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by
Walter S. Hadwen M.D.
Dr
Hadwen was a passionate opponent of Jennerian smallpox vaccination
in England around 1900.
It is clear that Jenner never possessed
anything that would be recognized today as a medical qualification.
At the age of 16 he was apprenticed to a country surgeon
and apothecary, and at 21 he was sent for two years as a
pupil to Dr. John Hunter, of London, who undoubtedly was
the most eminent surgeon of his day, and, like Jenner
himself, a keen naturalist.
At 23 Jenner returned to his native
village and started to practice as surgeon and apothecary.
Here he remained for 17 years, just a plain unqualified
country surgeon and apothecary, unknown to the world at
large, but keeping up a correspondence with Hunter on a
variety of natural history subjects.
At the end of this period he made
his first bid for fame.
In 1787 he sent a paper on "The
Natural History of the Cuckoo" to the Royal Society,
and, as a result, with Hunter's influence, he was elected
F.R.S. The paper contained a number of commonplace facts
and some others, which Jenner stated to be from his own
observation. The latter turned out to be purely imaginary,
Jenner having accepted the report of a youthful nephew on
the incidents he described.
The coveted fellowship, therefore, appears
to have been obtained by something very nearly approaching
fraud.
Three years later he applied to St.
Andrew's University for an M.D., and as St. Andrew's in
those days was no more squeamish about granting degrees
than some of the so-called American Universities are today,
so long as the fees are forthcoming, Jenner became Dr. Jenner
for the modest outlay of £15.
Later on in life, after several applications,
he was also granted an MD by the University of Oxford, though
this was not until after his discovery had been generally
adopted.
As for the discovery itself, it appears
to have been founded upon what Dr. Hadwen calls a
"superstition
among the dairymaids of Gloucestershire that a person who
had suffered from cowpox would never have smallpox."
Jenner appears to have bethought himself
of testing the Dairymaid's superstition, and with this object
he inoculated a boy named James Phipps with lymph from a
vesicle on the hand of a dairymaid suffering from cowpox
in May, 1796.
In July of the same year he inoculated
the same boy with smallpox by what Dr. Hadwen calls the
"bogus Suttonian method," which "afforded
no evidence as to protection."
Yet it was upon the strength of this
solitary experiment that Jenner had launched his
discovery upon the world, claiming that cowpox was a
prophylactic against smallpox, while to give some sort
of scientific color to the claim he labeled cowpox with
the name "Variolae Vaccinae" (smallpox of the
cow).
On the later developments and time exploitation
of vaccination there is no need to dwell at any length.
Jenner obtained both cash and credit. He received £30,000
in grants from Parliament for his wonderful discovery, and
all classes, medical and lay, tumbled over themselves in
their desire to do him honor, though even then there existed
a few skeptics who asked for better proof of the claims
made for time new prophylactic.
That those claims could not be fully
substantiated was proved when he was called upon to attend
the son of Earl Grosvenor, who was suffering from confluent
smallpox, although vaccinated in infancy by Jenner himself.
He thereupon modified his claims
for the protective powers of his cowpox vaccine, and he
was content to assert that vaccination had modified the
disease so that his patient's life was preserved.
What strikes me as most remarkable about
the whole story is the ease with which Jenner got
his theory accepted.
It is true that medical research was
a very different thing in the early days of the nineteenth
century from what it is today ; but even then the picture
of the whole of time Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons
swallowing the theory of an unqualified country apothecary,
based on one totally unreliable experiment, seems
scarcely credible.
Jenner's personal bona fides is a different
matter. It is unquestionable that he obtained his Fellowship
of the Royal Society by humbugging that learned body with
his yarn about a cuckoo; but that he deliberately set himself
to humbug the whole of the public as well as the medical
profession 'with his "Variolae Vaccinae," I hesitate
to believe.
I should imagine that he was one of
those unscientific researchers who, like the spiritualists,
are on the look out for facts to fit their theories, instead
of first making sure of their facts.
His methods were those of the quack,
but of the self-deluded quack. But how any real scientist
can accept his theories today seems astounding, except under
the supposition that they have been supported by later and
more conclusive experiments.
From "Truth,"
January 10, 1923
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