Dr. JOSEPH MARSHALL related his experience as a vaccine inoculator in the Navy and at Gibraltar, Malta, Palermo, Naples, Rome and Genoa. Everywhere was successful. Believed he had operated on 10,000, and never witnessed any ill consequences whatever. On the contrary, children in a weak state of health, after passing through the vaccine infection, began to thrive and become vigorous.
Mr. JOHN ADDINGTON, surgeon, had used Jenner’s remedy since 1799 in eighty-one cases. One third of these he had inoculated with smallpox, and subjected to every method of infection he could devise, but found them perfectly proof against the disease.
Dr. SKEY, physician to the Worcester Hospital, testified that in the spring of 1801 smallpox was epidemic in Worcester. He inoculated a number of children with cowpox, and none of them took smallpox although constantly exposed to contagion.
Dr. THORNTON, physician to the Marylebone Dispensary, had inoculated a patient with cowpox, and afterwards with smallpox at twelve different times during the past three years without effect. He had even slept with a person in natural smallpox, who died, but took no harm. When at Lord Lonsdale’s in the North he had operated on upwards of a thousand, and had completely satisfied himself, and all the medical practitioners in that part of England, that cowpox was a mild disease, hardly deserving the name of a disease. It was not contagious; it never disfigured the person, never produced blindness, nor excited other diseases. It was equally safe whether during the period of pregnancy, or the earliest infancy, or extreme old age.
Dr. BAILLIE then gave his influential judgment. He thought cowpox an extremely mild disease, and when a patient had properly undergone it, he was perfectly secure from the future infection of smallpox: and further, if Dr. Jenner had not chosen openly and honourably to explain to the public all he knew upon the subject, he might have acquired a considerable fortune. In his opinion it was the most important discovery ever made in medicine.
Mr. DAVID TAYLOR, surgeon of Wootton-under-Edge, had inoculated about two thousand persons with cowpox without a single failure, nor had he met with any ulcerations, tumours, or other diseases following the operation. He knew Jenner’s practice in Gloucestershire. It was in a very populous neighbourhood where there was not another physician within sixteen miles. He had surrendered an income of £600 a year to devote himself to the public service.