[1] Professor Crookshank, in his evidence before the Royal Commission (4th Report, Q. 11,729) quotes Dr. De HaËn, a writer on Inoculation, as saying: “Asthma, consumption, hectic or slow fever of any kind, internal ulcers, obstructed glands, obstructions of the viscera from fevers, scrofula, scurvy, itch, eruptions, local inflammations or pains of any kind, debility, suppressed or irregular menstruation, chlorosis, jaundice, pregnancy, lues venerea, whether in the parent or transmitted to the child, and a constitution under the strong influence of mercury, prevented the operation.” There is no evidence that those who applied the so-called “variolous test” in the early days of vaccination paid any attention to this long list of ailments, many of which were very prevalent at the time, and which would, in the opinion of De HaËn, and of the English writer Sanders, who quotes him, have prevented the action of the virus and thus rendered the “test” entirely fallacious. With such causes as these, added to those already discussed, it becomes less difficult to understand how it was that the alleged test was thought to prove the influence of the previous vaccination without really doing so.

[2] The cases of failure of vaccination here referred to are given in Mr. William White’s Story of a Great Delusion, where fuller extracts and references will be found.

[3] These extracts from the Reports are given by Mr. White in his Story of a Great Delusion. The actual deaths from small-pox during the last century are given in the Second Report of the Royal Commission, p. 290. The above statements have been verified at the British Museum by my friend Dr. Scott Tebb, and are verbally accurate.

[4] As an example of the dreadful results of vaccination, even where special care was taken, the following case from the Sixth Report of the Royal Commission (p. 128) is worthy of earnest attention. It is the evidence of Dr. Thomas Skinner, of Liverpool:

In the same Report, fifteen medical men give evidence as to disease, permanent injury, or death caused by vaccination. Two give evidence of syphilis and one of leprosy as clearly due to vaccination. And, as an instance of how the law is applied in the case of the poor, we have the story told by Mrs. Amelia Whiting (QQ. 21,434-21,464). To put it in brief, it amounts to this:—Mrs. Whiting lost a child, after terrible suffering, from inflammation supervening upon vaccination. The doctor’s bill for the illness was £1 12s. 6d.; and a woman who came in to help was paid 6s. After this first child’s death, proceedings were taken for the non-vaccination of another child; and though the case was explained in court, a fine of one shilling was inflicted. And through it all, the husband’s earnings as a labourer were 11s. a week.

[5] See Table J, p. 201, 3rd Report, and the Minority Report of the Roy. Comm., pp. 176-7.

[6] The same view is taken even by some advocates of vaccination in Germany. In an account of the German Commission for the Consideration of the Vaccination Question in the British Medical Journal, August 29, 1885 (p. 408), we find it stated: “In the view of Dr. Koch, no other statistical material than the mortality from small-pox can be relied upon; questions as to the vaccinated or unvaccinated condition of the patient leaving too much room for error.”

[7] It is always stated that only the deaths of those persons belonging to the Church of England, or who were buried in the churchyards, are recorded in the “Bills.” This seems very improbable, because the “searchers” must have visited the house and recorded the death before the burial; and as they were of course paid a fee for each death certified by them, they would not enquire very closely as to the religious opinions of the family, or where the deceased was to be buried. A friend of mine who lived in London before the epoch of registration informs me that he remembers the “searchers’” visit on the occasion of the death of his grandmother. They were two women dressed in black; the family were strict dissenters, and the burial was at the Bunhill Fields cemetery for Nonconformists. This case proves that in all probability the “Bills” did include the deaths of many, perhaps most, Nonconformists.

[8] Final Report of Roy. Comm., p. 20 (85).

[9] As an example of the Commissioners’ statistical fallacies in treating the subject of changed age-incidence, see Mr. Alexander Paul’s A Royal Commission’s Arithmetic (King & Son, 1897), and, especially, Mr. A. Milnes’ Statistics of Small-pox and Vaccination in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, September, 1897.

[10] The highest small-pox mortality in London was in 1772, when 3,992 deaths were recorded in an estimated population of 727,000, or a death-rate of not quite 5,500 per million. (See Second Report, p. 290.)

[11] The small-pox deaths under one year in England have varied during the last fifty years from 8·6 to 27 per cent. of the whole. (See Final Report, p. 154.)

[12] This almost exactly agrees with the ages of the boys who are admitted between nine and eleven, and leave at fourteen. (See Low’s Handbook of London Charities.)

[13] From 1850 to 1873 the private vaccinations have been estimated according to their proportion of the whole since they have been officially recorded.

[14] Although the Commission make no mention of Mr. Biggs’ tables and diagrams showing the rise of infant-mortality with increased vaccination, and its fall as vaccination diminished, they occupied a whole day cross-examining him upon them, endeavouring by the minutest criticism to diminish their importance. Especially it was urged that the increase or decrease of mortality did not agree in detail with the increase or decrease of vaccination, forgetting that there are numerous causes contributing to all variations of death-rate, while vaccination is only alleged to be a contributory cause, clearly visible in general results, but not to be detected in smaller variations (see Fourth Report, Q. 17,513-17,744, or pp. 370 to 381). Mr. Bigg’s cross-examination in all occupies 110 pages of the Report.

[15] It was introduced into the Navy in 1801, and in that year the medical officers of the fleet presented Jenner with a special gold medal!

[16] These figures (for the Army and Navy) are obtained by averaging the annual death-rates given in the tables referred to, and are therefore not strictly accurate on account of the irregularly varying strength of the forces. But the error is small. In the case of the Navy, from 1864 to 1888 the mortality accurately calculated comes out more, by nearly six per cent. than the mean above given, and in the case of the Army for the same years about one per cent. more. For Ireland the calculation has been accurately made by means of the yearly populations given at p. 37 of the Final Report, but for the Army and Navy materials for the whole period included in the diagrams materials are not available in any of the Reports.

[17] The figures for the Army are obtained from the Second Report, p. 278, down to 1888, the remaining six years being obtained from the Final Report, pp. 86, 87; but this small addition has involved a large amount of calculation, because the Commissioners have given the death-rates per 10,000 strength of four separate forces—Home, Colonial, Indian, and Egyptian, and have not given the figures for the whole Army, so as to complete the table in the Second Report. The figures for the Navy are obtained from the Final Report, p. 88.

[18] Neither Sir C. Dilke nor the Post Office medical officers of the period referred to gave evidence before the Commission, and it shows to what lengths the Commissioners would go to support vaccination when such unverified verbal statements are accepted in their Final Report.

[19] As regards the case of the nurses in small-pox hospitals, about which so much has been said, I brought before the Commission some evidence from a medical work, which sufficiently disposes of this part of the question. In Buck’s Treatise on Hygiene and the Public Health, Vol. II., we find an article by Drs. Hamilton and Emmett on “Small-pox and other Contagious Diseases,” and on page 321 thereof we read:

“It is a fact fully appreciated by medical men, that persons constantly exposed to small-pox very rarely contract the disease. In the case of physicians, health-inspectors, nurses, sisters of charity, hospital orderlies, and some others, this is the rule; and of over 100 persons who have been to my knowledge constantly exposed, some of them seeing as many as 1,000 cases, I have never personally known of more than one who has contracted the disease; but there are many writers who believe perfect immunity to be extremely rare. In this connection attention may be called to the exemption of certain persons who occupy the same room, and perhaps bed, with the patients, and though sometimes never vaccinated, altogether escape infection.”

And Mr. Wheeler shows that at Sheffield the hospital staff did suffer from small-pox in a higher degree than other comparable populations (see 6th Report, Q. 19,907).

[20] It is a common practice of vaccinists to quote the German Army as a striking proof of the good effects of revaccination; but as our own Army is as well vaccinated as the Army surgeons with unlimited power can make it, it is unlikely that the Germans can do so very much better. And there is some reason to think that their statistics are less reliable than our own. Lieut.-Col. A. T. Wintle, (late) R.A., has published in the Vaccination Inquirer extracts from a letter from Germany stating, on the authority of a German officer, that the Army statistics of small-pox are utterly unreliable. It is said to be the rule for Army surgeons to enter small-pox cases as skin-disease or some other “appropriate illness,” while large numbers of small-pox deaths are entered as “sent away elsewhere.” We had better therefore be content with our own Army and Navy statistics, though even here there is some concealment. In 1860 Mr. Duncombe, M.P., moved for a return of the disaster at Shorncliffe Camp, where, it was alleged, 30 recruits were vaccinated, and six died of the results, but the return was refused. A letter in the Lancet of July 7, 1860, from a “Military Surgeon” stated that numbers of soldiers have had their arms amputated in consequence of mortification after vaccination; and a Baptist minister and ex-soldier, the Rev. Frederick J. Harsant, gave evidence before the Commission of another Shorncliffe disaster in 1868, he himself, then a soldier, having never recovered, and having had unhealed sores on various parts of his body for more than 20 years. Eighteen out of the twenty men vaccinated at the same time suffered; some were months in hospital and in a much worse condition than himself (6th Report, p. 207). In the same volume is the evidence of twenty medical men, all of whom have witnessed serious effects produced by vaccination, some being of a most terrible and distressing character.

[21] Brief statement of the argument:

The chances of a person having small-pox a second time may be roughly estimated thus: Suppose the average annual death-rate by small-pox to be 500 per million, and the average duration of life forty years. Then the proportion of the population that die of small-pox will be 500 × 40 = 20,000 per million. If the proportion of deaths to cases is one to five, there will he 100,000 cases of small-pox per million during the life of that million, so that one-tenth of the whole population will have small-pox once during their lives.

Now, according to the law of probabilities alone, the chances of a person having small-pox twice will be the square of this fraction, or one-hundredth: so that on the average only one person in 100 would have small-pox twice if it were a matter of pure chance, and if nothing interfered with that chance. But there are interferences which modify the result. (1) Those that die of the first attack cannot possibly have it a second time. (2) It is most frequent in the very young, so that the chances of having it later in life are not equal. (3) It is an especially epidemic disease, only occurring at considerable intervals, which reduces the chances of infection to those who have had it once. (4) It is probable that most persons are only liable to infection at certain periods of life, having passed which without infection they never take the disease. It seems probable, therefore, that these several conditions would greatly diminish the chances in the case of any person who had once had small-pox, so that perhaps, under the actual state of things, chance alone would only lead to one person in two hundred having the disease a second time.

The above is only an illustration of the principle. Professor Vogt goes more fully into the question, and arrives at the conclusion that out of every 1,000 cases of small-pox the probability is that ten will be second attacks. Then by getting together all the European observations as to the actual number of second attacks during various epidemics, the average is found to amount to sixteen in 1,000 cases, showing a considerable surplus beyond the number due to probability. Further, the proportion of deaths to attacks has from early times been observed to be high for second attacks; and it has also been observed by many eminent physicians, whose statements are given, that second attacks are more common in the case of persons whose first attacks were very severe, which is exactly the reverse of what we should expect if the first attack really conferred any degree of immunity.

Now the whole theory of protection by vaccination rests upon the assumption that a previous attack of the disease is a protection; and Professor Vogt concludes his very interesting discussion by the remark: “All this justifies our maintaining that the theory of immunity by a previous attack of small-pox, whether the natural disease or produced artificially, must be relegated to the realm of fiction.” If this is the case, the supposed probability or reasonableness of an analogous disease, vaccinia, producing immunity wholly vanishes.

[22] It is not alleged that overcrowding, per se, is the direct cause of small-pox, or of any other zymotic disease. It is, perhaps rather a condition than a cause; but under our present social economy it is so universally associated with various causes of disease—impure air, bad drainage, bad water supply, unhealthy situations, unwholesome food, overwork, and filth of every description in houses, clothing, and persons—that it affords the most general and convenient indication of an unhealthy as opposed to a healthy mode of life, and, while especially applying to zymotic diseases, is also so generally prejudicial to health as to produce a constant and very large effect upon the total mortality.

[23] To the cases I have already given I may now add two others, because they illustrate the recklessness in making assertions in favour of vaccination which scorns the slightest attempt at verification. In the first edition of Mr. Ernest Hart’s Truth about Vaccination (p. 4), it is stated, on the authority of a member of Parliament recently returned from Brazil, that during an epidemic of small-pox at the town of Ceara in 1878 and 1879, out of a population not exceeding 70,000 persons there were 40,000 deaths from small-pox. This was repeated by Dr. Carpenter during a debate in London, in February, 1882, and only when its accuracy was called in question was it ascertained that at the time referred to the population of Ceara was only about 20,000, yet the M.P. had stated—with detailed circumstance—that “in one cemetery, from August 1878, to June 1879 27,064 persons who had died of small-pox had been buried.” Gazetteers are not very recondite works, and it would have been not difficult to test some portion of this monstrous statement before printing it. Jenner’s biographer tells us that he had a horror of arithmetical calculations, due to a natural incapacity, which quality appears to be a special characteristic of those who advocate vaccination, as the examples I have given sufficiently prove.

Another glaring case of official misrepresentation occurred in the Royal Commission itself, but was fortunately exposed later on. A medical officer of the Local Government Board gave evidence (First Report, Q. 994) that the Board in 1886 “took some pains to get the figures as to the steamship Preussen,” on which small-pox broke out on its arrival in Australia. He made the following statements: (1) There were 312 persons on board this vessel. (2) 4 revaccinated, 47 vaccinated, 3 who had small-pox, and 15 unvaccinated were attacked—69 in all. (3) The case was adduced to show that “sanitary circumstances have little or no control over small-pox compared with the condition of vaccination or no vaccination.”

This official statement was quoted in the House of Commons as strikingly showing the value of vaccination. But, like so many other official statements, it was all wrong! The reports of the Melbourne and Sydney inspectors have been obtained, and it is found: (1) That there were on board this ship 723 passengers and 120 crew—843 in all, instead of 312; so that the “pains” taken by the Local Government Board to get “the figures” were very ineffectual. (2) There were 29 cases among the 235 passengers who disembarked at Melbourne, of whom only 1 was unvaccinated. The crew had all been revaccinated before starting, yet 14 of them were attacked, and one died. All these in addition to the cases given by the Local Government Board. Thus 18 revaccinated persons caught the disease, instead of 4, as first stated, and 69 vaccinated, instead of 48; while among the 15 cases alleged to be unvaccinated three were infants under one year old, and two more between five and ten years. (3) The official reports from Melbourne and Sydney stated that the vessel was greatly overcrowded, that the sanitary arrangements were very bad, and the inspector at Sydney declared the vessel to be the “filthiest ship he had had to deal with”!

Here, then, we have a case in which all the official figures, paraded as being the result of “taking some pains,” are wrong, not to a trifling extent, but so grossly that they might be supposed to apply to some quite different ship. And the essential fact of the filthy, overcrowded, and unsanitary condition of the ship was unknown or concealed; and the case was adduced as one showing how unimportant is sanitation as regards small-pox. What the case really proves is, that under unsanitary conditions neither vaccination nor revaccination has the slightest effect in preventing the spread of small-pox, since the proportion of the cases among the revaccinated crew was almost exactly the same as that of the whole of the cases (omitting the three infants) to the whole population on the ship.

With this example of officially quoted facts (!) in support of vaccination, coming at the end of the long series we have given or referred to in the first part of this work, it is not too much to ask that all such unverified statements be, once and for ever, ruled out of court. (See Final Report, pp. 205-6; and Second Report, Q. 5,942-5,984.)

[24] So late as 1892 (Jan. 16) the Lancet declared in a leading article: “No one need die of small-pox; indeed, no one need have it unless he likes—that is to say, he can be absolutely protected by vaccination once repeated.” Surely, never before was misstatement so ignorantly promulgated, or so completely refuted!

[25] “Lymph, a colourless nutritive fluid in animal bodies” (Chambers’ Dictionary). How misleading to apply this term to a product of disease, used to produce another disease, and now admitted to be capable of transmitting some of the most horrible diseases which afflict mankind—syphilis and leprosy!