The vaccine contest, or, Mild humanity, reason, religion, and truth, against fierce, unfeeling ferocity, overbearing insolence, mortified pride, false faith, and desperation : being an exact outline of the arguments and interesting facts, adduced by the principal combatants on both sides, respecting cow-pox inoculation; including a late official report on this subject by the Medical Council of the Royal Jennerian Society / by William Blair.

  • Blair, William, 1766-1822.
Date:
1806
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The vaccine contest, or, Mild humanity, reason, religion, and truth, against fierce, unfeeling ferocity, overbearing insolence, mortified pride, false faith, and desperation : being an exact outline of the arguments and interesting facts, adduced by the principal combatants on both sides, respecting cow-pox inoculation; including a late official report on this subject by the Medical Council of the Royal Jennerian Society / by William Blair. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    have raked the very kennels of human misery, for diseases; that they might impute them all to the beastly origin of vaccination, and argue their unenlightened readers into a persuasion of their own disinterested exertions ! It would exhaust your pa- tience, and fatigue your attention, if I were to enter into a description of the cases which I myself and my friends have known to be thus egregiously misre- presented : I shall therefore decline, at present, de- taining you with any farther observations of this kind. Only let it be remembered, that I do not wish you to take my ipse dixit in behalf of vaccination, but to sift and examine the whole affair for yourself, as a question of inconceivable importance to society. My own experience can never stand in compe- tition with that of many others, in this department of medicine ; but, such has been my success (in about seven hundred cases), that it would be nothing short of insanity to discontinue the practice of Jcnner, and to substitute the curse of variolous pestilence in its stead : I should regard such conduct as no less cri- minal than voluntarily throwing fire-brands, arrows, and death, among my peaceful fellow-creatures, in the centre of this vast metropolis ! Dr. Bragwell's words, prophetically uttered on another occasion, must now recoil upon himself— Calumny and de- u traction said he, have been, and will be, ex- t( ercised against every attempt to improve medicine. <c The more successful any improvement is, with '( so much the more fury it is opposed % and it rarely 4