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In those far-away and long-forgotten days a Royal Commission had been sitting for some years to consider the whole question of compulsory vaccination; it was the same before which I had been called to give evidence.

If vaccination did no more than this it would be hard to overestimate its value, or to praise as it deserves the merit of its discoverer. =Chicken-Pox= is an ailment of such slight importance that it would scarcely call for notice if it were not that the resemblance of the eruption to that of small-pox sometimes leads to its being mistaken for that disease.

This position is opposed to all the recent work of the scientific bureaus of the Government and to the general experience of mankind. A physician who disbelieved in vaccination would not be the right man to handle an epidemic of smallpox, nor should we leave a doctor skeptical about the transmission of yellow fever by the Stegomyia mosquito in charge of sanitation at Havana or Panama.

Since the Company's advent, efforts are being successfully made to introduce vaccination, in which most of the people now have confidence.

In infancy, no doubt, I was vaccinated, for the operation has left a small and very faint cicatrix on my arm, but infantile vaccination, if unrepeated, is but a feeble protection in later life. Unconsciously I pulled upon the bridle, and the tired mule stopped. "Malignant smallpox!"

Therefore, if science demands compulsory vaccination, democracy in rejecting the demand, and even if it went further, is at least kept in countenance by some of those who are of the very household of science. The illustration is hardly impressive enough for the proposition that it supports.

Not The Engineering Times of April in the previous year or a Punch of the previous decade, and The Vaccination Record; but such things as the current Tatler, Times, Economist, and La Vie Parisienne. Mr. Prohack had uncomfortable qualms of apprehension. For several minutes past he had been thinking: "Suppose there is something up with that will!" He had little confidence in Mr. Softly Bishop.

As far as we know, every seventh year is a reasonable interval at which re-vaccination should be performed. One great cause of the failure of the protective power of vaccination is the unintelligent and careless manner in which it is too often performed, especially among the poor.

Jenner was not a man of science; but he was not a fool; and when he found that people who had suffered from cowpox either by contagion in the milking shed or by vaccination, were not, as he had supposed, immune from smallpox, he ascribed the cases of immunity which had formerly misled him to a disease of the horse, which, perhaps because we do not drink its milk and eat its flesh, is kept at a greater distance in our imagination than our foster mother the cow.

Here, since compulsory vaccination had been abandoned, we fought smallpox by a system of isolation so rigorous that under its cruel provisions every one of whatever age, rank or sex in whom the disease declared itself was instantly removed to a hospital, while the inhabitants of the house whence the patient came were kept practically in prison, not being allowed to mix with their fellows.