Is vaccination injurious? : a popular essay on the principles and practice of vaccination / by Henry Alleyne Nicholson, M.D.

  • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
Date:
1869
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Is vaccination injurious? : a popular essay on the principles and practice of vaccination / by Henry Alleyne Nicholson, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    within the first six months after birth. In many cases weaning has an equally disturbing effect about the same time ; in a still larger number of cases the diet has been from the first unsuitable; and, lastly, infantile syphilis, when present, rarely exhibits itself earlier than some two or three months after birth. From these causes, singly or combined, it very generally results that the latter half of the first year of life is more trying to the constitution of the child than any succeeding period of equal length. The system of the infant, too, is so easily disturbed, that the irritations of this period are very commonly manifested in some form easily recognised by the parents. Too frequently vaccination gets the blame, but, as before pointed out in more serious cases, there is not really any ground for supposing that it is really in fault. It may perhaps, in some cases, especially in children constitutionally unhealthy, act as the exciting cause of some minor affection, such as some disease of the skin; but even this is very far from being proved. If this really were the case, the skin- affection ought immediately to supervene upon the vaccination. As a matter of fact, however, the disease which is attributed to the vaccination, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, follows the vaccination at an interval too long to render this hypothesis a tenable one. At any rate, there is absolutely no proof that vaccination has a generally lowering effect upon the system, as its opponents assert. It may be so, but no rational man, who takes the trouble to inquire into the subject, will believe it without better proofs than any that have yet been brought forward, i Certainly those whose opportunities of observation have been greatest, and whose authority in the profession is highest, are unanimous in their disbelief And it is hardly reasonable to ask I us to reject well-grounded scientific testimony upon the dictum of any number of men whose faculties have not been trained to observe, and whose reasoning powers have never enabled them to perceive, that sequence of time does not always or necessarily imply causation.
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