OPEN COLUMN.

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXI, Issue 4132, 21 August 1900, Page 6

OPEN COLUMN.

VACCINATION. ' Lot us hope (writes Mr M. Fiursdheim).that.the Public Health Bill will bo thoroughly amended< by Parliament as far as vaccination is concerned. Though it brings an improvement compared with the existing state of things, it does not go far enough. Of all the different interferences which the individual has to suffer from the State; there is none more invidious than that which forces the citizen to submit to the injection of a poison into his. or his cljilcircn’s, system because a- deluded majority wills it so. Of course, we cannot get along without some sort of majority rule, hut wisdom will' draw a Jijjc- beyond which this rule is not be < xt ended. Legislators ought not to interfere with a man’s right over his own body unless they have gained an absolute certainty that it Is for the public good, and laws of this kind ought to rccuirc at least • a seven-eighths majority. lam no physician, and certainly cannot pretend that my own studies on the subject, though they have been rather extended, can approach in depth and extent those of the worthy men who have made health a specialty, but I have at least seen that the number of learned men who are deadly opposed to 'vaccination is daily increasing. ■ Their writings show us irrefutably that legislators have been the victims of falsified statistics and cf scientific errors when they first lent their arm to allow the law’s aid to the medical practitioner’s lancet. They show us that, among others, the worst of diseases has repeatedly been inoculated into tne human system to’ provide absolutely delusive security against another disease. They prove that nothing can protect us from ouch dangers; not oven direct vaccination from the calf. Though; they may go too far when they think that without vaccination, which...keens tho germs always present (for the cow-pox is nothing but a milder, kind of smallpox), small-pox would be as extinct as many ether epidemics which onoe decimal cd mankind, I know the dangers it brings are serious enough that I for my pSrt would rather go to prison for an indefinite period than allow any child of mine to be vaccinated.