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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    vaccination] in 1886 I had no other prepossessions than those which nearly all medical men have in favour of an established doctrine and practice. It vpas not until I had spent some months in a search among the authorities, pathological and other, at first hand, that I felt constrained to modify the opinions which I had hitherto implicitly accepted. If I am right, or within a measurable distance of being right, in my interpretation of Dr Creighton's opinions, is it possible, by any common stretch of language, to describe these opinions as a modification of any previous opinions which were consonant with the prepossessions which nearly all medical men have in favour of vaccination ? But, at any rate, I am safe in quoting his own words. In his latest book, addressed to the public rather than (as was his letter in the Lancet) to the profession, he speaks of vaccination as a grotesque superstition.^ Is this a modifica- tion of any ordinary views on the subject? If so, then a man who formerly held that the earth was a sphere, and now asserts that it is a level plane, may properly express his change of mind by saying that he lias modified his views as to the shape of the planet. It is obvious that, in endeavouring to square with his hypothesis all that is known of small-pox and cow-pox and syphilis, Dr Creighton sets himself a gigantic task, and one cannot but admire the courage which characterizes his effort to accomplish it. In attempting to review some of his principal lines of argument, I am met by tlie initial difficulty that his opinions are nowhere put in the form of definite propositions. I will, therefore, try to state each of them as necessity arises. (1.) The first question to be taken up refers to the folk-lore of cow-pox. The belief in its protective power against small-pox, he says, was a localized one. It had never been heard of till rather late in the eighteenth century, and it had no foundation in fact. The only bond of connexion between the two diseases was the word fox. The jingling sound of 'cow-pox—small-pox' led the officious gossips of the countryside to make a legend out of it, just as the old herb-books alleged that for a person to carry about with him the herb hound's tongue, protected from mad dogs, and that the root of the dog-rose cured their bite. This, and this alone, originated the idle story. Such is Dr Creighton's statement in Chapter II. of Jenner arid Vaccination. Clearly it is of the very greatest importance, for Jenner dates his first thoughts on the subject from hearing in his master's surgery in Sodbury a young woman observe, I cannot take that disease [small-pox], for I have had cow-pox^ and during the next thirty years much of his attention to the matter was due to the constant reiteration of this opinion by the dairy people of the Vale of Berkeley. 1 Jenner and Vaccination, p. 353. 2 Baron's Life of Jenner, vol. i. p. 122,