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THE VETERINARIAN, MARCH 1, 1871. 
Ne quid falsi dicere audeat, ne quid veri non audeat. — C icero. 
ON THE ORIGIN OF THE VACCINE DISEASE. 
Respecting the efficacy of vaccination as a protective 
against smallpox,, it is not our province to offer an 
opinion. Facts are, by repute, stubborn things, and those 
unfortunate people who are blind to their teachings are not 
likely to be reached by arguments based upon the facts 
which they are incapable of appreciating. 
The opponents of the system of vaccination are not only 
inaccessible to the evidences of reason and experience, but 
they have somehow contrived to stumble into a state of 
entirely hopeless confusion respecting the nature of the 
affection which is termed “ vaccine ” disease, and which 
they describe as a compound of maladies affecting the horse 
and the cow. Will you give your children a disease which 
is derived from the horse and the cow ? is the pathetic 
appeal to the father and mother of the age. Something of 
the same kind was said in Jenner's time, and doubtless with 
considerable effect. There is, we admit, a deficiency of 
respectability, to say nothing of dignity, in the idea of being 
the victim of a disease to which cattle are obnoxious. We 
may conscientiously consume the flesh of oxen and repair 
our wasted tissues with the milk of the cow, but to introduce a 
few drops of transparent lymph originally derived from vesicles 
on a cow's udder, and since transmitted through innumerable 
human systems, is a thing not to be contemplated without 
horror. Such wretched sentimentalism can only be tole- 
rated by the uneducated, but it is unfortunately among that 
class that smallpox is usually most rife. 
Among the members of the Anti- Vaccination League 
there appears to exist some sort of cloudy belief that the 
vaccine disease originated in the horse. Their creed is 
that the matter from the “ greasy heels," as they are called, 
in horses, is conveyed to the udder of the cow, presumably 
