VACCINATION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 8958, 16 August 1892, Page 3

VACCINATION.

.TO THE EDITOR. —In the article on vaccination in Saturday's supplement two important facta are omitted. 1, Many men of science have come to the conclusion that this much-lauded specific is nothing but - quackery, and peculiarly dangerous quackery too. The reasons for this belief may be found in the Free Public Library, iii the latest edition of .the British Encyclopedia, article " Vaccination" written by Dr. Charles Creighton, formerly Demonstrator in Anatomy in the University of Cambridge. Dr. Creighton has besides published a

little book entitled " Jenner and Vaccination," giving the history, and showing the unscientific nature of the so-called discovery of Jenner. An exhaustive work History and Pathology of Vaccination— Edgar M. Crookshank, M.8., Professor of Comparative Pathology in King's College, London, also lays bare the history of this great delusion; and other writers might be mentioned. 2. It has been found that_ leprosy and syphilis are spread by vaccination. Mr. T.ebb, president of the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination, who visited the chief centres of leprosy to inquire into the matter, found that every attempt to introduce compulsory vaccination in the populous island of Barbadoes, British West Indies, had been thwarted, owing to the belief that leprosy and syphilis are inoculated with the vaccine virus. In St. Thomas, Danish West Indies, and in Georgetown, British Guiana, vaccination could not be enforced for similar reasons. In the Sandwich Islands, a Bill for the repeal of the vaccination law was introduced, supported by a petition showing how leprosy had been disseminated, and new centres of the disease established by means of the vaccinator's lancet.

Those who wish to force upon helpless infants an operation of such fearful danger, need feel no surprise if the tables should presently be turned, and a practice so perilous to the whole community be rendered penal. If there must be compulsion, that is the only direction in which it can be tolerated. —I am, etc., Mary adman Aldis.