VACCINATION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20514, 15 March 1930, Page 14

VACCINATION.

Sir, —During the Gloucester epidemic, the man who distributed the money and the food to the smallpox houses was one of our strongest and most stalwart anti-vaccinators, and the authorities were as much upset to think that a man should dare to be going from house to house among the smallpox people unvaccinated, and yet not catch the smallpox, that a letter came down to the Guardians from the town clerk at the Guildhall to say that the man must submit to the operation, and so they summoned him before the board, and Bob. Spicer—for that is his name—walked in. The chairman said, "Spicer, you will have to be vaccinated." Spicer said, "Then, gentlemen, I shan't." "But," he said, "you must, you will either have to be vaccinated or you will have to go." "Then I will go," said. Spicer. But what happened ? Well, there was not in the whole of Gloucester a. vaccinated nor a revaccinated man who had pluck enough to take his place, and they had to fetch Bob. Spicer back again. And he went on with his job, but never did he catch smallpox to the day he died. Moreover, the man that carried the infected clothes to the disinfecting apparatus declined vaecinatioij. The man who drove the patients to the hospital also refused vaccination, and none of them took smallpox. The writer has seen more cases of smallpox in one month than any health doctor in New Zealand. What destroyed the patients was the medical treatment with opium and mercury ,_ helped by overcrowding ; in one block intended to hold 40 patients in isolation, no less than 153 children were treated. The hospital was not " isolation," but congestion, with two to four in each bed. Space forbids more detail. J. W. Perrett.

Sir, —It was with great interest I react the letter signed "Double Gloucester." My father, Rev. James Hughes Owen, was vicar of St. Paul's, Gloucester, at the beginning of the outbreak. He immediately volunteered for chaplaincy of the smallpox "hospital," which was rigged up temporarily just behind our vicarage garden—a long narrow garden. I was in the Natal Mounted Police in South Africa at the time, and the letters, and especially photographs, he sent, were truly appalling. Some o! the photos I did not see until after the Boer War, when I got three months' holiday in England, and these photos my father would not allow anyone elso to see. My mother wrote mo that she had walked past the "cross, the centre of Gloucester City, at mid-day, and not a shop was open, not a tram running, and the trains did not stop at the railway station, either Midland or Great Western. Yet she said the Anti-Vaccin-ation League were holding forth in the parks and all round the city. ' J. H. Owen. [The above letters are published as typical of the conflict over the facts of Gloucester's experience. Lack of space prohibits the publication of other letters received. The correspondence is now closed. —Editor Herald.]