Dr. C. Creighton, M.D. and vaccination : a review / by J. McVail.

  • McVail, John C. (John Christie), 1849-1926.
Date:
1890
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr. C. Creighton, M.D. and vaccination : a review / by J. McVail. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    1'> o swallow it as easily as his patient and his colleague had done! And not only would this happen in London, where Jenner's treatise was published; it would happen wherever the inoculation test was tried,—all over England, and all over Europe, and in India and America, and throughout the world. This in effect is the theory that Dr Creighton sets up to explain away the variolous test. Do my readers think it incredible ? To me it is incredible that they should think it anything else. Never- theless it is so. Here is Creighton's summing up:— We come, then, to this extraordinary result, that the very same degree of small-pox infection, namely, the local pustule alone, or the local pustule followed by an abortive fever and a few abortive pimples, which had come to be reckoned a sufficient manifestation of the disease when inoculation was an end in itself, was now reckoned an insufficient manifestation, and, in fact, an evidence that the infection had not taken at all, when inoculation was done after cow-poxing and with a view to test the alleged antagonistic power of the latter against small-pox.—(Pp. 146, 147.) It is clear that the Doctor himself sees the halting nature of the thesis. Very oddly does he strive to make it pass muster, however, trying to turn even its weakness into strengtli. He says,— I am aware of the gravity [the italics are mine] of that accusation against the common intelligence and moral prudence of the medical pro- fession. The assertion that the charge is a grave one is a stroke of real genius. Its characteristic is not gravity, but absurdity. In developing his argument, Dr Creighton, as usual, falls foul of Jenner. He desired not only to mislead the profession by the name Variolte vaccinae, but to guide it craftily into a method of testing which would be itself a fraud. He quotes Jenner's state- ment in the Inquiry, that In some of the preceding cases I have noticed the attention that was paid to the state of the variolous matter previous to the experiment of inserting it into the arms of those who had gone through the cow-pox, and he italicises Jenner's words, This I conceived to he of the greatest importance in conducting these experiments. Tlien he goes on to say— It is only in one of the ' preceding cases,' not in ' some,' that any notice is taken of the point; but that notice is quite significant enough of what this super-subtle genius wanted to hint to his readers. Case III.—John Philips, a cow-poxed milker, aged 62, was tested with small-j^ox, the matter having been 'taken from the arm of a boy just before the commencement of the eruptive fever.' Just so, the variolous test was applied in the most mitigated form of Gatti's and Sutton's ' new method ;' the matter for inoculation was taken from the local pustule of a previous case of inoculation, not from a general eruption of natural small-pox ; it was taken at a very early stage, before it had under- gone the supposed ' putrefactive' change which made it spurious ; and it was inserted, not by a deep incision, but by a superficial puncture, as well as in small quantity. Part of this, it need hardly be said, is mere assumption. Jenner does not say that he made a puncture (like Gatti) instead of an