VACCINATION.

Evening Star, Issue 10851, 8 February 1899, Page 3

VACCINATION.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —I am not certain what to make of “ Humanity.” His remarkable ingenuousness in saddling me with “a belief in the infallibility of doctors and their nostrums ” led me, at first, to consider him a humorist, but later on his extraordinary verbal tirade inclined me rather to the "shrieking sisterhood” theory. In any case, I am sadly afraid he has lost Ins temper, and that, consequently, his judgment in the choice of words thereby being obscured, his eagerness to deliver a grandiloquent maitre coup to my arguments has brought his effort perilously near the ridiculous. I certainly was thoroughly nonplussed and suitably overwhelmed by his “ prurient filth,” which, be n recorded to my shame, I had to give up. I do concede that evil effects may occasionally result when vaccination is practised by the unskilled (the case quoted by “Humanity” was performed by a chemist), but to argue from that that vaccination, properly performed, is noxious is about as rational as to say that because an infant chopping wood cuts his fingers off therefore wood should not be chopped at all by anyone. Furthermore, any person can obtain perfectly pure calf lymph practically for the asking (the Government conduct a farm in the North specially for supplying lymph), thus avoiding even in the hands of the unskilled the dangers so tragically described by “ Humanity.” In conclusion, I still claim, at the risk of being dubbed a bigot, the appropriateness of ‘ pigheaded ” being applied to those who " can and do see, but will not believe." —I am, etc., Sanitas. Dunedin, February 7,