Facts about vaccination : speeches in parliament, 19th June, 1883 / by the Right Hon. Sir Lyon Playfair, K.C.B. and The Right Hon. Sir Chas. Dilke, Bart.

  • Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair
Date:
[1883]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Facts about vaccination : speeches in parliament, 19th June, 1883 / by the Right Hon. Sir Lyon Playfair, K.C.B. and The Right Hon. Sir Chas. Dilke, Bart. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    out of that country. That is exactly what it has done. ‘The words ‘‘stamp out” are borrowed from the Cattle Plague Commission, of which I was a member. The Cattle Plague Commission thought that the measures recommended by them were sufficient to stamp out the disease, but not to keep it out, for great epidemics are like huge tidal waves, which may roll over any ordinary embankments. It must be borne in mind that these embankments are never wholly continuous, for the unvaccinated are like holes in them, through which the flood of disease finds its way. Vaccination is, under ordinary conditions, a sufficient protection, but in the presence of a great epidemic it is overtopped, and small-pox spreads over a country, attacking the unvaccinated and those whose protection has worn out by age—as it increases in volume, the vaccinated too are carried away by it, but vaccination is their life-belt, and they rarely perish. It was so in Scotland in the great epidemic to which I will allude later on in greater detail... When such an epidemic strikes a population, they become terrified, and they rush in crowds to-be . vaccinated. At that time the compulsory law had. only existed for eight years in Scotland, and only the infant population had come under its influence-
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