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

  • John McVail
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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    were afterwards either inoculated with variolous matter or ex- posed at different periods to contagion. It need hardly be insisted on that no such body of evidence could have come into existence had vaccination been nothing more than a grotesque superstition. (5 ) We come now to the very heart and soul of Dr Creighton's doctrine—to his views on the true nature of cow-pox, and its relationship to syphilis. The subject is dealt with mainly in his work, Coiv-pox and Vaccinal Syphilis. His opinions are rather difficult to collect from among the rhetorical passages of his essays, but the following summary expresses what we learn concerning them. Cow-pox he holds to be an entirely artificial disorder. It has its origin in an eruption on the teats and udder of hard pimples, which, if left to themselves, maturate to a very limited extent. These pimples, even maturated in a natural way, do not, he urges, constitute cow-pox. Their ' natural' development, in so far as it can come into the pathology of infective disease, does not exist, for the reason that the pimples on the cow's teats, if they were saved from the ' merciless manipulations of the milkers' [the words are Ceely's], would simply run the course of pimples, and would never become pox; it is the perpetual ' insult' of an ailing part, the forcible traction on the pimply skin three times a day, the creation of hoemorrhagic crusts, and the ever- renewed displacement of these, that now and then sets up the inveterate and communicable process which we know as cow-pox. Its characters are deep or spreading ulceration (sometimes phagaedenic to a degree that destroys half the udder), with slow healing, induration of the base and roundness of the edges, and a deep permanent scar, often smooth and regular, but not rarely puckered and irregular, such as follows any ulcerative destruction through the whole thickness of a vascular and almost erectile skin. The parallelism of the disease thus described with syphilis he endeavours to make out by a reference to Kicord's plates of experimental chancres, and by the narrative of one of Eicord's cases as given by an eye-witness. On the 6th day there was a little pimple at each inoculated spot, on the 7th day the pimples had become vesicular, on the 10th crusts began to form, on the 15th ichor oozed from beneath the crusts, on the 22nd this had become purulent, and on tlie 29th putrid. On the 30th the crust separated, revealing an ulcer, with raised hard edges, and ulti- mately a cicatrix formed. Mr Henry Lee's plates {Med. Chir. Trans., 1861) are said to show the same characters, and the ulcers above described are exactly parallel to the Stroud inoculations with cow-pox to which I have already referred. Jenner's and Ceely's descriptions of the sores on the milkers' hands, got by ' accidental infection from the cow's teats, are also brought in to show the resemblance to syphilitic sores. In a case of Ceely's, the