JENNER CENTENARY.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17706, 7 March 1923, Page 2

JENNER CENTENARY.

VALUE OF VACCINATION. (By the Medical Correspondent of the London "Morning Post.") The centenary which is now being celebrated in medical circles in connexion with Jenner is, of course, not that of his birth, but of his death, which occurred on January 26th, 1823. At his death he was 74 years of age. His fundamental discovery has well withstood the onslaughts of time, remaining as a great piece of hygienic construction, though in certain details it has been successfully challenged. „ Nothing in all scientific medicine has been so attacked as vaccination; the theories, the procedure, the sequelsa, have all been made the object of diiferent onslaughts, and to-day we see that the principles by which Jenner was guided were sound. Observers, almost from the time of Jenner onwards, have attempted by experimental methods to arrive at the real relationship between smallpox and cowpox, and the position now reached is that the artificially inoculated form of the disease, termed vaccina, is a variola modified by transmission through the bovine channel.

The value of vaccination, it is well known, has been called in question at different times, not oVy b y tlie com " pletely uninformed or the naturally recalcitrant, but by a well-equipped, if small, body of thinkers, whose views and whose assertions must not be confused with a great deal of the rodomontade which we read, and which purports to be their derivative. It has been all to the good that vaccina.tion has been subjected to such rigid scrutiny, while it in no way detracts from the fame of Jenner that he did not make discoveries, because he had not information which in his days was not in the possession of anyone else. The conclusions of the Royal Commission as to the effect of vaccination in reducing the prevalence of mortality from smallpox have been mainly accepted by the medical profession, while the opponents of the "Jenner superstition" must be puzzled to explain the shifting of the age incidence, under which smallpox has become largely a disease of adults, save by its relation to vaccination of infants. The existence of a large population of unvadcinated children, whose parents have set in action the conscience clause, is not to-day the threat of the community that it would have been under the hygienic conditions prevailing 100 years ago, but the substitution of domiciliary vaccination with gtfeerinated calf lymph for arm-to-arm vaccination at certain stations is a reform which removes to an infinite distance the risk of impure inoculation. v In the era of arm-to-arm vaccination —and we must remember how many decades that implies—it is admitted that syphilis could have been introduced, but throughout the long period only an infinitely small number of cases of the tragedy were ever authenticated, and in these the.responsibility rested upon the operator rather than the technique. There seems to be no proof that tuberculosis has ever been nregd in this way, and the one reproach which has a backing of fact is uhe possible occurrence of a spread of inflammation. But erysipelas is not peculiar to vaccination, and may follow any cutaneous lesion. In most countries with any scientific equipment the value of vaccination- has been tested by figures and results, and legislation to secure its performance has been introduced. Such universal endorsement forms a practical proof of its value, and makes the attitude of those * ho johallenffe >t(he principles difficult to understand. This does not >mply that further modifications will not inke place, tat it does establish the Jenn.jr centenary as a date which civilisation should mark.