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

  • John McVail
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

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.

    35/48 (page 33)
    points out that the most material indisposition, or at least that which is felt most sensibly, does not arise 'primar ily from the first action of the virus on the constitution, hut that it often comes on, if the pustule he left to chance, as a secondary disease. The italics are his own. Again, arguing, as was his wont, by analogy, he says, Is pure pus, though contained in a small-pox pustule, ever capable of producing the small-pox perfectly ? I suspect it is not. And yet again, as Dr Creighton quotes (p. 75), Jenner says, I am more and more convinced of the extreme mildness of the symptoms arising merely from the primary action of the virus on the constitution. So that Jenner, Woodville, Ceely, Hering, and Seaton are of one mind as to what is essential and what accidental in the vaccine disease. But we need not go to these authorities for proof that Dr Creighton is wrong. The following narrative, taken from his own pages (114-6), shows, when examined along with the associated facts, a condition of things entirely at variance with his whole theory:— The first vaccination clone in America, with lymph from Woodville, was upon Dr Waterhoiise's own child, who suffered from axillary swellings, an efflorescence from the shoulder to the elbow, and what would seem to have been an ulcer ; ' a piece of true skin was fairly taken out of the arm by the virus, the part appearing as if eaten out by a caustic ' {Op. cit., i. p. 19). His own subsequent cases were milder, and, in fact, regular; but in the autumn of that year (1800) a great many misadventures occurred through the incautious use of vaccine matter from open sores or from vesicles late in their develojJ- ment. ' I have known,' says Waterhouse (ii. p. 8), ' the shirt sleeve of a patient, stiff with the pvirulent discharge from a foul ulcer, made so by unskilful man- agement, and full three weeks after vaccination, aird in whicli there could have been none of the specific virus. I have known this cut up into small strips and sold about the country as genuine kine-pock matter coming directly from me. Several hundred people were inoculated with this caustic morbid poison.' At a later part of his second essay we come upon the more precise details of these vaccinations with caustic virus : ' All those cases where there were violent inflammations, deep-seated ulcerations, eruptions, and heavy febrile symptoms were not the true kine-pock, but a malady generated by a highly acrid, putrid matter ; or, in one word, poisonous matter taken from under a scab, or from an open ulcer long after the specific virus was annihilated.'' The explanation printed in italics is, of course, sophistical; the scientific explanation is, that the use of the virus from a late period of the vesicle or ulcer rej^roduced and gave fixity to that section of the natural history of cow-pox, which is ordinarily kei^t latent by careful attention to the period of maturation. ... 'At another time [says Waterhouse] the angry pustule shows no disposition to scab, the aperture in the skin increases, the inflammation blazes forth afresh, and the illness keeps pace with the progress of the ulceration ; a transparent glairy fluid fills the cavity, which granulates very slowly.' This transparent fluid had been used to vaccinate with : ' It is the most xarulent of all the dis- charges of cow-pox.' This is tiie caustic matter which is apt to produce in patients of certain habits a crop of eruptions and a heavy weight of constitu- tional symptoms.' When Jenner heard of the American disasters of the autumn of 1800 and of the end of 1801, he wrote to Waterhouse that he had been longing for a speaking-trumpet that would carry these words on the rapid wings of the wind C