DR. JENNER'S DISCOVERY.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVI, Issue 69, 26 July 1913, Page 4

DR. JENNER'S DISCOVERY.

The first Vaccination Act was passed by the House of Common's on July 23, 1840. The object of tho measure was not to enforce vaccination, but to pro-

liibit the then common practice of inoculating healthy people with virus taken from smallpox patients, a contemporary reminds u.s. Dr. Jenner's * claim that vaccination with cowpox lymph was a safeguard against smallpox was being discussed with a great deal of heat by rival schools of thought, but there was a consensus of opinion that the malignant disease itself ought not to be cultivated, oven with a view to securing future immunity. The primitive form of inoculation had been introduced into Britain from Turkey more than a hundred years previously by Lady Mary Montague/ the wife of a British Ambassador. | Lady Mary found that the Turks were in the habit of contracting smallpox deliberately, using mild cases as sources of infection, and so undergoing what was regarded as a necessary ordeal with a minimum danger to life. She tested the treatment on her own son, and later persuaded the British authorities to try it on four condemn-; cd criminals. Vaccination of this kindj had become widely popular before Dr. | Jenner came forward with his cow-, pox theory. Before the English Act many other countries had made vac-i cination compulsory, among these being Bavaria (1807), Denmark (1810), Sweden (1814), Wurtemburg, and several other German States (1818), and Prussia (1835). In the United States several States passed compulsory vaccination laws very early, Massachusetts starting in 1809. The Act of 1840 did not, however, make it compulsory in England. This was not done "till 1835, and in 1863 the operation of the Act was extended to Scotland and Ireland.