Scores of such testimonies might be adduced, twitching the reader from conclusion to conclusion; and in the conflict of authorities what is to be said? It is true that if we select what evidence we like, and call it sound, and reject what we dislike, and call it unsound, we may prove anything; but it is also true, that if we are to be fettered by evidence we shall stand paralysed amid contradictions. When men who are competent, and obviously honest, deliver varying testimony, we are driven to seek some method of reconciliation; and in this matter of Inoculation wherein our resort is to books, and about which we can have no immediate experience, we may derive much light from the corresponding practice of Vaccination. Thus, what is commoner than for vaccinators to assert, that never within their sphere of observation have they witnessed a single case of injury resulting from Vaccination--not one! Subject any dozen ordinary practitioners to judicial examination, and they would thus testify with scarcely a note of variation. On the other hand, take any dozen mothers of families, especially from among the poor, and they would tell of illness, disease, and death following the vaccinators’ lancets. The men are more or less competent and honest, and the women likewise, and how shall we account for their variance? In the first place, the men have been drilled from the outset of their profession into the conviction that Vaccination is absolutely harmless, and if any disaster follows, it is coincidence, not consequence. Occasionally a practitioner of more vigorous intelligence than the average, like Mr. Henry May of Birmingham, sees what the mothers see, but does he report accordingly? Not at all. In Mr. May’s own words--
A death from Vaccination occurred not long ago in my practice, and although I had not vaccinated the child, yet in my desire to preserve Vaccination from reproach, I omitted all mention of it from my certificate of death.[70]
Mr. May recognised the fact and concealed it: a duller man would have ascribed the death mechanically to erysipelas or pyœmia. Indeed, it is a commonplace with medical men, that no child dies of Vaccination; and hence Vaccination is not an admitted cause of death; and when the fact is insisted upon, there is no limit to the hardihood wherewith the truth is crushed down and covered up. Coroners refuse to hold inquests on children slain by Vaccination, and Dr. Lankester, as coroner for Middlesex, did not hesitate to authorise a false certificate of death in order, like Mr. May, “to preserve Vaccination from reproach.”[71] As for mothers, poor creatures, few of them have minds of their own, and if only they were adequately assured that it was for the good of their offspring that their noses should be slit, they would believe, weep, and submit.