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Popular Science Monthly

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genuine, well-marked, human smallpox, AND THE BOY DID NOT TAKE THE DISEASE AT ALL. Jenner waited till the nineteenth of the month, and finding that the boy had still not developed variola, he could hardly write for joy. "Listen," he wrote to Gardner, "to the most delightful part of my story. The boy has since been inoculated for the smallpox which, aS I VERNTURED TO PREDICT, produced no effect. I shall now pursue my experiments with redoubled ardor." Here we are behind the scenes at a great discovery; "as I ventured to predict"; prediction is part of scientific theorizing; there is a place for legitimate prediction as there is for experimentation. All discoverers have made predictions; Harvey predicted the existence of the capillaries, Halley predicted the return of his comet, Adams predicted the place of the planet Neptune, the missing link in the evolutionary series of the fossil horses had been predicted long before it was actually found by Professor Marsh. Pasteur predicted that the sheep inoculated with the weak anthrax virus would be alive in the anthrax-infected field, while those not so protected would all be dead. A prediction verified is a conclusion corroborated, an investigator encouraged. Early in 1797, through another outbreak of cowpox, Jenner was able to inoculate three persons with variola, only to find as before that they were immune from smallpox. He now felt himself justified in preparing a paper for the Royal Society, the highest scientific tribunal in England. The council, however, returned him his paper with the remark that in their opinion the amount of evidence was not strong enough to warrant its publication in the Transactions. Jenner was wise enough not to be discouraged, and so in June, 1798, he published the paper himself under the title, "Inquiry into the causes and effects of the Variolae-Vacciniae, a disease discovered in some of the western counties of England, particularly Gloucestershire, and known by the name of cowpox." This historic pamphlet, which ranks with the great classics of medicine, was dedicated to Dr. O. H. Parry, of Bath. Later on the Royal Society was sagacious enough to elect the very man whose paper it had previously refused. While in London attending to the publication of his pamphlet, Dr. Jenner called on the great surgeon Mr. Cline, and left some cowpox virus with him for trial. Cline inoculated a young tubercular patient with vaccinia and later with smallpox in no less than three places. In due time this patient did not show a sign of smallpox. So impressed was Cline with this remarkable result that he wrote to Jenner thus: "I think the substitution of cowpox poison for smallpox one of the greatest improvements that has ever been made in medicine. The more I think on the subject, the more I am impressed with its importance." The word "vaccination" was coined by the French, so remarkable for the aptness of their descriptive terms, and it has ever since remained with us as a convenient expression for the inoculation of vaccinia as protecting from variola.[4] [4] It is certainly not necessary to point out that the principle of vaccination has been one of wide application in modern medicine. Our word "vaccine" testifies to this. A vaccine is a liquid, the result of bacterial growth, injected into a patient in order to render him immune from that particular disease which is caused by sufficient infection with the microorganisms in question, e. g., of typhoid fever or of plague. Dr. Jenner's views were now becoming known, and the critics and the doubters had appeared: St. Thomas has always had a large following. The most formidable of the early objectors was Dr. Igenhouz, who had come to London to study inoculation for variola, and had already inoculated, among other notable persons, the Archduchess Theresa Elizabeth of Vienna. The careless vaccinations of Doctors Pearson and Woodville at the London Smallpox Hospital brought much apparent discredit on Jenner's work. In all his early work Jenner used lymph obtained directly from papules on the cow or calf, but Woodville in 1799 showed that excellent results could be got from arm-to-arm vaccination. As this latter method is a very convenient one, the technique was widely adopted. We have to remember that we are speaking of a period about sixty years before Lister gave to suffering humanity that other great gift, antisepsis: and so many arms "went wrong," not because of being vaccinated, but because the scratches were afterwards infected by the microorganisms of dirt. Jenner knew well the difference between the reaction of clean vaccination and that of an infected arm, but a great many medical men of his time did not, and so he was constantly plagued with reports of vaccinations "going wrong" when it was septic infection of uncleansed skin that had occurred. The explanation of these things by letter consumed a very great deal of his valuable time. By the end of 1799 a large number of persons had, however, been successfully vaccinated. As one Pearson proved troublesome by starting an institution for public vaccination on principles which Jenner knew to be wrong, and as Jenner found himself virtually supplanted and misrepresented, he came up to London in 1800 to vindicate his position. The King, the Queen and the Prince of Wales, to whom he was presented, materially helped on the cause by countenancing the practice of vaccination. Lord Berkeley, his Lord of the Manor, was in this as in all things a kind and wise patron. In the United States of America vaccination made rapid progress, having been introduced there under the good auspices of Dr. Waterhouse, professor of medicine at Cambridge, Mass. The discovery was announced with true American informality as "Something curious in the medical line," on March 12, 1799. Things went even better on the continent of Europe; deCarro, of Vienna, inaugurated vaccination with such zeal and discrimination that it spread to Switzerland, France, Italy and Spain. From Spain it passed over to Latin America. In Sicily and Naples, "the blessed vaccine" was received by religious processions. Sacco, of Milan, commenced vaccinating in 1801, and in a few years had vaccinated 20,000. In Paris, a Vaccine Institute was established; and Napoleon ordered all his

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