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CHAPTER XLIII.

HOUSE OF COMMONS COMMITTEE, 1871.

On 13th February, 1871, Mr. W. E. Forster moved that a Select Committee be appointed to inquire into the operation of the Vaccination Act of 1867, and to report whether such Act should be amended. Mr. Forster’s remarks on the occasion are noteworthy, as manifesting the prevalent prejudice. He said—

Then followed the usual fabulous matter of rote—the awful mortality prior to vaccination, the reduction of that mortality by vaccination, the extraordinary immunity enjoyed by the vaccinated and revaccinated, and so forth—uttered and accepted as indisputable.

Sir Charles Adderley opposed the appointment of the Committee. Accepting Mr. Forster’s statement as valid, he demanded—

Apparently the Government were of the same mind as Sir Charles, and the Committee was conceded in fulfilment of an inadvertent pledge. Mr. Forster assured the House—

The Committee was nominated as follows on 16th February—

Dr. Brewer, Colchester.
Mr. Jacob Bright, Manchester.
Mr. John Candlish, Sunderland.
Mr. R. M. Carter, Leeds.
Mr. Stephen Cave, Shoreham.
Sir Smith Child, West Staffordshire.
Sir Dominic Corrigan, Dublin.
Mr. W. E. Forster, Bradford.
Mr. J. T. Hibbert, Oldham.
Mr. J. M. Holt, North-East Lancashire.
Lord Robert Montagu, Huntingdonshire.
Mr. P. H. Muntz, Birmingham.
Dr. Lyon Playfair, Edinburgh University.
Mr. W. H. Smith, Westminster.
Mr. P. A. Taylor, Leicester.

The first witness examined was Mr. Candlish, himself a member of the Committee and promoter of the inquiry. Whilst professing a limited faith in vaccination, and willing to exercise a degree of pressure sufficient to overcome mere apathy, Mr. Candlish was strongly opposed to the compulsion of parents who seriously objected to vaccination, and especially to their persecution by repeated penalties and imprisonment.

Dr. W. J. Collins, the next witness, opened the entire question of vaccination, and by a variety of experience showed that the vaccine disease neither superseded nor mitigated smallpox, whilst it was frequently a severe ailment and the means of exciting and conveying other diseases.

Dr. C. T. Pearce followed suit. The purpose of the Committee (limited to the consideration of the compulsory law) was apparently forgotten, and Dr. Pearce delivered a comprehensive discourse, in which the history, claims, failure, fallacies, and disasters of vaccination were freely displayed; and in the cross-examination which followed made good the positions he had assumed.

Sir Jervoise Clarke Jervoise, Bart., formerly M.P. for South Hants, disputed the common notions of infection as confused with contagion, and pointed out that it was absurd to draw comparisons between the vaccinated and unvaccinated unless their pecuniary status were at the same time defined: cases of smallpox in Belgravia were not to be likened to cases in Clerkenwell. Smallpox was not mitigated by vaccination: he had two relatives vaccinated by Jenner himself who subsequently had confluent smallpox so severely that “their own father did not know them.” Nor if smallpox had diminished was there any reason to ascribe it to vaccination: Jenner’s cowpox had ceased out of the land, and the cause of its cessation might equally apply to smallpox.

Dr. Garth Wilkinson gave evidence with the characteristic wisdom of the physician of genius who sees with his own eyes. He showed how, endowed and lucrative, the futility and mischief of vaccination were concealed or denied, and how, considered all sufficient against smallpox, the causes of the disease were overlooked, and the introduction of improved methods of treatment were unattempted or discouraged.

Mr. George S. Gibbs contested the right of the State to inflict vaccination, or to interfere between parent and child. Having a faculty for statistics, he had applied himself to the records of smallpox before and since the practice of vaccination, at home and abroad, and showed that smallpox was the same at present as in the past, neither more mortal nor less mortal, while there was reason to believe that vaccination was a breeder of smallpox as well as a source and excitant of other maladies.

Mr. Aaron Emery related in vigorous English how an infant of his had been vaccinated from a healthy-looking child on 31st May, 1869; how erysipelas followed; how it gradually got worse; how “the little fellow had no rest night nor day from 9th June to 4th July, when death put an end to his sufferings.” Then he told the difficulty he had to obtain a true certificate of death from the vaccinator; how he forced an inquest; how a verdict was returned, “Died from erysipelas caused by vaccination”; and how its terms were subsequently altered by Coroner Lankester and registered as altered at Somerset House. Up to the time of this fatality, Mr. Emery had been an unsuspicious believer in vaccination; but his sorrow led him to acquaintance with numerous cases like his own, screened from public recognition, any artifice being accounted laudable which seemed necessary to preserve vaccination from reproach.

Mr. F. Covington, secretary of the Northampton Anti-Vaccination League, described injuries from vaccination in his family and among his acquaintance; the distrust and dislike of the practice in Northampton with widespread resistance to the compulsory law.

Mrs. E. Kemp brought her baby, and told how it had been vaccinated without examination, although there was a sore on the side of its head. As the vaccination began to take, the child’s face and ears broke out, until through the mass of eruption “you could only see its little eyes.”

Mr. Thomas Baker, barrister, had been engaged in the Board of Health from 1849 to 1854, and officially connected with several sanitary inquiries. In his opinion what were called epidemics were fevers with a common origin, against which cleanliness was the efficient prophylactic, and to which his friend, Dr. Southwood Smith, held smallpox was equally amenable. As a shareholder in the Metropolitan Association for the Improvement of the Dwellings of the Industrial Classes, he knew that residents in wholesome houses, even in insanitary neighbourhoods, enjoyed remarkable exemption from epidemic maladies.

Mr. W. J. Addison testified that his perfectly healthy child had had syphilis invaccinated, and had died in consequence after horrible suffering. The facts of the case were beyond question. One hospital doctor had the temerity to ask the mother, “Whether is it not better for one in a thousand to die like this than have smallpox raging about our towns.” “Possibly,” replied the poor woman, “but it is strange that my child should be the thousandth.”

The Rev. Wm. Hume-Rothery said his attention was first drawn to vaccination by the operation on his own child, his wife observing instinctively, “This is an unnatural and wrong thing.” Investigation confirmed his wife’s judgment, and he became an open opponent of the practice, writing and lecturing against it. His acquaintance with the people in Lancashire had led him to the conviction that the majority disliked and distrusted vaccination: they were coerced to its observance, and evaded it when possible. He himself was opposed to vaccination because there was nothing in nature, human nature, or revelation to justify it. This assertion of principle over and above practice led to considerable discussion as to divine law, providence, and the nature of things, and the right of conscience to withstand corporate dictation.

Mr. R. B. Gibbs, secretary of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League, referred to the origin of vaccination, as attested by Jenner, in the production of cowpox from the contagion of horsegrease, and subsequently to the use of horsepox, by which equination was substituted for vaccination; the diverse virus thus derived from Jenner continuing in official arm-to-arm currency to the present day. What vaccination was had never been determined; and consequently there had been no proper basis for legislation. Nor had legislation been preceded by impartial and adequate inquiry: it had been promoted by certain medical men, supported by the press, and especially by The Times, the editors of which jealously suppressed all communications which impugned the efficacy of the rite. Interrogated as to the amendment of the law, Mr. Gibbs said he had no amendment to propose: the State should withdraw all assistance from the practice, and leave its use or disuse to individual discretion.

At this point the evidence of the anti-vaccinists was cut short. They had much more to produce, but enough had been heard. The Committee had forgotten its purpose, which was not to discuss vaccination, but, accepting the rite as unquestionable, to consider whether the law which enforced it was capable of amendment. Still, the mischief being done, it was thought advisable to counteract it; and forthwith contrary testimony was laid on. Various officials who for years had made the promotion of vaccination their business were summoned to the rescue, along with certain fashionable physicians, whose assurance, it was calculated, would overcome any distrust that might be excited in the public mind.

The first of the officials was Mr. John Simon, a review of whose Papers on Vaccination forms Chapter XL. of the present volume. Evidence from Mr. Simon relative to vaccination was of much the same order as that of a Virginian of former days on slavery, or a thriving London publican on the liquor traffic. Mr. Simon answered to the demand upon him: he was thorough: there was nothing like leather—nothing! Smallpox was among the most contagious and most fatal of pestilences, and “for an overwhelming majority of persons, well vaccinated in infancy, vaccination was a security for life against even an attack of smallpox.” The unvaccinated died at the rate of 35½ per cent.; the vaccinated in general at 7 per cent.; and “the properly vaccinated” at from 1 to ½ per cent.—the fact being concealed that in times when all were unvaccinated, the smallpox death-rate ranged from 10 to 18 per cent., the same overhead death-rate of vaccinated and unvaccinated at this day. There had never been, he believed, a case of death from the direct effect of “properly performed vaccination”—the qualification, it will be observed, referring all cases of death to something other than the correct rite. He admitted there was not the least doubt that syphilis had been invaccinated on the Continent, but either from carelessness or culpable intention. Sanitation, he said, had little or no influence on smallpox: vaccination was the only protective—which variety of vaccination being judiciously left undefined. Smallpox did not displace other fevers during its prevalence, as alleged by Dr. Pearce. Holding that 97 per cent. of Londoners were vaccinated, he did not see that the epidemic then raging, the severest of the century, disproved the security asserted for vaccination.

As we read Simon’s evidence, we realise afresh the possibilities of audacity operating on credulity: there is nothing that men, otherwise sane, may not believe when their disposition is set toward belief. This Committee sat in London amid a population, almost universally vaccinated, suffering from smallpox as they never had suffered within living memory; and yet in presence of such a demonstration of the impotence of the vaccine ordinance, they listened to the soothsayer with abject acquiescence! Strange as are the records of witchcraft, there is nothing in them more marvellous than this 1871 Committee of select men from the House of Commons taking for true what under their own eyes was visible as untrue—deceived and consenting to be deceived.

As for those who disputed the efficacy of vaccination, and justified their disbelief by smallpox among the vaccinated, Simon’s contempt was unqualified—contempt being essential to the success of the part enacted. “Some of them were ignorant,” he said, “and others dishonest.” They were a “league of persons interested in interrupting the fulfilment of the law, and very actively engaged in disseminating falsehoods against vaccination”—falsehoods in its favour actively disseminated by Simon and his trade-union being disinterested and praiseworthy.

Dr. R. Hall Bakewell, vaccinator-general for Trinidad, was somehow produced by mistake, his evidence being in several respects the reverse of what was wanted. He thought vaccination good, but that “it should be done in a more careful manner.” It ought not to be compulsory, but left to the good sense of the people. Having been proved to cause death, “it was unjust to oblige a parent to submit his child to an operation attended with such risk, however rare.” Referring to his experience in Trinidad, he said—

As a consequence of this prevalent opinion, vaccination was much disliked in Trinidad, and, although by law compulsory, was indifferently enforced, so that at least half the population escaped unvaccinated.

Interrogated concerning smallpox in Trinidad, Dr. Bakewell said there had been no epidemic for fourteen or fifteen years when one occurred “frightfully severe, as are all epidemics in Trinidad, owing to the entire neglect of sanitary precautions”; adding that “the mortality from smallpox may be greatly diminished by sanitary measures independently of vaccination.” The Doctor still further ruffled the prejudices of the Committee in asserting—

Precisely what Dr. Watt proved of Glasgow in 1813, and Dr. Farr at a later date confirmed; and what the comparison of the statistics of mortality in epidemic and non-epidemic years everywhere illustrates.

With the examination of Mr. Danby Palmer Fry, head of the legal department of the Poor Law Board, the Committee reverted to its proper function. Questioned as to the state of the law and the difficulties connected with its administration, Mr. Fry showed that whilst vaccination was nominally compulsory, any resolute parent might disregard it. To make vaccination really compulsory, it would be necessary to legislate for its application by force, which legislation public opinion would not tolerate. For himself, he thought that parental conviction adverse to vaccination was entitled to respect, and he therefore suggested—

Sir Dominic Corrigan, M.D., a member of the Committee, next gave evidence, and the defence of vaccination was resumed. So little did Sir Dominic apprehend the purpose of the Committee that he observed—

As to the invaccination of syphilis, he was clear: it was impossible. Vaccination induced no disease. Virus was nothing but pure lymph, even when taken from an impure subject. Vaccination was regarded with favour throughout Ireland. It was enforced, but it required no enforcement: there was no disposition to resist the law. He disliked penalties, and would rather operate by excluding the unvaccinated from schools, factories, and public employments, on the ground that “they might become a mine of disease and injure others,” namely, to the vaccinated fortified against smallpox!

Smallpox had been gradually declining in Ireland under the influence of vaccination, and the disease was then, 28th April, 1871, practically extinct. Foolhardy was the assertion. Even while Sir Dominic was testifying, smallpox had reappeared: 665 died of it in 1871 and 3,248 in 1872. From 1871 to 1875 there perished 5,521 of smallpox in a land from which it was claimed vaccination had banished the disease!

Mr. James Furness Marson followed Sir Dominic—a fanatical vaccinator and promoter of compulsion. For thirty-five years surgeon of the Highgate Smallpox Hospital, he had there elaborated the whimsical notion that the efficacy of vaccination was measured by the number and character of the cicatrices; holding that—

Confronted by Mr. Jacob Bright with the fact that Dr. Gregory, of wide experience and admitted authority, had expressed the contrary opinion in his work on Eruptive Fevers, saying—

Marson made answer—

Marson was the victim of a notion, and that a poor one, to which whatever stood in opposition was sacrificed. Among his assertions and admissions, the following are characteristic and illustrative—

Yet it is customary to ascribe the Smallpox epidemic of 1870-71 to the Franco-German war.

The unscrupulous ferocity which animated Marson and his associates toward those who impugned their practice is forcibly displayed in the following questions and answers; premising that Simon attested of Marson that “he was a singularly careful observer”—

A libel as atrocious as absurd, and significant.

Dr. Alexander Wood was brought from Edinburgh to give evidence as to Scotland of much the same tenor as that of Sir Dominic Corrigan concerning Ireland. Dr. Wood’s note was clear—“I do not think,” he said, “that a person has a right to keep an unvaccinated child any more than to keep a mad dog.” Smallpox had been prevalent in Scotland for some years, and had been made use of to pass a Compulsory Vaccination Act in 1863; but it was neither shown that prior to that Act the Scots were unvaccinated, nor that it was the unvaccinated who suffered from smallpox—apart from those conditions of life which make for smallpox. In the course of nature, smallpox abated in Scotland, and the Act had the credit of the abatement: the vaccination of the people being so complete that Dr. Wood testified—

As in Ireland, there was little or no resistance to the law; and as in Ireland, it was asserted that smallpox had been stamped out; but as in Ireland, the assumption was nullified by experience. In the epidemic of 1871-73, there died of smallpox no fewer than 5034 in Vaccinated Scotland—a contradiction unforeseen by Dr. Wood and the Committee before whom he prophesied.

Sir William Jenner appeared as court physician. He had advised Her Majesty the Queen to encourage vaccination in the case of all the members of the Royal Family, and Her Majesty had complied with his advice, and the Prince of Wales too. He had had great experience as physician to the Children’s Hospital and elsewhere, and had never seen any serious illness or death result from vaccination. His testimony as to the harmlessness of the practice was unqualified, and he was “unable to conceive of any medical practitioner of standing disbelieving in it, or thinking it mischievous”; adding—

He approved of the compulsory law, and wished that revaccination was likewise compulsory. As to the statistics of smallpox and vaccination, he disowned sufficient acquaintance; nevertheless he did not hesitate to assert that smallpox, as a form of zymotic disease displacing other forms, or replaced by others, was “a theory utterly without foundation.” Of course testimony of this order was produced for social rather than scientific ends.

The like was true of Dr. Gull, now Sir William. He also professed to have never seen any serious illness caused by vaccination; nor did he believe that vaccination from a diseased child would communicate disease. As a defence against smallpox, he held that vaccination was as protective as smallpox itself. It was the duty of the Legislature to enforce vaccination; adding—

He had advised the Government to accept no one for service in India without revaccination. Asked by Mr. Candlish whether he would take a child by force from its parents and vaccinate it, he replied—

Less judicious than Sir William Jenner, Dr. Gull adventured on statistics. It having been pointed out that though smallpox was then epidemic in London, the death-rate was not raised thereby, he attributed the result to vaccination. “In former times smallpox produced an enormous increase in mortality”—

Verily the class at Guy’s had romance for science, and the Committee had similar entertainment. They were told that except for vaccination the epidemic then prevalent in London would result “in a perfect pestilence”; for mortality among unvaccinated populations “had been something terrific.” They had “the history of smallpox in China and India, where its effects had been perfectly depopulating.” “To neglect or discourage vaccination in their crowded English towns would be much the same as thrusting a fire-brand into a powder magazine.” Before the introduction of vaccination, “France lost year after year a quarter of a million of inhabitants (250,000) by smallpox”; and so forth and so forth; assertions without warrant outside the intention to excite fear in order to obtain confidence.

The next witness was Dr. Charles West, for twenty years physician to the Hospital for Children, London, where children under two years old were not received—at ages when the immediate effects of vaccination are obliterated or forgotten. Vaccination, in his opinion, prevented or mitigated smallpox. “It had, no doubt, the effect in many cases of developing a disposition to some forms of skin disease, especially eczema;” but on the whole it was not injurious. In the course of his immense experience he had only known of one child whose death was due to erysipelas caused by vaccination. He had no proof of the invaccination of syphilis.

There was nothing peculiar about Dr. West’s evidence. It was according to professional orthodoxy, from which it would have required more than ordinary courage to depart. Medical men by the gross could have been put up to deliver similar evidence; but what was it worth? The medical mind is fixed in two directions; first, that vaccination prevents smallpox, or mitigates it; and second, that it induces a harmless disease; a couple of conclusions that it seems possible to maintain in presence of a vast array of evidence to the contrary.

If any one chooses to assert that vaccination prevents smallpox or mitigates it, How can he be confuted? The prevented smallpox is hid in the unknown, likewise the severity that has been mitigated. Again, if vaccination be held harmless, any instance of its ill effects can be resolved into coincidence with a sneer at the vulgar fallacy of converting post hoc into propter hoc. Possessed with these notions, nothing is easier than to assert with Dr. Stevens, for example, “No man has seen more of vaccination than I have, but I have yet to see any bad effect from the practice.” None are so blind as those whose business it is not to see; or as Mr. Aubrey De Vere has it, “Prejudice, which sees what it pleases, cannot see what is plain.” It is, I contend, plainly impossible to inflict a disease like Vaccinia, in any of its varieties, without injury to the extent of the disease; without intensifying active or exciting latent disease; or without the risk of conveying other inoculable disease from the vaccinifer.

“The great question before the Committee,” said Sir Dominic Corrigan, “is whether vaccine poison can contain within itself syphilitic or any other poison”—the great terror being syphilitic poison. That question the next witness, Mr. Jonathan Hutchinson, an expert in syphilis, determined. He had been called to examine thirteen persons, mostly young adults, engaged in a London shop, who had been revaccinated by order of their employer during the prevalent smallpox panic. The vaccinifer was “a fine, full-grown, healthy child,” yet it conveyed syphilis, beyond mistake, to 11 of the 13 vaccinated. Mr. Hutchinson allowed that the vaccinator was not to be blamed for the disaster, saying—

Having similar cases within his experience, and convinced “that syphilis can be communicated in the act of vaccination,” Mr. Hutchinson was asked by Mr. Candlish whether he was aware that the medical profession in general denied the possibility, he replied—

To reduce the effect of testimony so injurious to vaccination, it was attempted to make out that the danger was limited to virus tainted with blood; and although Mr. Hutchinson conceded that blood might be the medium of transmission, it was undecided.

Subsequent experience has shown that with blood or without blood, syphilis may be invaccinated. Still, Mr. Hutchinson, as an advocate of vaccination, and of its compulsory infliction, “considering it of the utmost necessity and importance,” conceded that the risk was infinitesimal; but (as was remarked at the time) unless the diffusion of syphilis were infinitesimal, there was no ground for the assumption of an infinitesimal risk. As Mr. Hutchinson admitted—

Mr. James Neighbour, vaccination officer of St. Luke’s, Middlesex, a district of 60,000 inhabitants, chiefly poor, described the operation of the Vaccination Acts. He met with little resistance to the law; the births were vaccinated up to the registration point, but he had no check on those who might neglect or evade registration, or leave or settle in St. Luke’s.

Dr. E. C. Seaton, as select representative of the official vaccine ring, was reserved for the consummation of the inquiry. To review his evidence, delivered with much elaboration, would be to repeat much of our story. Vaccination was afresh set forth as “a perfectly safe and efficient prophylactic against smallpox, which might be as reasonably disputed as the demonstrations of Euclid.” Nevertheless, the perfectly safe and efficient variety of vaccination was neither defined by the witness, nor demanded by the Committee—whether with horsegrease cowpox, cowpox, horsepox, or smallpox cowpox; an omission that illustrates the slovenly and credulous habit of those concerned—a 19th century miracle and mystery, being under discussion, and matter and mode being taken for granted under cover of a word!

Throughout Seaton’s evidence, smallpox was treated as an isolated disease, which might be dealt with specifically and exterminated without reference to other fevers, the common mortality being reduced to the extent of its reduction: no relation being recognised between fever and fever, epidemic and epidemic—

Yet when explanation was offered, namely, that the febrile disease of a community is a measure of its sanitary aberrations; that whilst the forms of fevers may vary, the activity of one form is balanced by the quiescence of others, the tale of death being equal—the explanation was waved aside; and why? Because it did not make for the glory of vaccination!

Curiously, and for a different reason, Malthus argued, as we now argue, that if vaccination could exterminate smallpox, not a life would be saved—supposing, let us add, no change effected in the conditions out of which smallpox and cognate maladies arise. Thus Malthus wrote—

Like Simon and Marson, Seaton had his insult for the opponents of Smallpox. Simon charged them with ignorance and dishonesty; and Marson, with the desire to have their families reduced by smallpox. Seaton held that they enjoyed martyrdom and courted imprisonment, in order to get silver watches from their admirers on their release! Here imputation was self-revelation. Seaton had won place and pay by his promotion of State vaccination; and absurdly ascribed to his antagonists his own venality. Indeed, his evidence throughout was pervaded by the temper and tactics of the quack, with an end to promote per fas et nefas. Asked what would happen if compulsion were withdrawn from vaccination, he answered—

The typical answer of the quack when his dupe hesitates over his prescription is, “You’ll see then what will happen!” When vaccination was not compulsory prior to 1853, nothing “awful” happened; it had been compulsory for fourteen years in 1871, and yet in 1871 the kingdom was under experience of the severest smallpox epidemic of the century! Nevertheless, the anticipation of Malthus was fulfilled: there was no proof that the average mortality was increased by a single unit.

The evidence concluded, a draft report was drawn up by the medical officials, submitted to the Committee, and, after some trivial alterations, agreed to. The character of the report may be estimated from this its second article—

And this in face of the fact that deaths from smallpox among the vaccinated and revaccinated were recorded by thousands!

Against the evidence in favour of vaccination, the prevalence of the present (1871) smallpox epidemic, especially in London, was alleged, and the awkward circumstance was thus tried to be evaded—

There is no arguing against what might have been. When Sangrado’s patients died, he averred that if only they had been bled more and taken more water, they would indisputably have recovered; and Sangrado had believers. So when vaccination does not save from smallpox, we are assured, “Ah, but it would, if only there had been more of it.” Descending from fancy to experience,—from what might have been to what has been, there is no record of a worse epidemic in England than that of 1871-72. The only one to compare with it was the epidemic of 1838-40, which occurred when not 50 per cent. of the English were vaccinated; but they fared no worse than in 1871-72, when the number of vaccinated was doubled.

The proper business of the Committee lay in legislation, and their report thereon took this form—

The recommendations of the Committee, chiefly administrative, were embodied in a Bill, passed by the House of Commons on 15th August. The tenth clause, limiting penalties, was the subject of a short debate, and was carried on a division by 57 to 12. When the Bill was brought before the House of Lords on 18th August, Lord Redesdale moved to omit clause 10, saying—

Viscount Halifax replied—