CHAP. xvm. VACCINATION A DELUSION. 301 



were henceforth at stake, and those who adduced evi- 

 dence of the failure or the dangers of vaccination were 

 treated as fanatics, and have been so treated by the medi- 

 cal and official world down to the appointment of the last 

 Royal Commission. 



I next give the reasons why doctors are not the best 

 judges of the effects, beneficial or otherwise, of vaccina- 

 tion, and follow this by proofs of a special capacity for 

 misstating facts in reference to this question which has 

 characterized them from the beginning of the century 

 down to our day. The successive annual reports of the 

 National Vaccine Establishment give figures of the 

 deaths by small-pox in London in the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, which go on increasing like Falstaff's men in 

 buckram ; while in our own time the late Dr. W. B. Car- 

 penter, Mr. Ernest Hart, the National Health Society, 

 and the Local Government Board make statements or 

 give figures which are absurdly and demonstrably incor- 

 rect (pp. 223-228). 1 



1 To the cases I have already given I may now add two others, 

 because they illustrate the recklessness in making assertions in favor 

 of vaccination which scorns the slightest attempt at verification. In 

 the first edition of Mr. Ernest Hart's " Truth about Vaccination" p. 

 4), it is stated, on the authority of a member of Parliament recently 

 returned from Brazil, that during an epidemic of small-pox at the 

 town of Ceara in 1878 and 1879, out of a population not exceeding 

 70,000 persons there were 40,000 deaths from small-pox. This 

 was repeated by Dr. Carpenter during a debate in London, in 

 February, 1882, and only when its accuracy was called in question 

 was it ascertained that at the time referred to the population of Ceara 

 was only about 20,000 ; yet the M. P. had stated with detailed cir- 

 cumstancethat " in one cemetery, from August, 1878, to June, 1879, 

 72,064 persons who had died of small-pox had been buried." 

 Gazetteers are not very recondite works, and it would have been not 

 difficult to test some portion of this monstrous statement before 

 printing it. Jeuner's biographer tells us that he had a horror of 



