Inefficacy of Vaccine Inoculation. 8 1 



with publications, to prove the mistaken opinions of 

 hospital surgeons. This novelty I resisted, with equal 

 firmness; here I was unwilling to give up experience 

 for experiment^ wanting nothing more safe or certain 

 than mercury, which, for so many years, in the prac- 

 tice of so many competent judges, had proved an an- 

 tidote to that malignant poison. The advocates for 

 the nitrous acid are now no longer heard of; the books 

 on the subject no longer regarded. 



Sacrificing, therefore, every consideration to my 

 actual opinion, I have avoided the practice of vaccina- 

 tion, but I have watched the result of it. I do not 

 mean to enter into the proofs of its failures, or mis- 

 takes: Mr. Goldson has published some, in a very 

 candid pamphlet; more are expected from another 

 pen; and unless' the first projectors have something 

 better to say, than what has yet been said, to recon- 

 cile the public mind to those cases of Mr. Hodges' 

 children, in FuUvvard's Rents, Holborn, I shall con- 

 tinue firm in the opinion I gave to the committee of the 

 House of Commons, That what has been called the coiv- 

 pox is not a preservative agai?ist the natural small-pox. 



John Birch. 

 Spring-Gardens, October, 1804. 



A child, vaccinated by Mr. Ring, exposed to variolous infection 

 often, caught the natural small-pox, four years after, and had it 

 full. Mr. Ring saw and acknowledged it, and I attended it. 



An eminent practitioner at Harrow on llie Hill, Middlesex, vac- 

 cinated his child, inoculated it three successive springs, without 

 VOL. II. PART r, L 



