Compulsory Vaccination Report of a Public Meeting, held in the Marylebone Vestry Hall, London, on Wednesday evening, October 19, 1870.

The chair was occupied by R. HALLAM, Esq. a Vestryman, who said, it was twelve months that day, since a meeting was held in that hall, for the purpose of inaugurating a Marylebone Branch of the Anti-Vaccination League. Some gentlemen of the medical profession, subsequently said that if they had been present, they could have upset all the arguments on the other side. The executive of the Marylebone Branch had very straightforwardly said, they would be happy to meet those professional gentlemen, and the public notice which the secretary would read, invited their presence. The notice having been read, the Chairman proceeded to say it must be apparent to all that they were not assembled there to make pecuniary profit. They did not come to receive vaccination fees, but to enter their protest against such an iniquity. The subject they were to discuss was one of the most important that could engage their attention. A great outcry had been raised about the unfortunate position they stood in with respect to infanticide and baby-farming; and Dr. Lankester, one of the coroners for Middlesex, had made himself very busy to have a check put upon those practices, but why did not the coroner reflect upon the enormous amount of infanticide caused by the point of the lancet? Could he be a conscientious man, when he carried his prejudice for vaccination into the coroner’s court? He very much regretted that they had a medical coroner, and although he had voted for him at first, he would promise never to vote for another gentleman of the same profession. He then referred to the recent inquiry in St. Pancras, on the body of a child which died the day after it was vaccinated. The death was attributed to congestion of the lungs, but the iniquitous part of the proceedings was that the doctor who vaccinated performed the post-mortem examination. Referring to the general question, he said that under the vaccination system, even when small-pox was absent there was an equivalent disease present. Dr. Lankester himself, in a return he had furnished to the parish of St. James’s, said that although they had no small-pox, they had its equivalent—scarlet fever—very bad. Dr. Lankester had also said that there were three small-pox cases in the hospital; one patient was unvaccinated, and two had been vaccinated. That order of things was not according to the promise of the vaccinators, who told them that vaccination was a preventative. Before calling on the speakers he would just say to the medical profession, that they desired a fair and impartial investigation. As an individual he was open to conviction, if any gentleman present could prove he was in the wrong, but as far as he at present saw, he should as much expect to see the sun shining in the middle of the night, as to be convinced of the utility of vaccination. If any medical gentlemen wished to speak and would hand up their names they should be heard.

Dr. Routh and Dr. Thompson (of the Brompton Hospital) sent up then cards.

Mr. Snell, on rising, said that the meeting was, no doubt, acquainted with the account of Do-the-boys Hall, in one of the works of the late Charles Dickens, in which an amusing description is given of the weekly administration of brimstone and treacle. The boy had to open his mouth and nolens volens, receive therein and swallow the spoonful. Now, said the speaker, we Englishmen are in a somewhat similar position; it is true we are not commanded to open our mouths, but our veins, to receive the poison of a diseased brute. Now the celebrated John Hunter, the great Anatomist and Physiologist said, “Any extraneous substance introduced into the blood modifies the vitalized or living fluid. The introduction of animal products from another living body, be it a man, a cow, or even the ass, is infinitely more pernicious because allied to it, being vitalized.” He held, therefore, that government violated a natural law, besides one of the fundamental principles of the English constitution, when it enforced this odious compulsory vaccination, by depriving parents of their liberty—committing them to prison for refusing to contaminate their infants with the disease of a brute. The speaker then briefly called attention to the law of vicarious mortality, which had been so ably elucidated by Dr. Pearce, in his Essay on Vaccination, which proved that we had no control over the epidemic visitations of small-pox, or any other disease. With great pleasure, he moved the following resolution.

“That the enforcement of the practice of so-called Vaccination, is an interference with the liberty of the subject, and injurious to the community, and that therefore, this meeting is of opinion that the Vaccination Acts ought to be repealed.”

The resolution was seconded by Dr. McOubrey, who called the attention of the meeting to the unconstitutional character of the Acts which enforced the practice of vaccination; giving power to magistrates to consign to prison, men and women, without trial by jury. He adverted to the almost unexceptional practice of magistrates, of cruelly inflicting the utmost penalty of the law, and this in defiance of the clause in the Act, which provides that if a reasonable excuse be offered, the fine may not be inflicted. The loss of one or even two children by vaccination, was not held by any magistrate to be a sufficient or reasonable excuse. Moreover, said the speaker, there is no justification for the law, the whole thing is a delusion. Vaccination never did prevent small pox, and Jenner knew it—and therefore he invented a theory that the virus from the horses’ heel was the true source of the matter, and was alone protective. The disease which Jenner produced was not like small-pox. Phagædenic ulcers, with inflamed and swollen glands in the axilla, were the result of the process which he imposed upon the government, and on his unproved assertion, that his process would protect the subject for ever, obtained no less than thirty thousand pounds of British gold. And this was done against the protest of all the leading medical men of the time.

What are the facts regarding this professed protective power? Why, that of the patients admitted into the small-pox Hospital, no less than eighty-four of every hundred eases, were found vaccinated! call you this protection? The whole thing is a falsehood.

Take the fact that in Paris, in the Barracks of the 1st regiment of the Voltigeurs of the Guard, in 1867, the soldiers were vaccinated to the number of 457, when towards the end of 1868, a small-pox epidemic in a highly confluent form, broke out in this regiment. This epidemic made many victims where the hygienic conditions, as space, ventilation and food were excellent; while in the 2nd regiment, in a similar barrack in the same court-yard, but wherein no vaccination had been done, not a single case of small-pox occurred.

Take another case. In Bavaria every person is vaccinated, yet a short time ago small-pox broke out in Munich, and the Royal Pages were seized with small-pox. The Royal Court left the capital in alarm, not less than if a shell had burst in their midst. Since the passing of the Compulsory Act almost every constitutional disease that flesh was heir to had increased most alarmingly. In 1866, 122,222 persons died of chest disease, and of consumption alone 55,714. Now consumption was increasing by 2,000 cases a year. These facts should rouse the people to indignation against a government whose acts are despotic and which aimed at the destruction of the people’s liberty. He cordially seconded the resolution.

Before putting the resolution to the meeting the Chairman intimated to Dr. Routh who had sent up his card that if he wished to move an amendment he could now do so.

Dr. Routh said: It was not his intention to move a formal amendment to the resolution, but merely a negative vote. He was very much surprised at the two speeches he had heard. He had no doubt, both the gentlemen were perfectly convinced they were right, but he did not know how they could have come to that conclusion if they had taken statistics. They had been told that the mortality from every form of disease had increased, but it had not done so from small-pox. The population was increasing, and therefore there were more deaths than there used to be. The speakers on the other side were taking a time when the whole population of the kingdom was not more than 20,000,000, and comparing the gross number of deaths then with those that took place now; they ought, if they meant to deal fairly, to take the number of deaths to the million of population. It had been said that by the statistics of the Small-pox Hospital a greater number of persons were there who had been vaccinated than had not. What was the fact? The official return showed the following:—Number of deaths among the unvaccinated, 35 per cent.; vaccinated with one vaccine cicatrice, 7; with two cicatrices, 4; with three, 1; with four, 5–10ths. Well-marked, 2; badly-marked, 18; those who had previously had small-pox, 19. This last average showed that the vaccine was a better preventative than small-pox itself. Dr. Seaton, medical officer of the Privy Council, had published a return showing the annual death-rate in England and Wales. The death-rate per million of population during the 30 years previous to vaccination was 3,000. In ’38 and ’40, when vaccination was diffused, but before it was gratuitous, it was 770. The average for nine of the years when public vaccination was gratuitous but not obligatory was 304, and during the time it was both gratuitous and obligatory, the vaccination death-rate was 202 per million. Who, in the face of that, would maintain that vaccination was not a preventative of small-pox? Having referred to the ravages the disease used to commit, and the powerful nature of the small-pox virus, he proceeded to say that a great deal had been made of the fact that more people died of other diseases than usual, when deaths from small-pox were few in number. It stood to reason that if they saved a certain number of people from a certain disease, they must leave a greater number than if they had not saved them to die afterwards from some other disease. So, when a fearful epidemic had just left a place the number of deaths for some time afterwards was much smaller than at any other time during a long period of health. The reason of this was that nearly all the weak had been killed. It had been said that vaccine put into the system a great number of noxious diseases. That rested on the mere ipse dixit of a few persons. No doubt, in the crowded and unhealthy neighbourhoods of the poor, where no attention was paid to cleanliness, serious consequences might follow upon the mere scratch of the lancet or anything else, but that furnished no real argument against the system. He quite acknowledged they had no right to prevent Mr. Tomkins keeping any disease he liked in his own house, but if Tomkins came out amongst other people, and poisoned them, they had a right, and it was their duty to the nation, to take measures for preventing him.