Who that have felt the benefits of Vaccination will not teach their children, and their children’s children, to bless the name of Woodville when they bless the name of Jenner.
Yet Pearson and Woodville, who made the New Inoculation practical and practicable, were pursued by Jenner with implacable animosity, stigmatising their mishaps and appropriating their apparent successes.
To publish a pamphlet for the detraction of Woodville, and if possible to upset Pearson’s Vaccine Pock Institution, Jenner left Berkeley for London on 28th January, 1800, taking Bath on his way, where also a Vaccine Pock Institution was in progress.
Early in 1800 appeared _A Continuation of Facts and Observations relative to the Variolæ Vaccinæ_--a quarto of 40 pages, Jenner’s third pamphlet. Like its predecessor, a trumpery collection of gossip, it was designed to manifest his advantage over Woodville, who had inadvertently confused cowpox with smallpox in his inoculations at the Hospital.
First, Jenner expressed satisfaction over the interest of Europe in Cowpox Inoculation--
I have the pleasure, too, of seeing that the feeble efforts of a few individuals to depreciate the new practice are sinking fast into contempt beneath the immense mass of evidence which has risen up in support of it.
He then went on to describe the accumulating mass of evidence--
Upwards of six thousand persons have now been inoculated with the virus of Cowpox, and the far greater part of them have since been inoculated with that of Smallpox, and exposed to its infection in every rational way that could be devised, without effect.
“True,” Pearson might have observed, “but who inoculated the vast majority of the six thousand? Nor were they inoculated with the horsegrease cowpox you prescribed, but with the cowpox you condemned.”
The introductory reference to Woodville revealed Jenner’s disposition and tactics--
It was very improbable that the investigation of a disease so analogous to the Smallpox should go forward without engaging the attention of the Physician of the Smallpox Hospital in London.
Accordingly, Dr. Woodville, who fills that department with so much respectability, took an early opportunity of instituting an inquiry into the nature of the Cowpox. This inquiry was begun in the early part of 1799, and in May, Dr. Woodville published the result, which differs essentially from mine in a point of much importance. It appears that three-fifths of the patients inoculated were affected with eruptions, for the most part so perfectly resembling the Smallpox, as not to be distinguished from them. On this subject it is necessary that I should make some comments.