Children have been crucial to the entire history of vaccinationism. Of course, children are the main recipients of vaccination today, and historically also. However, the use of children by the vaccination paradigm goes beyond this. In this essay we will look at how children were used in inoculation and vaccination experiments, how they were used to bolster the image of inoculation, and with vaccination, how they were transported as a method of maintaining vaccine lymph.
Children as Test Subjects
Inoculation was deliberately infecting someone with smallpox, via taking matter from a live smallpox case (usually a mild case) and inserting it into someone else’s arm in the hopes that they would also get a mild case. This practise was introduced into England by Lady Montagu, after she had observed it being used in Turkey. After the practice was introduced, members of the elite were interested in the procedure, but were not willing to commit to the process. To satisfy the Princess of Wales, 6 charity children were inoculated. After they survived the procedure, she had her own children inoculated.
In vaccination too children were important. Edward Jenner’s original testing of vaccination was performed on an 8-year-old child, James Phipps. John Baker was another child that Jenner carried out experiments upon, and it is a plausible interpretation of the facts that he died as a result of the experiment. These children were from poorer backgrounds.
There are many other examples of doctors testing vaccination upon children in different countries. For example, in Calcutta in 1805, the British wanted to convince the traditional Indian inoculators to switch to vaccination. As such, they ran a public test where they vaccinated children publicly and then performed the variolous test by inoculating them with smallpox to demonstrate immunity. A similar demonstration also happened in France in 1801.
Children as Example
In the adoption of inoculation, the use of elite children as an ‘example’ of the effectiveness and value of inoculation was common. A publicised inoculation of a child of the elite was used as a means to bolster the practice and to demonstrate an elite belief in its safety. It could also serve as a means of signalling status to other elites and the population at large.
This was the case with Lady Montagu, who had her own son and daughter inoculated as a means of introducing the procedure to England. Maitland, Lady Montagu’s physician, promoted inoculation as parental love. In 1722, the British royal princesses were inoculated.
Inoculation fell out of favour until the 1750s, when it had a resurgence. The Duke of Orleans had his children inoculated in 1756, and these children were cheered when taken to the opera after recovering from the procedure. in 1760, the King of Denmark had his son inoculated which showed his belief in the procedure.
After the introduction of vaccination in 1798 onwards, the example of individual aristocrats seems less important and is less heavily emphasised. This could be due to the changing times, where aristocratic families would start to play second fiddle to the rising capitalist class.
Children as Carriers of Lymph
In inoculation, preservation and maintenance of smallpox matter was not a concern. One could always get new inoculation matter from a smallpox case. However, in vaccination, maintaining an active supply of lymph was a real problem. Cowpox was not a very common disease, which meant extracting matter from the cow whenever vaccinations were required was not feasible. There were attempts to preserve cowpox for a longer term by soaking it in threads, but when this method was tried to send lymph over long distances, the lymph often lost its potency (ability to form the vesicles by which vaccination success was judged). As such alternative methods were considered to carry vaccine lymph over long distances.
In 1803, King Carlos of Spain announced a vaccine expedition to Spanish America and the Philippines, using children as a means to preserve vaccine lymph. Children would be taken on the boat and vaccinated in sequence across the ocean journey, to ensure active vaccine lymph at the end of the journey. This trip went from Tenerife to Puerto Rico as well as Cuba, Mexico and Peru. During certain parts of the land trip, freshly vaccinated children were also used to convey lymph.
In India in 1803, there was a plan to send vaccination to Sumatra. Vaccination had successfully reached India a year prior. 14 children were recruited to be vaccinated two at a time on the voyage. Children were taken from the Military Orphan School, which was a school for the children of military Europeans in India (the children may not have been orphans in the literal sense).
Conclusion
Children are vital to modern vaccinationism as its purported beneficiaries and serve a vital ideological function in the promotion of vaccines. This article seeks to show that this has always been the case.
The book M. Bennett, War against Smallpox, and the Article “Carrying the Pox: The Use of Children and Ideals of Childhood in Early British and Imperial Campaigns Against Smallpox” were used to compile this article.
Smallpox vaccination was said to prevent infection with smallpox. However, there is a significant practical difficulty with this argument, aside from statistical evidence and anecdotes of vaccine failure. This is the nature of ‘vaccine lymph’ itself. Although ‘vaccine lymph’ is often considered to be cowpox, the history is a lot more complicated than this, with multiple different lymph sources in circulation. This poses a theoretical problem for those who argue that vaccination prevented smallpox, since they then have to argue that all these sources are equivalent, but this is unlikely.
Horse Grease Cowpox or Spontaneous Cowpox?
Edward Jenner argued that there was more than one form of cowpox in his essay the Inquiry. His Inquiry starts with a description of a disease of the horse, the grease, which he claims is spread to the cow:
In this Dairy Country a great number of Cows are kept, and the office of milking is performed indiscriminately by Men and Maid Servants. One of the former having been appointed to apply dressings to the heels of a Horse affected with the Grease, and not paying due attention to cleanliness, incautiously bears his part in milking the Cows, with some particles of the infectious matter adhering to his fingers. When this is the case, it commonly happens that a disease is communicated to the Cows, and from the Cows to the Dairy-maids, which spreads through the farm until most of the cattle and domestics feel its unpleasant consequences.
Jenner is clear in this text that the protection comes via the horse, through the cow, to man.
Jenner distinguishes this from spontaneous cowpox, which he considers not protective from smallpox:
It is necessary to observe, that pustulous sores frequently appear spontaneously on the nipples of Cows, and instances have occurred, though very rarely, of the hands of the servants employed in milking being affected with sores in consequence, and even of their feeling an indisposition from absorption. These pustules are of a much milder nature than those which arise from that contagion which constitutes the true Cow Pox. […] But this disease is not be considered as similar in any respect to that of which I am treating, as it is incapable of producing any specific effects on the human Constitution. However, it is of the greatest consequence to point it out here, lest the want of discrimination should occasion an idea of security from the infection of the Small Pox, which might prove delusive.
So here we have two forms of cowpox. One protects from smallpox, and one does not. Presumably, the lymph used by Jenner in his vaccinations outlined in the Inquiry was horse grease cowpox.
So where did his next set of lymph come from? Enter William Woodville.
William Woodville was the lead doctor of the Smallpox Hospital in London and interested in Jenner’s method. He was able to obtain lymph for vaccination from a cow in Grey’s Inn Lane, London. Woodville had been previously unable to directly inoculate horse grease on the cow’s teat.
Be it observed, however, that this London cowpox was not Jenner’s cowpox. It was not horsegrease cowpox, but the variety stigmatised by Jenner as spurious.
However, because Jenner had no source of lymph, the Woodville lymph became the source that was spread across the world, regardless of the fact that it wasn’t horse grease cowpox. So if we take the Jennerian distinction as legitimate, there is a significant argument that the lymph used was not protective. Even if we reject the idea that there is such thing as a horse grease cowpox, there is still the problem of which forms of lesions on a cow’s teat are protective from smallpox, since it is agreed that there is more than one form of disease on the cow’s teat.
Cowpox or Smallpox – Was Woodville’s Lymph Contaminated?
As Woodville worked at the Smallpox Hospital in London, he performed his vaccinations there. This of course meant there was a risk of a patient who may become a vaccinifer contracting smallpox, leading to smallpox being spread along with the vaccine lymph. There were also other issues with how Woodville carried out his tests. Although he ran many more tests than Jenner and was more fastidious in recording his results, in some of his cases he performed the variolous test very early on, while the cowpox pustule was still present:
Ann Pink, a tall girl, of a brown sallow complexion, aged fifteen years. This girl was inoculated with variolous matter, on the fifth day, in the same manner as Collingridge, and both tumours proceeded to maturation, though more slowly than in that case.
He then went on to use some of these cases as vaccinifers (e.g. James Crouch was vaccinated, then inoculated on the 5th day after vaccination, then used as the vaccinifer for case 21). This meant the cowpox matter may well be contaminated with smallpox matter.
As Woodville made differing observations from Jenner, regarding the eruptions on the skin, there were some cases where it seemed evident that Woodville’s patients had smallpox.
Horsepox or Cowpox: Equine Lymph Direct From the Horse
Jenner’s relationship to the horse grease theory of cowpox is not straightforward. Essentially, he advocated it initially, but then failed to mention it in his further essays, likely due to its unpopularity. For example, a notable early vaccine promoter, George Pearson, considered the horse grease part of Jenner’s ideas to be nonsense and openly said so. William White argues that Jenner did this for cynical reasons, i.e. financial gain. Later in his life, however, Jenner essentially returned to the horse and in fact used vaccination (equination?) direct rather than via the cow.
For example, he referred to using equine lymph in his correspondence:
[Mr. Melon] sent me some of his equine virus, which I have been using from arm to arm for these two months past without observing the smallest deviation in the progress and appearance of the pustules from those produced by the vaccine.
It was not just Jenner that use horsepox direct. An Italian vaccinator, Sacco, used horsepox to vaccinate.
Sacco obtained some matter from the ulcerous sores on a horse’s hocks (he gives a startling picture of huge, excavated horse sores in his Trattato of 1809), and therewith inoculated several children at the Foundling Hospital of Milan. He found that the effects were very like those of cowpox virus (as we know, in fact, that they always are) ; and, on trying the children with the variolous test, he found that they were protected just as if they had been cowpoxed.
De Carro in Vienna also used horse grease in his vaccinations.
This horse material likely ended up in wide circulation due to its usage by these prolific vaccinators.
Humanised Lymph: Did Serial Passage Affect the Disease?
As for most of the 19th century, vaccination was arm to arm, there is a possibility that passing through multiple human constitutions may have affected the disease. Essentially, this passing through multiple humans was a crude form of serial passage. In fact, people considered this in the nineteenth century as well, which is why some in the 1840s wanted to “return to the cow” and create a fresh stock of lymph (see below). They believed that the passage through multiple human constitutions had made the disease too mild to be effective against smallpox. As virologists subscribe to the idea of serial passage affecting the function of viruses, then they have to concede this is probable in the case of artificial cowpox infection. Thus the vaccine given over time is not a consistent virus but had different mutations, meaning that there is a distinct possibility of mutation away from being an effective preventative of smallpox even if Jenner’s original concoction worked (which of course, it did not).
Cowpox or Smallpox II: Smallpox Via the Cow
In the 1840s, the idea became prevalent that the lymph was no longer potent and that a stock should be raised from cows. The idea that smallpox and cowpox were the same disease became explicit (Jenner had said that horse grease was ‘the source’ of smallpox instead, although he did call cowpox variolae vaccinae i.e. cow smallpox). The reason that cowpox protected from smallpox on this view was that it was smallpox, except passed via the constitution of the cow which somehow made it milder. This idea wasn’t really explained, just asserted.
Cowpox was not a widespread disease, making it difficult to find new lymph sources. As such, there were those who attempted to deliberately infect cows with smallpox to generate these new lymph sources.
One of these men was Robert Ceely, who performed extensive experiments involving cows. He gave detailed descriptions of cowpox and also infected cows with smallpox and described the results.
Badcock was another 1840s writer, who wanted to obtain fresh lymph for vaccination:
The only satisfactory mode of obtaining, with certainty, the true vaccine that presented itself to my mind was, therefore, to inoculate a healthy cow with Small Pox matter, as the result of that operation, if any, must be cow Small Pox
Badcock used this matter for vaccination and indeed states that he vaccinated ‘several thousand’ with this lymph.
Later in the 19th century, when arm to arm vaccination was abandoned, the method of ‘pure glycerinated calf lymph’ came into vogue and emerged as the main method of vaccination. Again, this involved the deliberate infection of cows with smallpox.
The living calf or heifer is first bound down on a movable tilting table, and its belly is shaved and on the clean, tender skin of a most tender part one or two hundred cuts or scratches are then made, and into these cuts or scratches is rubbed some “seed virus,” obtained directly or indirectly from human smallpox.
Vaccinators also tried different examples of less popular material for vaccination.
One example is sheep pox:
Accordingly, when Sacco, in 1804, obtained variolous lymph from infected sheep at Capua, he gave it to Dr. Legni in the remote Sicilian province of Cattolica to try as a substitute for vaccine in the prevention of smallpox.
There were also other examples of various lymph being used – goat pox was experimented with in Madrid in 1804. Crookshank also argued that cattle plague was used for vaccine lymph in India.
The Jennerian Vesicle: The Vaccination Standard
What connects all of this? The notion of the Jennerian vesicle. Basically, the standard for ‘successful vaccination’ was whether it produced a correct ‘Jennerian vesicle’ on the arm where the matter was inserted. In other words, so long as the vesicle looked ‘correct’ the vaccination was considered to be successful. It goes without saying that this is not a scientific criteria for judging immunity to a disease. But because all these sources could raise the Jennerian vesicle, they were defended as vaccine lymph and some were widely employed.
Conclusion
The fact that so many different diseases, from so many different sources, were considered and used as vaccine lymph, poses a theoretical issue for vaccinationists. All these sources were adjudged at some point, and by some individuals to be appropriate matter for vaccination and many sources existed in circulation. Yet it is difficult theoretically to argue that all these sources were equivalent and thus, for the vaccinationist, equally effective against smallpox.
Vaccine deaths have always existed, and have always been denied. This is a story of some of these forgotten vaccine deaths.
Inoculation Deaths
Inoculation, or variolation, was the practice of deliberately infecting someone with smallpox. This was the practice that was used prior to the introduction of the Jennerian method of deliberately infecting people with cowpox as a method to protect from smallpox.
This practice was very dangerous. The more sensible (if that’s the right word) inoculators admitted this risk, they just argued that the odds were better with inoculation than natural infection since they had observed that people generally only got smallpox once.
A man called Jurin (a pro-inoculator) collected statistical data on the question of inoculation. He stated that inoculation had a death rate of 1 in 48 (13 in 624). But that the natural disease killed 1 in 6, so that the odds were better with inoculation (of course, what this logic ignores is that you aren’t guaranteed to get smallpox, and even if you were, you might get it many years later, meaning many life years lost to inoculation).
The Case of John Baker
When Edward Jenner entered into this discussion, he performed experiments on children to attempt to prove that cowpox protected from smallpox. This bit is well known, what is less emphasised, however, is Jenner’s arguments relating to horse grease and cowpox. Jenner believed that there was more than one form of disease of the cow’s teat – horse grease cowpox and spontaneous cowpox. In his initial text, the Inquiry, he argued that the protective form of cowpox was the horse grease form. Jenner believed that the disease was essentially artificial in the cow. The chain of events was as follows, in Jenner’s mind: the horse developed a disease known as grease which affected the heels of the horse. The farrier would have to dress the heels of the horse, causing the disease to be on his hands. However, he also did double duty milking the cow, and as such, then spread the disease to the cow’s teat. Pustules and inflammation developed on the teat as a result and this was horse grease cowpox (which could protect from smallpox).
This is relevant because Jenner wanted to compare direct horse grease with horse grease cowpox. As such, he vaccinated two children, one with horse grease direct and one with cowpox. The child vaccinated with the horse grease was John Baker, a 5-year-old. Jenner had intended to test his immunity by inoculating him for smallpox, but he was ‘rendered unfit for inoculation’, Jenner said, by a fever he caught in the workhouse. The boy died and the most plausible assumption is that he died as a result of the vaccination experiment.
‘Preserving Vaccination From Reproach’
Vaccination death has always been covered up by the medical establishment. As critics of vaccination have pointed out, one way this is done is to put the symptom on the death certificate, but not the cause of the symptom. In this way it can be stated that the child died of erysipelas or some other condition, without blaming vaccination.
What is of interest is we have one case from the 19th century where a doctor openly stated they concealed vaccination as the cause of death on a death certificate. Henry May, a physician from Birmingham (United Kingdom) stated the following in 1874:
A death from Vaccination occurred not long ago in my practice, and although I had not vaccinated the child, yet in my desire to preserve Vaccination from reproach, I omitted all mention of it from my certificate of death.
For much of the twentieth century, deaths from vaccination were higher than deaths from smallpox. Smallpox declined due to increased sanitation:
A Mr. John Cryer, an ardent anti-vaccinationist, taught school in Bradford, Eng. One day he noticed a lad of about twelve years—a new pupil in school. He questioned him: “Where did you come from?” “Sheffield, sir.” “How long have you resided there?” “Six years, sir.” “How many are there in the family ?” “Six of us, sir.” “Then you were in Sheffield during the small-pox epidemic ?” “Yes, sir.” “Did any of you have the small-pox?” “Oh, no, sir, we lived in a front street.” That last sentence tells the whole story. It is worth more than a dozen reports of Local Guardians; worth more than whole columns of statistics. It hits the nail square on the head, and locates the disease. Why didn’t the lad say: “Oh, no, sir, we were all vaccinated?”
Vaccination also declined significantly after the mandates were eased and objection clauses inserted.
Nevertheless we have multiple deaths reported from vaccination. Between 1933-1946 there were 89 child deaths from vaccination according to the official statistics. During the same time 28 died from smallpox. This will likely be a large undercount due to the concealment of vaccination deaths.
This is a very small sample of death that has occurred as a result of smallpox inoculation and vaccination.
Edward Jenner is the ‘founding father’ in vaccine ideology. The official narrative holds that Jenner was some sort of genius, who discovered cowpox inoculation and thus saved millions of lives from smallpox. So let’s discuss Edward Jenner and his theories, from a critical perspective.
Did Jenner Discover Vaccination?
The short answer to this question is no. Jenner was not the first person to practice a cowpox inoculation to protect from smallpox. A farmer called Benjamin Jesty is known to have used a needle to scratch the cowpox virus into the arms of his wife and sons several years before Jenner. The idea of cowpox protection was not invented by either, but existed as rural rumour in certain parts of the country (see below on milkmaids). The beginnings of the ideology behind vaccination already existed in the practice of smallpox inoculation, that is, deliberately infecting people with smallpox to attempt to induce a mild disease rather than risk natural infection. Inoculation goes back a long time in certain parts of the world, such as China, and was introduced into the UK in 1721 by Lady Mary Montagu. Although there is a valid distinction drawn in histories of smallpox, ideologically inoculation is vaccination as we would use the term today, that is attempting to induce a mild form of the disease via artificial means (i.e. the lancet) to avoid natural infection.1
The Milkmaid Myth
Jenner’s encounter with a milkmaid is often outlined as the first exposure of the young Jenner to the cowpox-smallpox theory of protection.
It is a story often told. The author vaguely remembers hearing it in secondary school when she studied the history of medicine. When Jenner was 13, he was said to have overheard a milkmaid discussing her alleged immunity to smallpox based upon having had a cowpox infection.
As the story goes, an English milkmaid told physician Edward Jenner that she would never get smallpox — a deadly disease and a leading cause of blindness — because she had had cowpox, a mild, uncommon illness in cattle that can spread to humans through sores on a cow’s udder. The milkmaid’s reasoning — that infection with cowpox protected her from smallpox — was a common belief among dairy workers
This is said to have interested the young Jenner in the issue of cowpox as a smallpox preventative. The story has been used for decades to promote the myth of vaccination.
Alas this story is most likely untrue.
It is one of those tales, that when one thinks about it for a moment, has a mythical quality. But we can go further than this.
The above account was first related by a man called John Baron, who was Jenner’s official biographer after his death. Baron was well known for his sycophancy, to the extent that even modern pro-vaccinationists have considered this excessive. According to Crookshank, an anti-vaccinationist who studied the issue carefully in the late nineteenth century, Fosbrooke, the first biographer of Jenner, did not mention this incident (p.127). While Crookshank does not question the whole incident, Baron’s well known sycophancy and desire to give Jenner priority for the vaccine ‘discovery’ gives him a strong motive to fabricate the tale. (And let’s be honest, the idea is rather romantic and makes a good story).
If Jenner did not originate the idea and did not perform the first vaccinations, what was his contribution? One could suggest Jenner’s writings on the topic formalising the idea. This is where Jenner does have some claim, since it seems he was the first to formally put forward in print the idea of cowpox vaccination. However, we can ask ourselves what this research actually amounted to. Men such as Baron would have us believe that Jenner’s works on the topic were filled with extensive research and strong scientific methodology. What is the truth?
Jenner’s initial paper on cowpox, An Inquiry Into the Causes and Effects of the Variolæ Vaccinæ, was published in 1798. However, there was an earlier version of the paper. Jenner was a member of the Royal Society due to a paper he had published about cuckoos. He sent this earlier version of the paper to the Royal Society in 1796 – however they rejected the paper. They thought that it might negatively affect Jenner’s reputation.
For our purposes, we will only focus on the evidence Jenner brings forward for the claim that cowpox protects against smallpox and not about Jenner’s other speculations (about the origins of cowpox, etc). If we look at the original 1796 paper, that Jenner considered worthy of Royal Society publication, we can examine the evidence Jenner had for his theory. Crookshank discusses the 1796 rejected paper in detail.
For his evidence, Jenner first lists 10 ‘cowpoxed milkers’, that is, 10 milkers who had natural cowpox infections (some a long time ago). These milkers proved insusceptible to smallpox inoculation. Then Jenner outlines the case of his first vaccination, that of the 8-year-old James Phipps. He vaccinated Phipps with cowpox, and then several weeks later inoculated him for smallpox. The inoculation did not ‘take’, thus proving in Jenner’s mind the theory of protection. This is the sum total of the evidence for cowpox inoculation in the 1796 version of the paper (Chapter 7). The 1798 paper adds some more evidence, a couple more cases of milkers and a chain of cowpox inoculations (although, it seems he only performed the inoculation test on 3 of those, plus Phipps). Jenner drew the conclusion from this evidence that cowpox provided life long protection against smallpox infection.
As we can see from this discussion, Jenner had limited evidence for his claims and draws excessive conclusions from this limited evidence.
1 for accuracy, the Chinese used a method of putting smallpox sores in the nose, but the method used in Europe involved the lancet.
I have mentioned in previous articles the cult of sterility and cleansing that exists as part of the practice of vaccination. Images such as the white coat, sterile room, mask, etc. promote the idea of the sterile and cleanliness.
The receipt of the injection is a cult ritual. It is a sacred act. One is prepared for the receipt of the injection by the doctor, the modern day priest. The clean sterile environment, free of danger, germs, serves like the stained glass of old – to induce reverence, and as a reminder of what bounty one (or one’s child) will receive for undergoing the pain of the needle – a sterile, germ free body.
However, the actual historical practice of vaccination is at odds with that sterile image. One of the paradoxes of vaccination has always been that it has sought to purify via defilement, to prevent disease by invoking it. Nowadays, the process has been so sanitised that the disease is barely invoked, being a few dead particles of virus that while bringing forward horrific injuries does not create the disease it attempts to protect from.
This was not always the case. The defilement aspect was much more obvious in historical vaccination and inoculation. Historically, inoculation/vaccination was performed by taking matter from a pustule. Sometimes, the matter was preserved on another surface before being rubbed into a wound made with a lancet; on other occasions, it was rubbed directly into the wound. For example, when performing his first vaccination, Edward Jenner took matter from a pustule on the hand of a milkmaid; her hand had become infected with cowpox from milking the cow.
THE more accurately to observe the progress of the [cowpox] infection, I selected a healthy boy, about eight years old, for the purpose of inoculation for the Cow Pox. The matter was taken from a sore on the hand of a dairymaid, who was infected by her master’s cows, and it was inserted, on the 14th of May, 1796, into the arm of the boy by means of two superficial incisions, barely penetrating the cutis, each about half an inch long.
In reality, although vaccination purported to be cowpox inoculation, there were multiple sources of ‘vaccine lymph’, with people experimenting with sheep pox, goat pox, and horse pox (Jenner believed that the cowpox came originally from the diseased heel of horses). Equine lymph in particular was significant in its usage.
For most of the nineteenth century, the kind of vaccination practiced was largely arm-to-arm vaccination. An initial set of vaccinations would have been performed direct from the cow or from a cowpoxed milkmaid who caught the infection via handling the teat. After the vaccinations had roused pustules on the arms of those undergoing the procedure, a vaccinifer could be selected to take a fresh batch of lymph from and carry on the chain of vaccinations. The vaccinifer would usually be selected by how well the vaccination ‘took’, that is the size and shape of the pustule produced, and whether it was adjudged to be a ‘good’ pustule.
This method came under criticism and was eventually banned. The replacement method ended up going back to the cow:
By referring to the cut on this page it will be seen that the living calf or heifer is first bound down on a movable tilting table, and its belly is shaved and on the clean, tender skin of a most tender part one or two hundred cuts or scratches are then made, as shown, and into these cuts or scratches is rubbed some “seed virus,” obtained directly or indirectly from human smallpox, and other known or unknown human or animal infections. Now after the calf has been inoculated as described, it is removed from the table and allowed to stand on its feet in its stall securely tied, and carefully fed and tended and allowed to remain thus for about a week, with its one or two hundred festering wounds gradually filling up with ulcerative or suppurative disease matter. At this stage the calf is now again strapped on the table for the collection of this accumulated disease matter.
What is the point of elaborating upon this information? Simply because when looked at objectively, the idea that this practice reduced disease is rather absurd. A priori, taking lymph from a pustule on another human being or an animal had the potential to spread many other diseases that were present in the vaccine lymph. There were multiple cases of syphilis from vaccination, and observed increases in infant syphilis deaths. There were contrasting views on the reasons for this rise, with Creighton seeing cowpox as essentially a form of syphilis where others believed the syphilis was spread along with the vaccine matter. Some other anti-vaccinationists, such as Alfred Russell Wallace, pointed to an increase in pyaemia (a form of sepsis) and skin diseases.
This contrast between historical and modern practices of vaccination reveals an interesting tension in the vaccine narrative. On the one hand, anyone would have to agree that the above procedures are unsanitary and dangerous, especially pro-vaccinationists, since they lived in morbid fear of the Covid virus, a disease much milder than smallpox or syphilis. On the other hand, any pro-vaccinationist would also argue that Jenner’s smallpox vaccine, and thus the procedures described above, reduced disease and death.
Recently, I have been reading some of the anti-vaccine literature written in the nineteenth century. There are many things fascinating about it, one of which was that the antivaxxers of the time were much less diplomatic than our antivaxxers. Take this excerpt from John Pickering, for instance:
Vaccination, then, is simply a vile, useless, mischievous, unnatural, and barbaric piece of quackery; a trade for fools, for sorcerers, snake-charmers, rain-makers, fakirs, and fetich worshippers,—not for men of education, not for men who profess acquaintance with the laws of nature.
Another notable point is the fact that the average person is probably not even aware of the fact that there were anti-vaccination activists, leagues, etc, in the nineteenth century that fought against compulsory vaccination laws.
Let’s step back a bit into the topic of this article. Vaccination in the nineteenth century meant vaccination for smallpox, as other vaccinations were not invented until late in that century. Edward Jenner was the original promoter of this practice, as an alternative to the then-practiced inoculation for smallpox. Inoculation essentially meant deliberately infecting people with smallpox, on the theory that everyone would get the disease anyway and after having it be immune, so it was better to deliberately inflict it at a time and place of choice, and with a mild version, rather than risk natural infection. As inoculation led to deaths from smallpox and risked spreading the natural infection, the idea of using vaccinia (cowpox) was an alternative approach that came to be promoted by Jenner. There was a prevalent belief that dairy maids would not get smallpox because of having cowpox, so Jenner ran experiments where he deliberately introduced cowpox to see if it would protect from smallpox.
Jenner’s conclusion was as follows:
When it has been uniformly found in such abundant instances that the human frame, when once it has felt the influence of the genuine cow-pox in the way that has been described, is never afterwards at any period of its existence assailable by the smallpox, may I not with perfect confidence congratulate my country and society at large on their beholding, in the mild form of the cow-pox, an antidote that is capable of extirpating from the earth a disease which is every hour devouring its victims; a disease that has ever been considered as the severest scourge of the human race!
This theory of ‘perfect security’, alas, fell apart pretty quickly. As early as 1805, William Rowley published many examples of vaccine failure. One could argue that Rowley was somewhat biased as he sought to defend the previous practice of inoculation against vaccination but nevertheless the evidence stacked up. How did the vaccinators deal with case after case of smallpox after vaccination?
What we see is a narrative change. Instead of the claim of ‘perfect security’ we see other claims come to the fore to defend the practice of vaccination. Some of these were that those who got smallpox after cowpox didn’t have the ‘genuine’ cowpox (a claim made by Jenner himself) or that the vaccination did not ‘take’ effectively. However by far the most interesting of these claims is that while vaccination did not always prevent infection, it did reduce the severity of the disease if you happened to contract smallpox.
Rowley refers to this argument:
But another refuge of the learned Cow-pox inoculators, after they seemed beaten out of many of their strong holds by opposing irrefutable facts, that could not be denied, then a new idea strikes the vaccinating mind, namely, that wherever Small Pox made its appearance, it would be wise to try another project — to inoculate the neighbouring children with the Cow Pox, in order to render the Small Pox milder.
Charles Pearce, writing much later, also refers to this argument made by the vaccinators:
It is no longer denied that the vaccinated do succumb small-pox, but it is contended that a certain amount protection is awarded. It is, moreover, assumed that those who recover from small-pox having been vaccinated, would probably have died had they not had some protection.
This kind of argument is now starting to sound eerily familiar. This is of course exactly the same claims made regarding the Covid ‘vaccines’: initially they said that you would not get Covid, and then when it became obvious that ‘breakthrough infections’ were everywhere, the narrative changed to the Covid ‘vaccine’ preventing severe disease.
Thus we can conclude that the same goalpost-moving has been used to prop up the vaccination fraud from the beginning.
