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The most radical of all present-day legal measures against the disease has therefore not yet reached the radicalism of compulsory prophylaxis as it exists in armies, or even the radicalism of compulsory vaccination for smallpox.
A method of inoculation against this disease has been devised by Pasteur, which can be applied after the individual has been bitten by the rabid animal. Apparently, however, this preventive inoculation is dependent upon a different principle from vaccination or inoculation against anthrax.
Many of the objectors did not even take the trouble to do as much as this, for within five years of the passing of the Act, in practice the vaccination laws ceased to exist.
An hospital for gratuitous vaccination, founded by the Prefect of the department of La Seine, is now open for the continual treatment of the cow-pox, and the distribution of the matter to all parts of France.
Few of the natives appeared to be marked with it, which may have been owing, perhaps, to their escaping this disorder for some years. Vaccination has not yet been introduced among them, nor have they practiced inoculation. Notwithstanding Soung was once the Mecca of the East, its people have but little zeal for the Mahomedan faith.
The population of Dunchester, it is true, is smaller by over five thousand souls, and many of those who survive are not so good-looking as they were, but the gap is easily filled and pock-marks are not hereditary. Also, such a horror will never happen again, for now the law of compulsory vaccination is strong enough!
His teaching, in spite of the vehement cavillings of the "antis" of his day, gained credence readily, and vaccination speedily became recognized and was constantly resorted to, but hardly any attempt at perfecting the practice was made until after more than fifty years had elapsed.
It was averred that vaccinated children became "ox-faced," that abscesses broke out to "indicate sprouting horns," and that the countenance was gradually "transmuted into the visage of a cow, the voice into the bellowing of bulls." Vaccination, however, was a truth, and notwithstanding the violence of the opposition, belief in it spread slowly.
That their confidence in it, as a measure preventive of small-pox, is great, I judge from the anxiety which they shew, and the eagerness which they manifest to have their children vaccinated when the small-pox is raging around them; while, under ordinary circumstances, and when their fears have been lulled by the absence of this fatal epidemic, an absence which they well know is probably but temporary, they exhibit such an unaccountable apathy regarding vaccination, that a stranger might well suppose they had no faith in it as a prophylactic measure; notwithstanding this, I believe they have great confidence in it, although, from circumstances to which I shall presently allude, that confidence has declined considerably.
Private practice, thus protected, would itself protect individuals, as far as such protection is possible, against the errors and superstitions of State medicine, which are at worst no worse than the errors and superstitions of private practice, being, indeed, all derived from it. Such monstrosities as vaccination are, as we have seen, founded, not on science, but on half-crowns.
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