Anti-vacc. veracities : a commentary / by Arthur F. Hopkirk.

  • Hopkirk, Arthur F.
Date:
[1899?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Anti-vacc. veracities : a commentary / by Arthur F. Hopkirk. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Keller, and Mr. Alfred Milnes, M.A. Keller produced some statistics about small-pox and vaccination amongst the employees on the Austrian State Railways, and Milnes, for years, assiduously propagated them in England. When in 1874 the Imperial Vaccination Law was under discussion in the German Reichstag, some anti-vaccinist referred to Dr Keller, but all reference to that worthy was speedily dropped when Dr. Zinn easily demonstrated that Keller was always on very constrained terms with the truth; and, more recently, a committee appointed by the International Medical Congress has shown that Keller not only cooked, but even invented statistics ! This, however, did not prevent Mr. Hopwood, Q.C., M.P., from attempting to white-wash Keller in the House of Commons. As far as Dr. Creighton’s original—and they are highly original—statements are concerned, it is only necessary to call attention to a few of them in order to substantiate the charge that his so-called scientific objections to vaccination are most distinctly of the order pseudo-scientific. Thus we are told that “ the real affinity of cow-pox is not to the small-pox but to the great-pox. The vaccinal roseola is not only very like the syphilitic, but it means the same sort of thing.” He says this, in spite of the well established fact that syphilis cannot be communicated to the bovine species, and that the two forms of roseola in question are only alike to the casual and untutored observer, the medical history of the one being totally different from that of the other. Again, in giving an absolutely inaccurate description of a plate in Jenner’s “ Inquiry,” Dr. Creighton actually asserts that the typical vesicle therein depicted shows “ a broad central area of brownish sloughing cuticle.” Anti-vaccinists have discovered a great many mares’ nests in their time, but even Rowley,