N.B.--All poor persons, whose affection for their families leads them to embrace this favourable opportunity, may have their children inoculated for the Cowpox at the Hospital and Dispensaries every day in the week (Sunday excepted) throughout the year. No time ought to be lost by the poor in freeing their families from the apprehension of the Smallpox, _which daily increases in frequency and malignity throughout this town_.
This manifesto is an illustration of the unscrupulous and unwarrantable assertions with which the New Inoculation was introduced to the world. There is no question that many who were active in circulating these mendacities did so honestly, justified, as they thought, by medical authority. What is marvellous is the survival of the primitive fictions to the present day. It would seem that when the human mind acquires a certain _set_, something like a surgical operation is requisite to reverse it.
We shall now see how the New Inoculation obtained this sudden popularity--a popularity so sudden that opposition had not time to organise itself. There were protests, and some raillery. In the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for August, 1799, we find a correspondent saying--
There is a plan to mitigate Smallpox in the human species by passing it through a Cow. Now as everyone is not in possession of a Cow, I propose to pass it through animals that most people possess. I mean Cats; and I shall call it the Catpox. When my plan is matured, the ingenious shall hear further concerning it.
And Pearson writing in 1802, when the success of cowpox appeared secure, observed--
How the new practice was sneered at by some: how it was reprobated as a gross and mischievous imposition: how it was stigmatised with the appellation of the Gloucestershire bubble: and how the Inquirers were considered by many persons as fit candidates for a certain asylum: to say nothing of the villainous jests made on the occasion, are recent in our memory.[118]
[114] Baron’s _Life of Jenner_, vol. i. p. 360.
[115] _Rees’s Cyclopædia_, vol. 38. London, 1819. The writer of the article himself inoculated Woodville with the Grease.
[116] Mr. Cooke’s letter was reprinted in the _Medical and Physical Journal_, vol. i. p. 322. London, 1799.