Vaccination / by Edward Ballard.

  • Ballard, Edward, 1820-1897.
Date:
[1859]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vaccination / by Edward Ballard. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    not contagious. And as to scrofula—a term which the public use in a indefinite sense—no charge could bo more inapplicable. Scrofula d consumption, which may be regarded as its most intense expression, ai from conditions which have to do with the mere keeping and feeding of individual, and from transmission from parent to child of an hereditary ta Neither of them are diseases that can be propagated either by contagion] by inoculation ; how then by the introduction into the system of vacq virus, which differs in every respect from the ordinary products of scrofulj disease ? Scrofula is a disease of nutrition and development; and, Mr. Simon observes, it might as well be said that Vaccination communica a Roman nose or a landed estate. But in order to set this question quitd rest, it was put to 542 eminent medical practitioners in this country 1 abroad, and the answers which Mr. Simon obtained were remarkably unifcj in their tenour,—viz., that they had no reason to believe or suspect tj the operation of Vaccination has ever been the medium of any form constitutional infection, or that Vaccination renders a person more suscepti of consumption or of any other disease. 3. A word for the “doctors.” They are not universally ignorant dishonest. Individuals may be, and unhappily every profession cont its fool or its rogue; but the charge must be proved to apply universa or at any rate generally, to invalidate their collective opinion. Perh it is not too much to say, that there is no body of professional men wl training is better calculated to render them accurate reasoners or more ar lovers of truth. Fourthly and lastly. The State has a right to control individual lib for the good of the many, even to the extent of compelling a parent to hi his child vaccinated. Really it seems a farce to argue this point. WT it is the basis of all law and of all government. What would be the sf of society, think you, if every man that pleased might take the life of auothl or if a man might quietly stand by and see another murdered ? Does a one quarrel with the law that renders the accomplice a participator in crime ? Does it not meet everybody’s sense of right, that the neglect supplying his infant with appropriate and necessary food and clothin punishable as a crime ? and do we not at once stigmatize the person vf| thus permits a child to die of starvation as guilty of infanticide? And what respect is the criminality less, when a parent allows his child to open to the attacks of a fatal malady when it is in his power to protect hi Nay, how much more criminal is the neglect, when it is considered t the omission in that one instance may be the cause of introducing int neighbourhood, and of communicating to others, the fearful plague of Small-P' Printed by J. & 1. Tirebuck, Monkwcll Street, City, and Islington.