be a Coercion Act? Such is not the best way to disarm hostility, and to ensure conviction. Who would put faith in the professions of a philanthropist who should threaten the objects of his beneficence with fine or imprisonment if they did not accept his proffered boon? Or who could receive with cordiality and respect the doctor of physic who should thunder at the door, armed with scab and lancet, threatening to assault the inmates if they did not accept his services? If Vaccination be indeed a blessing which must needs be showered upon the land, would it not be more becoming in a wise Government and a free people to trust to the dissemination of information rather than attempt to make unconverted converts by force?
Had smallpox been preventible by vaccination, such contention would have been useless. The virtue of the rite, manifest in its efficacy, would have secured its observance. The bitterness of compulsion lay in the attempt to enforce imposture, and to suppress the convictions of those whose perceptions were sharper, and whose loyalty to right was more determined than in the mass of the nation. Mr. Gibbs had no difficulty in adducing evidence in proof that vaccination did not prevent smallpox. The reports of the Registrar-General and the hospitals furnished testimony in such profusion, that his difficulty lay in the selection of examples likely to be most convincing. From the Lancet, of 21st May, 1853, he took the following confession—
In the public mind extensively, and to a more limited extent in the medical profession itself, doubts are known to exist as to the efficacy and eligibility of Vaccination. The failures of the operation have been numerous and discouraging.
Nor did the failure to prevent smallpox exhaust the condemnation of vaccination. Ineffective, it was far from harmless. Itself a disease, it was a conductor and excitant of other diseases, and, inoculated, occasionally bore with it other company. Erysipelas, as Jenner taught, was the note of successful vaccination; but erysipelas, not being a limitable affection, was frequently a mortal one; and deaths from erysipelas as a sequence of vaccination were of constant occurrence. Then there were skin eruptions, carbuncular and glandular swellings, tuberculosis, scrofula, syphilis, etc., either provoked or inseminated with the vaccine disease. Such results were so distinctly recognised that, in the Lancet, of the 11th November, 1854, it was stated—
So widely extended is the dread that along with the prophylaxy something else may be inoculated, that few medical practitioners would care to vaccinate their own children from a source of the purity of which they are not well assured.
But the care vaccinators exercised over their own offspring was impracticable for the multitude. Again, citing the Lancet, 23rd October, 1854, it was said—
The poor are told that they must carry their children to be vaccinated by medical men who may be strangers to them. They apprehend—and the apprehension is not altogether unfounded, or unshared by the educated classes, that the vaccine matter employed may carry with it the seeds of other diseases not less loathsome than the one it is intended to prevent.
Useless against smallpox, and injurious in itself, it remained to test the influence of vaccination on the health of the community—
What is the per centage of deaths from all epidemics among the Vaccinated as compared with the Unvaccinated? What is the per centage respectively of cases of disease of the respiratory organs, of skin diseases, of scrofula, and of convulsions? What is the average duration of life among the Vaccinated and among the Unvaccinated? Of a thousand children vaccinated within a given time after birth, and of a thousand unvaccinated, the whole two thousand being placed as nearly as possible in like circumstances, what per centage in each thousand attain the age of puberty?
These are statistics with which the advocates of Vaccination have never grappled. Is it not, then, rather premature to decide that Vaccination is an unmixed good, a boon which we ought not only gratefully to accept, but which we should even combine to force upon the acceptance of others?
If it should appear that before a given age the rate of mortality from all causes be the same among a thousand vaccinated and a thousand unvaccinated children, of what avail is Vaccination? Of what import is it, as a public question, in what shape death claims his allotted number of victims, whether by Smallpox, Scarlet Fever, or Hooping Cough? If, however, the rate of mortality should prove to be greater among the Vaccinated than among the Unvaccinated, how shall we avoid the conclusion that Vaccination is a curse and not a blessing?
The interdependence of the forms of zymotic disease, so luminously displayed by Dr. Watt in the statistics of Glasgow, was apparently a conception in excess of the capacity of the average medical mind. It was the custom of vaccinators to treat smallpox as a solitary existence, any diminution of which was ascribed to the observance of their rite, and any increase to its neglect, although the observance of the rite was neither less in the waxing, nor more in the waning of the disease. With many illustrations from medical literature, Mr. Gibbs enforced the lesson that diseases were not irregular and detached disasters, but varied manifestations of a common disorder: that when one form prevailed, other forms abated or disappeared; that health, and the defect of health, were referable to habits and conditions of life; and that the consequent rate of mortality was unaffected whether smallpox happened to be one of its factors—indeed, in numerous instances, a reduced rate of mortality signalised the prevalence of smallpox. In short, to suppose that the creation and culture of an ailment like vaccination could by any means tend to the invigoration of life was to reverse the canon—that health always and everywhere was the best defence of health.
Among the supporters of his thesis, none had greater weight than Dr. George Gregory. Adducing “the experience which twenty years of official connection with the Smallpox and Vaccination Hospital had given him,” he asserted—
The great principle that there are no diseases strictly isolated from others. They are links in a chain—
“All are but parts of one stupendous whole.”
They must be viewed in conjunction, if we would hope to form just, enlarged, and legitimate views of the character and pathological affinities of each.
Long surmised, but never proved, until the statistical inquiries of recent times showed its correctness, Dr. Gregory continues—
We may, for want of a better name, call this curious doctrine the Law of Vicarious Mortality; by which is understood that whenever one epidemic diminishes, another increases, so that the sum total of epidemic mortality remains, on an average of years, nearly the same.
Epidemic Mortality in England and Wales during 1838, 1839, and 1840.
| Year 1838. | Year 1839. | Year 1840. | |
| Smallpox | 16,268 | 9,131 | 10,434 |
| Measles | 6,514 | 10,937 | 9,326 |
| Scarlet Fever | 5,802 | 10,325 | 19,816 |
| Total Mortality by the Exanthemata, | 28,584 | 30,393 | 39,576 |
| Hooping Cough | 9,107 | 8,165 | 6,132 |
| Total Epidemic Mortality | 37,691 | 38,558 | 45,708 |
| Total Mortality throughout England and Wales | 342,529 | 338,979 | 359,561 |
We learn from this table, that every year is distinguished by some master epidemic. In 1838, Smallpox was the ruling epidemic throughout England. In 1839, Measles and Scarlet Fever struggled for the mastery. In 1840, Scarlet Fever was so general and so fatal, that the mortality by it exceeded by one-fifth the ravages of Smallpox during the epidemic season of 1838, and more than doubled the mortality by that disease in 1839....
Everything teaches us that when one avenue to death is closed another opens—
“Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis.”
Vaccination, great as its merits are [What are they?—J. G.], and no one more fully appreciates them than I do, does not, and cannot do, all that its too sanguine admirers promised. The blessings of Vaccination are met and balanced by the Law of Vicarious Mortality. How and why is this? The explanation is easy. The weak plants of a nursery must be weeded out. If weakly children do not fall victims to Smallpox, they live to fall into the jaws of tyrants scarcely less inexorable. Scarlet Fever and Measles are both advancing in respect of mortality; and the increase of deaths by Hooping Cough since this century set in [that is, since the introduction of Vaccination.—J. G.] is quite extraordinary.[287]
The concession of so much was the concession of all. If smallpox was merely displaced to be replaced, and the tale of death maintained by cognate diseases, what was there to claim for vaccination, even if it were allowed to have an influence adverse to smallpox? Where were the lives saved? and where the glory of the immortal Jenner?
The advocates of compulsory vaccination were accustomed to cite countries like Austria, where the practice was enforced, for English imitation. Let us then compare, said Mr. Gibbs, the death-rate of the chief centres of English population with the death-rate of the chief divisions of Austria, and note which had the advantage in the years 1850-51—
| Death-rate per 1000. | Death-rate per 1000. | |||
| England and Wales | 22·0 | Lower Austria | 35·7 | |
| London | 23·3 | Upper Austria | 27·7 | |
| Liverpool | 29·0 | Styria | 30·3 | |
| Manchester | 29·0 | Bohemia | 38·6 | |
| Birmingham | 23·3 | Moravia | 30·9 | |
| Leeds | 24·6 | Galicia | 30·8 | |
| Dublin | 26·8 | Lombardy | 33·9 | |
| Cork | 23·3 | Venetia | 33·3 |
These figures required no commentary. If vaccination had stopped smallpox in Austria, it evidently had not reduced mortality even to the level of the most insanitary English towns.
Assuming, said Mr. Gibbs, that vaccination is entitled to all the credit claimed for it, let us endeavour to estimate the gain, if it should be enforced. The yearly average of deaths from all causes, in England and Wales, is 370,000, of which about 7,000 are from smallpox—
This 7,000, then, is the limit of gain which enforced Vaccination could confer; but from the 7,000 should be deducted about one-third for deaths from Smallpox among the Vaccinated; and from the remainder should be deducted an equivalent for the deaths caused immediately and remotely by Vaccination; and another equivalent for the deaths resulting from the Law of Vicarious Mortality. This done, it would require no little ingenuity to discover a balance in favour of Vaccination.
Having thus argued the matter out, was not Mr. Gibbs justified in asking—
What would be thought of the tinker who would knock a hole in the bottom of his saucepan lest one should be burned there in the ordinary way?
Yet it is just what the vaccinator does; and when he finds—as he might have foreseen, had he been governed by common sense—that his saucepan does not wear a bit the better, but rather the worse, he gravely endeavours to excuse the failure, by asserting that unfortunately he made the hole too big, or too little, too much on this side, or too much on that, or by offering some other equally wise excuse.
Lastly, there were the political and moral considerations involved in compulsory vaccination—the first attempt in England to confer on a medical prescription the force of law—
Surely, a wise Government may perceive that there are greater evils than the occasional outbreak of an epidemic. The systematic violation of human rights and natural affections, the uprooting from the human breast of feelings of self-reliance, a state religion in physic, coercion which may well be regarded as odious persecution, the belief of the poor that what they hold dearest is sacrificed to the selfish prejudices of the rich—any one of these is far worse than a pestilence.
Cannot they who believe in Vaccination protect themselves? Nobody seeks to hinder them; nobody presumes to dispute their right to adopt any medical practice, however questionable it may be. Why cannot they act with like forbearance to others? Surely, if freedom be more than a name, it implies the right of the freeman to reject not only that which other men may choose to regard as evil, but even that which they may combine to urge upon him as good....
How absurd that an attempt should be made to visit with punishment the want of belief in a scientific, or rather unscientific, dogma! How absurd to pretend to the possession of a prophylactic of such unquestionable potency that its acceptance requires the threat of force! In their anxiety to coerce others, compulsory vaccinators demonstrate their own defect of faith in the prescription which they assert affords complete security from Smallpox.
As observed, the service of Mr. Gibbs is entitled to special commemoration, because it was the first attempt to put the arguments against vaccination into systematic shape. He demonstrated the quackery of the practice, and the fallacies wherewith it was defended; and denounced the tyranny of the legislation that would compel those who recognised the imposture to submit to it. The service thus rendered by Mr. Gibbs constituted a ground of vantage for further operations: those who had to contend against the delusion had their hands strengthened, and their power of assault magnified, by what he was favoured to accomplish.
John Gibbs was born at Enniscorthy, County Wexford, on 25th May, 1811. Owing to the unsettled life of his father as Captain of the Royal Cork Volunteers, his education was desultory—at various schools, and under various masters. Sagacious, bright, earnest, and independent, he early manifested a passion for such things as made for human welfare, and improvement. Abstinence from alcohol, in connection with Father Mathew’s mission, had in him an enthusiastic advocate. A book by Captain Claridge on the water cure excited his interest, and led to the formation of the Enniscorthy Hydropathic Society. Anxious to master the mysteries of this new treatment of disease, he set out for Silesia in 1843, and placed himself under the instruction of Priessnitz, remaining with him as a chosen disciple until 1847, when he left with a certificate of competency.
Whilst acquiring his art with Priessnitz, he communicated his experiences to his Enniscorthy friends, who published them in the Wexford newspapers, a selection from which was reproduced as Letters from Grœfenberg, in 1847. A passage in one of these letters, dated 27th November, 1844, indicates the manner in which his attention was drawn to smallpox—
Another case of Smallpox has just been treated by Priessnitz. The patient is the daughter of a peasant in the neighbourhood, and is about twenty years old. She was confined for eight days, and was most profusely covered with the eruption. An Italian physician said that he never saw the symptoms come out better. She had at first the usual treatment—wet sheets, wet rubbings, and tepid baths; and, after the eruption appeared, three wet sheets and three tepid baths daily. She will not have the slightest mark. Under the water cure Smallpox appears to be deprived of half its terrors; as far as my observation extends, it neither robs man of life, nor women of beauty.
On his return, he assisted Dr. Lovell in opening a hydropathic establishment at Barking, Essex; and, in 1848, he undertook the medical superintendence of the Grande Chartreuse in Piedmont. There he met Miss Anna Skelton, to whom he was married, at Nice, in 1849. Ultimately he made his home at St. Leonards, Sussex. The passage of the Compulsory Vaccination Act, in 1853, led him to publish a pamphlet, Our Medical Liberties, 1854, which excited the attention and won the approval of many thoughtful people. At the suggestion of Mr. Thomas Baker, he constructed a letter from the substance of the pamphlet, and addressed it to the President of the Board of Health, which, as we have seen, was issued as a parliamentary paper. The more vehement controversy which sprang up in recent years when the Vaccination Act was tightened, found Mr. Gibbs in health too feeble for active exertion. After his wife’s death, he retired to Jersey to be near his sister, Mrs. General Lane, in whose house he died in the winter of 1875.
[286] Compulsory Vaccination.—Copy of a Letter, dated 30th June, 1855, addressed to the President of the Board of Health by John Gibbs, Esquire, entitled, Compulsory Vaccination briefly considered in its Scientific, Religious, and Political Aspects. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 31st March, 1856.—Folio, pp. 31.
[287] Eruptive Fevers, pp. 5-8. London, 1843.