The natural history of cow-pox and vaccinal syphilis / by Charles Creighton.

  • Charles Creighton
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The natural history of cow-pox and vaccinal syphilis / by Charles Creighton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    pointed out in elaborate detail by several writers, and ought, indeed, to be so obvious to anyone as not to need pointing out at all; yet the Jennerian fable of variola vaccinae con- tinues to be the creed of the medical profession. The first thing, then, is to dismiss Jenner's Latin name for cow-pox. Having dismissed the Latin name we come to the thing itself—to its characters on the milch-cow's teats, and the circumstances of its very occasional origin thereon; to its characters as communicated by contact to the milker's hands and face ; to its characters as experimentally cultivated and modified by artificial selection on the arms of infants ; and to the occasional reversions of type, with disastrous consequences, in the ordinary course of vaccination practice. These are the tilings that I have endeavoured to set forth in the several chapters of this essay. I appeal to facts that are as well authenticated as any facts can be, and I invite the most rigid scrutiny of my use of them, or of my reasoning from them. I deprecate no criticism ; but I warn the apologists of the Jennerian doctrine that any attempt to wrap themselves in a mantle of orthodoxy will be a grave dereliction of that duty which the profession owes to the public. I am as sensible as any one of the need of securing our professional credit and dignity in the controversy which has been raised, by an intelligent and ceaselessly active body of the laity, touching the whole subject-matter of compulsory vaccination ; and it is because I am persuaded that the profession must lead rather than follow public opinion in bringing the theory of cow-pox up to date, that I have thrown this contribution to the subject into a strictly professional and even technical form.
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