Vaccination fl Crime With Comments on Other Sanitary Superstitions By FELIX OSWALD, A.M., M.D. " Tyranny begins her arguments by fettering free speech. Begin your reply by breaking your fetters."-Mirabeau. Copyrighted 1901, by Bernarr Macfadden ALL RIGHTS RESERVED New York Physical Culture Publishing Company 1901 Illustrations of Diseases frequently resulting from Vaccination. INDURATED ULCERS, DISEASES RESULTING FROM VACCINATION: CONTAGIOUS IMPETIGO. In certain cases of vaccination, a double infection may sometimes take place When the vaccine virus has produced a vesicle, the microbes of contagious impetigo may be accidentally implanted. The vaccine lesion now becomes unusually inflamed and itchy. Through scratching a number of other crusted lesions are DISEASES RESULTING FROM VACCINATION SCROFULA. "Scrofula" and "Impetigo"-the latter a characteristic after-effect of vaccination. developed upon the arm and elsewhere, and doubtless some of the cases of generalized vaccinia which have been reported may be justly considered to have been cases of contagious impetigo beginning at the point of vaccination. DISEASES RESULTING FROM VACCINATION. VARIOLOID SYPHILIS. DISEASES RESULTING EROM VACCINATION. ICHTHYOSIS. DISEASES RESULTING FROM VACCINATION. John Pfander, child of healthy Swiss parents, was healthy until vaccinated. Was a sturdy and beautiful child, as were all his four brothers and sisters; he walked at the age of nine months. He was vaccinated by the official vaccinator. Eight days later his feet began to swell, abscesses formed, his teeth began to rot, his glands to swell. Fistulous sores appeared on his hands and feet. He could neither walk nor stand; several of the bones of his hands had rotted out. It was such cases as this and the spirit of liberty, not yet dead in Switzerland, which led that freedom-loving people to reject on a referendum the infamous system of blood-poisoning called vac- cination, which a medical clique was seeking to impose upon them. DISEASES RESULTING FROM VACCINATION. VEGETATING LEPROSY DISEASES RESULTING FROM VACCINATION. HOW THEY MAKE PURE (?) VIRUS. PROCESSES OF INOCULATING THE COW. The poisonous pus obtained from these sores is manufactured into vaccine tubes and used to poison the blood of human beings. This is called vaccination. INTRODUCTION. No question has latterly more occupied the attention of sanitary reformers than that of our means of defense against the arrogations of the cowpox bullies. Opinions differ as to the superior efficacy of legislative safeguards or appeals to the tribunal of public opinion; but there should be no mis- conception about the importance of the main problem. Compulsory vaccination ranks with slavery and religious persecutions as one of the most mischievous outrages upon the rights of the human race. And it might be seriously questioned if men have ever suffered from the hands of their fel- low men a more unqualified evil. The advo- cates of the " peculiar institution " could plead its civilizing influence upon races formerly sunk in the depths of barbarism, and the vast utilita- rian enterprises which the command of serf- 4 INTRODUCTION. labor enabled some rulers of pagan antiquity to accomplish. Jean Bodin, in his apology of medieval witch-hunts, demonstrates the fact that they terrorized poison-mongers out of ex- istence and greatly reduced the prevalence of medical quackery. But it would be difficult to name a redeeming tendency of the delusion that has polluted the blood of millions of our children with the germs of loathsome diseases and contributed more to the progress of physical degeneration than uncleanliness and the social evil taken to- gether. It is true that vaccination yields fees to lymph-peddlers and baby-slashers, but in a plea of their solicitors the mention of that circum- stance suggests the porcine argument of the rum-seller who quoted the pay-roll of breweries and distilleries, and who might as well have added that assassins patronize knife-grinders. The sophisms of the Jenner doctrine have, in fact, been so thoroughly exploded that the per- sistency of its defenders seems to imply a moral, rather than mental aberration; in other words, INTRODUCTION. 5 the collapse of all other supports justifies the suspicion of the hideous fact that the organiza- tion of the cowpox syndicate rests upon the deliberate sacrifice of truth to business consid- erations and corporation interests, to mulish conservatism and the gratification of the mania for meddling with the affairs of a fellow man. The Jenner dogma can no longer plead the privileges of an untested theory. Vaccination has become a crime. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. The Danger of Vaccination 9 CHAPTER II. Fallacies of the Jenner Doctrine 32 CHAPTER III. The Cowpox Federation and the Secret of Its Per- sistence 73 CHAPTER IV. Defensive Resources 103 CHAPTER V. The Stimulant Delusion 119 CHAPTER VI. The Dread of Fresh A ir 149 CHAPTER VII. Air Poison 165 CHAPTER VIII. Cures and Prevention 175 VACCINATION A CRIME. CHAPTER I. THE DANGER OF VACCINATION. A.-Vaccination spreads the germs of conta- gious diseases. Up to the end of the eighteenth century it was often questioned if the pollution of the hu- man blood with the virus of vaccine lymph could produce disorders entirely different from cowpox, or even from true variola. At present we might as well doubt that the complications of the opium-habit include sleep- lessness, though poppy-juice is essentially a sleep-promoting drug. Eight years ago Dr. Hermann Lasker of Prague tested the question by a series of experiments which, besides es- tablishing the fact of collateral contagion, also clearly explain its modus operandi. That explanation is based upon the fact that 10 VACCINATION A CRIME. inflammatory eruptions tend to attract the vi- tiated humors of the organism. An inflamma- tion, threatening the destruction of the eye, can be diverted by producing an artificial sore else- where and causing it to fester by the applica- tion of any chemical or mechanical irritant. A cancer absorbs minor germ-diseases; the patient becomes almost contagion-proof. It is also a common experience that consumptives have a remarkably untainted complexion; skin erup- tions disappear; the pulmonary tubercles have absorbed the impurities of the system and mock the eye with an external appearance of florid health. In the same way the vaccine areola, or in- flammation produced by the virus of cowpox lymph, absorbs all sorts of vitiated humors, and in its communication to other bodies the viru- lent pus becomes a propagator of miscellaneous disease-germs. The lymph collector gathers an assortment of malignant blood-poisons and in- jects them all over the neighborhood at a dol- lar per outrage, and at the constant risk of in- itiating a ruinous and widespread epidemic. THE DANGER OF VACCINATION. 11 A case of that kind occurred in 1821 at Cre- mona, some fifty miles southeast of Milan, Italy, where the manager of a public workhouse ordered the vaccination of some twenty of his prisoners and thus infected them with syphil- itic poisons which reduced five of them to physi- cal wrecks and doomed the rest to lifelong misery, besides communicating the contagion to a number of their relatives. The next year the health-officers of a district in Upper Franconia reported a similar experi- ence, and the cowpox syndicate being at that time less perfectly organized, impartial investi- gators were able to ascertain facts which clearly traced the mischief to the compulsory vaccina- tion of a number of village school children. In the neighborhood of Buda-Pesth vac- cination in 1855 caused an epidemic of malig- nant skin-diseases that raged uncontrollably till 1857, and was only checked by the use of anti- dotes (mercury, etc.), not much preferable to the suppressed disorder. A most pitiful result of the cowpox crime was recorded three years later in the district of 12 VACCINATION A CRIME. Rivalta, Piedmont, where lymph, derived from a slightly syphilitic child, communicated the disease in its most virulent form to some two hundred poor miners and day laborers, many of whom were unable to afford the expenses of competent medical assistance, and under the perfunctory ministrations of a municipal San- grado were disabled for life. Two of them com- mitted suicide, ten or twelve died in their prime, with remarks probably not very compli- mentary to the memory of Dr. Edward Jenner. It is on record that the next time the cowpox bullies called around they were chased like mad wolves from hill to hill, and that a public mass- meeting of strong-fisted men solemnly pledged themselves to slay any informer, judge or jury- man who should venture to trouble the con- ductors of the vendetta. The Italian penchant for self-help has its drawbacks, but on that occasion it proved a blessing in disguise by frightening the hirelings of the vaccine ring all over northern Italy and causing sympathetic assemblies as far north as Switzerland, where the voters of several can- THE DANGER OF VACCINATION. 13 tons resolved to cancel the ordinance of com- pulsory blood-poisoning. In Torre del Greco near Naples a young woman died in 1862 from the effects of vac- cination which in that case resembled true variola, and the excitement spreading from town to town, the " health-officers " despaired of being able to enforce the provisional acts of the legislature. " Let them do without it then, and die," de- cided the royal counsellor; " it doesn't pay try- ing to save people against their will." The na- tives of the maritime district were in conse- quence left alone, yet declined to die earlier than their neighbors; but the episode derived additional interest from its sequel; foreign res- idents reported it to British newspapers and thus started a discussion which in 1863 com- pelled the Registrar General of the City of Lon- don to admit that " from forty to fifty cases of death within the corporation limits are yearly attributed to the after-effects of vaccination and often to its direct results," i. e., to a malignant form of the varioloid eruption caused by cow- pox lymph! VACCINATION A CRIME. 14 A revolt bordering on a municipal insurrec- tion was also provoked in Algiers, where in 1880 an entire battalion of Zouaves was syph- ilized " by the lancet of the regimental surgeon. Their protests were silenced by military force, but outsiders took up the hue and cry, and the responsible doctor thought it best to go to Eu- rope for his health, soon after. Syphilis epi- demics resulting from vaccine blood-poisoning occurred also in Undine, Dalmatia, Stettin, on the Baltic, Verviers, near Aix-la-Chapelle and on the Isle of Wight. And even more numerous are the clearly es- tablished cases where vaccine virus has initiated a plague of erysipelas. Holland adopted com- pulsory vaccination provisionally in 1876, and definitely in 1882, but came near revoking that decision the next year when the garrison of Dortrecht was decimated by an outbreak of frightful skin-diseases. The medical function- ary, in that case, was a man of honor, and frankly admitted that the affliction had un- doubtedly been caused by a " virulent degen- eration of vaccine pustules." What to call that THE DANGER OF VACCINATION. 15 modification of cowpox remained for a while a mooted question; but erysipelas was about the nearest cognate disorder, so they agreed to de- scribe it by that name. The lymph pustules developed in the usual manner, but the " areo- las " refused to subside. They spread, coa- lesced and caused swellings extending from the arm to the shoulder and beyond, the patient became feverish, complained of thirst, tremors and vertigo, and generally died soon after the inflammation had spread to the neck. The patients were isolated-the problematic disorder might be contagious, for all the doc- tors could tell; but it did not spread, even in cases where dying men had been intrusted to the care of their relatives. The weather (an unusually warm summer) could not be made a scapegoat; the trouble was clearly and exclu- sively an effect of cowpox virus. But it has since been ascertained that a high temperature at least aggravates that mysterious degenera- tive tendency of vaccine lymph. In British In- dia, where compulsory vaccination was " tried " in the seventies, the consequent eruptions so 16 VACCINATION A CRIME. often became malignant that the medical com- missioners thought it safest to desist, pending the outcome of experiments with new kinds of lymph (vaccine in some substitute for glycer- ine). In the Brazilian harbor-town of Santos, Dr. Pereira recorded a panic due to a severe inflam- matory form of varioloid, and Sir Samuel Ba- ker ("Baker Pasha") mentions that in the Soudan smallpox itself is very apt to assume that frightful form known as the coalescent modification. The sores spread till their bor- ders touch; the festering dividing ridge gives way altogether, and a dozen pustules may thus combine to produce a swelling resembling the result of a severe burn. He also describes his experience in the vicinity of Khartoum, where a ship-load of smallpox-stricken, and too late vaccinated, slaves tainted the atmosphere on the other side of the river. The vaccination controversy, in that climate, would probably reduce Hamlet's alternative to the choice of dying of variola or erysipelas. In children vaccination pustules occasionally THE DANGER OF VACCINATION. 17 appear in a form closely resembling measles. The two disorders seem to be as nearly allied as catarrh and influenza, and in bygone times were, indeed, often mistaken for each other, since Dr. Boerhave claimed the credit of having pointed out their distinctive characteristics. In Neu Dietendorf, a Thuringian settlement of the Moravian brethren, an unprejudiced ob- server (Prof. R. Wettstein) reported in 1872 that " the prevalence of measles seems to have considerably increased since the adoption of in- fant vaccination." " Children vaccinated in their cradles," he adds, " appear to have always something the matter with them; they catch cold under all possible pretexts and claim their share of any skin-disease going." A still stranger metamorphosis of cowpox is an affection indistinguishable from jaundice. An experience of that kind was reported in 1883 frcm Bremen, Germany, where the man- ager of a large shipyard had seen fit to adver- tise his importance by compelling his underpaid and overworked mechanics to submit to a dose of blood-poison. They were vaccinated by in- 18 VACCINATION A CRIME. stalments, at intervals varying from four to fourteen days, and in the order of their infec- tion developed, one after the other, a pro- nounced form of gelb-sucht-" yellow sick- ness." They lost their appetite, became wan and listless, and their friends hoped in vain that the affection would subside together with the traces of the vaccine lancet. Gelb-sucht, it seemed, had come to stay; and the working force of the establishment was practically crip- pled till 1884, when unvaccinated apprentices had grown up to take the place of the invalids. It is a pity that the case in question did not occur in a country like England, where the legal status of a blood-poison despot could have been tested by a series of damage suits. The toady- ism of John Bull is tempered by a strong dose of defensive pugnacity, and his shrewd com- mon sense might suggest ways to counteract the risk of getting the very right of existence imperilled by the caprices of a Jenner idiot. B.-Vaccination impairs the vigor of the or- ganic functions. For about a month after vaccination the pa- THE DANGER OF VACCINATION. 19 tient suffers from the functional disorder known as asthenia-a general depression of vital vig- or. There is no appetite; slight dietetic excesses cause congestions; the respiratory process be- comes labored and apt to be affected by symp- toms resembling those of spasmodic asthma. The heart, too, feels the influence of the all- pervading virus. The pulse is weak and fre- quently capricious-slow and fluttering, by turns, and without any apparent proximate cause of disturbance. If such are the effects of pox-poison on a hale adult, we need not won- der that infants often fail to recover from the after-complications. " In early childhood," says a writer on the abuse of drugs, " health-disturbing influences frequently leave their permanent traces on the organism, and a life of mental and physical sickliness may have to expiate the folly that tried to silence the cries of a fretful babe by a dose of 'back-drops' (laudanum)." It is the same with the victims of vaccine virus. Parental love, with its protective in- stincts, rebels against the suggestion of the 20 vaccination a crime. health-blighting outrage, and I agree with Dr. Schrodt that, " in ninety-nine of a hundred cases a human mother is an unwilling witness of the infamous aggression," but intimidation prevails, the absurdity is comsummated, and the victim has to pay the penalty of a poison- weakened organism. Every veteran physician will attest the fact that the ailments of child- hood have remarkably multiplied in the course of the last forty years; and while the vast progress of public and private hygiene has in- creased the general average of longevity, the survival chances of children under twelve years have decreased. In our vaccine-cursed cities healthy children have become almost as rare as in the Lancashire weaver-districts where in- fants are fuddled with opiates, to keep them quiet while the poor mother is drudging at the factory. " Re-vaccination " aggravates the evil, the self-regulating tendency of the system strug- gles in vain against the cumulative effects of the accursed virus. The fearless and restless THE DANGER OF VACCINATION. 21 American youngster of Washington Irving's time is fast becoming a tradition of the past: " Who has drugged my boy's wine? Who has mixed my boy's bread? Who, with sadness and madness, Has filled my boy's head? " " It is not true," says an educational re- former, " that a disorder from which we have recovered leaves us as before. No disturbance of the normal course of the functions can pass away and leave things as they were. In all cases a permanent damage is done-not imme- diately appreciable, it may be, but still there, and along with other such items, which Nature in her strict account keeping never drops, will tell against us to the end of our days." The compulsory vaccination law, indeed, marks a height of effrontery which despotism has now reached for the first time. Politically outlawed, dogmatically gagged and fettered, financially disinherited, the child of poverty is now robbed of his physical health, literally and systematically injected with disease-germs, by 22 VACCINATION A CRIME. due process of law, and thus deprived of the one remaining advantage that held out a hope of recovering all others. C.-Vaccination encourages reliance on spu- rious palliatives. The cowpox curse has done a great deal to promote the plague of poisons that is infesting the homes of civilization in the form of ever- multiplying quack-drugs. Instead of being taught to ward off disease by cleanliness, venti- lation and exercise, millions are encouraged to rely on anti-natural remedies, and come to be- lieve that health can be sold and bought across the counter. Dr. Isaac Jennings called it " the Nostrum Fallacy," the idea that the disorders of the organism can be set right only by artifi- cial means. When a child complains of head- ache, lassitude or want of appetite, the nurse concludes that he must " take something." If the complexion of a young lady grows every day paler and pastier, her mother will insist that she must " get something " to purify her blood. If the baby squeals day and night, a doctor is sent for and is expected to " prescribe THE DANGER OF VACCINATION. 23 something." What that something should be, the parents would be unable to define, but they have a vague idea that it should come from the drug-store, and that it can not be good for much unless it is bitter or nauseous. Traced to its principle, their theory would be about this: " Sickness and depravity are the normal condi- tions of our nature; salvation can come only through abnormal agencies, and a remedy, in order to be effective, should be as disagreeable as possible." And the cowpox despotism has, at it were, confirmed that superstition by an official en- dorsement. " Whew 1 By the taste of that stuff it must be powerfully good," was the verdict of a Ten- nessee granger who had ventured to sample the pills of a nostrum peddler and found them al- most bitter enough to blister his tongue. Didn't the vaccinator blister our youngsters for their own good? And isn't he a govern- ment agent? Shouldn't the government know ? D.-Vaccination spreads smallpox. 24 VACCINATION A CRIME. The French Republic, like Switzerland, has refused to enact a national vaccination law, but cities here and there, and even whole " depart- ments," are saddled with the yoke of the cow- pox bullies. That vaccination does not afford permanent, or in all cases even transient, pro- tection from true variola has been proved again and again. Dr. Buchecker collected evidence of 2,180 such cases in Germany alone, and the Baudin brothers, almost as many in lit- tle Holland. But a comparison of impartial statistics revealed the far more astounding fact that in France, during the last 25 years (1875- 1900), smallpox epidemics have occurred more frequently in the vaccinated than in the anti- cowpox departments, the average per 1000 cases of all diseases being 3^2 per mil. higher in the former than in the latter. And, as it happened, the anti-districts were pretty evenly distributed between lowlands and highlands. In the case of Rochelle and St. Jean de Luz seaport towns with a considerable patronage of visitors of various nations, had enjoyed a remarkable immunity, while vaccinated and re-vaccinated THE DANGER OF VACCINATION. 25 Cherbourg had to admit six outbreaks of indis- putable smallpox in a quarter of a century. Variola had also made its appearance in several upland departments, remote from the highways of travel, and under circumstances which left no doubt that the germs of the contagion had a local origin. The causes of the frightful virulence of smallpox epidemic in the Middle Ages will be discussed in another chapter, but we may pre- mise the remark that the infection in those cases was nearly always imported from abroad, and spread from city to city like La Grippe or the Black Death. It swept over Europe like a devastating fire, but left no sparks behind. Vac- cination, instead of stamping out those linger- ing germs, has actually preserved and distribut- ed them, either by the selection of lymph from persons afflicted with the dormant virus of the more formidable disease, or if a colleague of Prof. Pasteur should be right, in consequence of the fact that vaccine (cowpox) lymph may degenerate in a manner tending to produce a disease closely resembling smallpox. Something 26 VACCINATION A CRIME. analogous, it should be added, had been ob- served in the development of hydrophobia germs, modified, and as it was supposed, miti- gated, by transmission through the system of non-carnivorous animals. Mad-dog virus, in- troduced into the body of a squirrel-monkey, will kill the victim of the experiment, but its blood or brain-serum produces in another mon- key a disorder less frequently fatal, and after a third or fourth transmission merely a fever and transient delirium. Now and then, however, inoculations with this " lenified " virus disappoint the expecta- tions of the operator, and develop hydrophobia with all its horrid symptoms; the modified dis- ease has " reverted " to the original type. Vaccine virus is liable to similar reversions; nay, the intermediate forms of cowpox and smallpox are so numerous that some cases are described as a malignant degeneration of vac- cine rather difficult to classify; they might be virulent lymph-eruptions or a comparatively mild type of variola. But under a concurrence of not clearly THE DANGER OF VACCINATION. 27 known circumstances, vaccine virus may at once overleap these midway stages, and repro- duce the disease which, in all probability, formed a varioloid by being communicated from men to cattle. Divested of its technical terms, the above summary of the bacteriological expert means just this: Cowpox lymph, the supposed pre- ventive of variola, may take a more or less virulent form, and under unknown, and there- fore unavoidable circumstances, may produce and spread the very disease it was intended to eradicate. The one loophole of escape from the infer- ences of that fact is the suggestion that, un- known to the patient himself, the germs of smallpox may have been at work in his system at the time a dose of vaccine came in to shoulder the blame; but those " intermediate " forms of the fitful disorder cannot be explained away in that manner, and no ingenuity can disguise the significance of the fact that the aggregate effort of numerous (say 50,000 a year per de- partment) routine vaccinations has resulted in 28 VACCINATION A CRIME. more smallpox than the let-alone plan. Thou- sands and hundreds of thousands of children have been blood-poisoned for life, thousands of adults fever-racked and itch-tortured, under the pretext of preventing a disease which results proved to be propagated by the remedy itself! The Swiss Federation, a few years ago, re- jected the proposition to override the local op- tion privilege of the separate cantons in the matter of compulsory vaccination. Among the twenty-two States, as we should call them, there were twelve antis; and their adverse vote makes it evident that the comparison of results had given them no reason to exchange freedom for the despotism of the blood-poison bullies. They had effected a large saving in coin, time, health and self-respect, and, after all, eluded small- pox as successfully as their neighbors. E.-Compulsory vaccination furnishes per- ilous legal precedents. In the course of the last fifty years the pub- lic has been favored with the gospels of some sixteen different medical saviors, claiming the discovery of infallable " lymphs," or " serums " THE DANGER OF VACCINATION. 29 for the prevention of contagious disorders. All " germ-diseases " have been proved to be more or less infectious, but withal, amenable to mod- ifications by the artificial substitution of kindred affections. Some of these plans for preventive inoculation are a great deal more plausible than the Jenner doctrine, and if on evidence such as that of the cowpox hypothesis millions of citi- zens of so-called civilized countries can be forced to submit to official blood-poisoning, there is no limit whatever to the progress of therapeutical despotism. The converts of Prof. Pasteur will insist on pumping us full of hy- drophobia virus, and every owner of a flea-bit- ten, moon-baying, sleep-murdering flee will second the proposition. It is so much more charitable to let the dear thing snap away, and patronize a virus peddler, if the neighbors all around can be bullied to bare their arms to the prophylactic syringe. The dupes of Robert Koch will petition for the compulsory injection of abstersive con- sumption serums, and a mutual benefit associa- tion of druggists and weather-strip manufac- 30 VACCINATION A CRIME. turers will offer premiums for the re-capture of fugitive deserters. Instead of wasting time on the ventilation of their dwelling houses, do- mestic Dogberries will rip up their children and domestics left and right and set the police on the poor refugee in the haystack. A Spanish doctor heralds the discovery of a yellow fever serum, and army contractors will go into part- nership with speculators in man-traps and bloodhounds for the capture of un-injected Fihpmos. There are influenza lymphs and bubonic plague serums, diphtheria antitodes and elixirs for the prevention of senile decrepitude; life will be almost too short for the maturation of all the different blood microbes; the hide of a law-abiding citizen will be scarred like the bark of a pine-tree in the North Carolina turpentine camps. Lymph contractors will bully municipal com- missioners into the concession of more and more outrageous privileges, and, banter aside, the possibilities of transcendent egotism, in that respect, are foreshadowed by abundant his- THE DANGER OF VACCINATION. 31 torical precedents. Europe has witnessed the dragonades of speculators in parish tithes, and A. D. 1408, a gang of manhunters went to northern Portugal and proceeded to cremate landed proprietors on trumped up charged of heresy. Confiscation of all secular assets fol- lowed in every case, and before the affrighted population had time to organize their defensive resources, the impostors had hurried their boodle across the mountains. Shall we submit to an actual and enormous outrage for the prevention of an imaginary peril? We might as well allow the bullies of a holy inquisition to trepan the skulls of our chil- dren and narcotize their brains to prevent the development of a penchant for free inquiry and thus enforce the precautions of a post-mortem fire insurance. CHAPTER II. FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. A.-Has vaccination abated the prevalence of smallpox ? The advocates of the cowpox plan unhesi- tatingly answer that question in the affirmative, and their assurance is a most characteristic, but also perhaps the most baneful illustration of what logicians call the " Post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy-the disposition to mistake an in- cidental sequence of events for connection of cause and effect. Woodpeckers search for in- sects in the bark of trees betraying symptoms of incipient decay, and Jack Hodge concludes that the bird has caused the ruin of the grove. After a brisk summer-shower multitudes of frogs leave their hiding places under planks and stones, and passersby infer that it must have been raining tadpoles. There are self- limiting diseases,- and if the patient has hap- pened to have swallowed a dose of pills after FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 33 the convalescent turn of the crisis, his final re- covery is pretty sure to be ascribed to the effects of the nostrum. Smallpox is a disorder of that sort. It is a filth disease. All the world over its most de- structive epidemics coincide with periods of sanitary neglect. Like swamp-fever it flour- ishes most in a tainted atmosphere and can be exorcised by ventilation, personal cleanliness and dietetic hygiene. The disease-resisting faculty of a vigorous body repels it, weakness invites its attacks. Within the same decade and under the same parallels of geographical lati- tude it has been known almost to devour a sickly nation and spare its health-blest neigh- bors. In China, the old seed-plot of filth epidemics, true variola was known from remote antiquity. Tse Han Tong, a medical sage of the eighth or ninth century, B. C., attempted to check its rav- ages by a prophylactic trick of his own, viz., by powdering the dried scabs of variola pus- tules and blowing the powder into the nostrils of his patients. His personal longevity seems 34 VACCINATION A CRIME. to imply that they failed to break his neck, but the prescription also failed, for the smothered fire flickered up again and again, especially in the slum-ridden southern cities. Its epidemics were checked in eras of national prosperity, owing to the general increase of creature com- forts, more wholesome diet, roomier and more cleanly habitations, for the well-to-do Mongols have always been a bath-tub-loving people. A specially destructive epidemic is recorded in B. C. 350-48, and seems to have spread westward as far as Scythia, and all along the north coasts of the African continent. Disorders closely resembling smallpox are also described by Egyptian historians; but it is a most noteworthy fact that they failed to get a foothold among the health-worshiping nations of southern Europe. During the long period of pagan civilization neither Greece nor Rome, nor any one of their European colonies, expe- rienced any epidemic that can be possibly mis- taken for contagious variola. From B. C. 800 to A. D. 450 the record of memorable events in both countries is almost complete; at the time FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 35 when Athens was a metropolis of science and Rome the capital of the civilized universe gos- sipy chronicles recorded every insurrection, ev- ery earthquake and famine, gave circumstantial accounts of strange pathological phenomena, like the revival of leprosy and the Miletus mania of suicide; but they do not mention anything remotely akin to a fatal skin-disease. The disfiguring effect of the horrid disorder, if nothing else, would be sure to have been dis- cussed by the philosophers of a nation of beauty-worshipers. In the battle of Pharsalia Julius Caesar instructed his troopers to slash the faces of his aristocratic opponents-the atroc- ity of the expedient was emphasized and rep- rehended by scores of critics, and it is wholly incredible that they should have failed even to allude to the ravages of a skin-pitting disorder. They cannot have either experienced or heard of it, anywhere at home or among their colonial friends. Their campaigners may have noticed some- thing of that sort in northern Africa, but prob- ably did not consider it worth while to mention 36 VACCINATION A CRIME. the abominations of barbarians whose appear- ance could not have been made much less ba- boonish by any cosmetic artifice: " If, with silver or with gold, You could turn ten thousand pimples Into half a dozen dimples, Doubtless then we might behold Your face looking much more snugly, But, for all that, d-d ugly." They traded with China, they traveled in In- dia (another plague center) they conquered northern Africa from the isthmus to the Pillars of Hercules, they kept Numidian slaves, and it is almost certain that here and there they must have encountered the risk of contagion; but they could afford to despise it. For a thousand years their masses had been trained in athletics, in dietetic rationalism, in public and private hygiene; every larger town had free municipal baths, no dread of nudity aggravated the perils of a warm climate; on their clean skins small- pox declined to develop, as " shame refused to sit " on the brow of Francis Bacon. FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 37 They explained their immunities in their own way. Among the minor divinities of their pantheon there was a Goddess of Health, to whose protection they attributed their good luck in pathological matters-a theory about as well founded as the claims of the Jenner gang. The mere proposition of compulsory blood- poisoning would have consigned the projector to a madhouse-cage, and by hygiene alone a population of some 120,000,000 eager traders and restless adventurers, coming in unavoidable contact with smallpox-stricken neighbors, kept smallpox at bay, for nearly fifteen hundred years. But after the fall of Rome the darkness of Oriental superstition crept over Europe and the Goddess of Health withdrew her protection. It is worth while to preliminate a few words on the moral and physical condition of the Christian nations at the time when smallpox made its first appearance on the Caucasian con- tinent. It was in the midnight hours of the Millennium of Madness, the thousand years' reign of anti-naturalism, and it is not too much VACCINATION A CRIME. 38 to say that the unsanitary condition of ortho- dox Europe at that time transcended anything experienced in the era of primitive barbarism. Mere neglect of hygiene might be charged against many effeminate nations of pagan antiquity, but herq, for the first time, that neglect was publicly commended as a duty. The deadliest blow ever directed against the cause of health was the anti-natural fanaticism of the Middle Ages, the world-hating infatuation of the maniacs who depreciated every secular blessing as a curse in disguise and despised their own bodies as they despised nature, life and earth. The world-renouncing saints actu- ally welcomed disease as a sign of divine favor; they gloried in decrepitude and deformity and promoted the work of degeneration with a zeal never exceeded by the enlightened benefactors of the human race. The Olympic festivals were suppressed. The Spanish Inquisition or- dered the destruction of the magnificent Moor- ish baths that rivalled the therms of ancient Rome. Municipal hygiene was held so utterly below the attention of orthodox magistrates FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 39 that every large city became a hotbed of con- tagious disease. Hillocks of garbage accumu- lated in the narrow streets and were removed only when they began to obstruct traffic to an unendurable degree. The representatives of justice were too busy hunting heretics to mind such trifles as the depredations of robber-knights whose raids forced peace-loving burghers to fortify their cities with walls and moats, thus prevent- ing expansion of the suburbs and crowding the ill-ventilated rookeries from attic to sub-cellar. Three generations of poor mechanics often herded in one room,-frequently a basement room, receiving light through holes in the wall, which at the beginning of the cold se?.son were apt to be stopped with stable litter. What little water could be procured in such dens was gen- erally needed for drinking and cooking. Wash- ing was out of the question. Yet such citizens were only beginners in holiness. No vigilance probably could prevent their youngsters from bathing in summertime, but there were friars VACCINATION A CRIME. 40 who boasted of never having washed for twenty or thirty years. It need not surprise us that epidemics raged with fearful destructiveness in that era of out- rageous sins against the health-laws of Nature. The wonder is how smallpox once started could ever be stayed at all, and Dr. Zimmer- mann suggests that it continued its work of depopulation till the reeking city slums had be- come a little less crowded. Wailing processions of penitents marched from town to town, con- fessing sins that were supposed to have pro- voked the wrath of heaven and exhorting their neighbors to renounce earthly vanities and pay their arrears of tithes. But the epidemic de- clined to abate. In their extremity the citizens of several towns took the advice of Hippocra- tes and burnt masses of wood on the market- square, where thousands of panic-crazed ref- ugees crowded close to the protecting flames, fiercely fighting for the privilege of getting their sleeves and eyebrows singed, i.e., coming as close as they dared. Of a hundred patients an average of 45 died FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 41 in Germany and about 25 in France, where the traditions of Roman civilization still lingered here and there, and where bigotry rarely took the form of deliberate self-torture. In monk- ridden Italy smallpox epidemics were likewise extremely virulent; Milan lost half its popula- tion in 1298 and was again ravaged in 1329 and again in 1360. No positive remedy was known, and persons who had proved to be contagion- proof were in great request as nurses and sex- tons, " being supposed to bear charmed lives." The same epidemics also decimated the pop- ulation of Russia, Flanders, Poland and north- ern Spain, but rarely got farther south than the Ebro Valley; the cleanly and otherwise more civilized natives of Moorish Spain generally escaped. The bigots of their faith ascribed the visitations of the northland races to their un- belief, and Prof. Weil, in his " History of the Chalifs " adds that they maintained a sort of quarantine, but it should also be remembered that their creed prohibits pork and alcoholic beverages, and enjoins daily ablutions, and that nearly every larger town of Mohammedan 42 VACCINATION A CRIME. Spain had free public baths. Moreover, their cities were less crowded. Jealousy, if no better motive, made every paterfamilias anxious to have his family occupy a home of their own, and all well-to-do citizens maintained an algua- dor, or a tree-shaded courtyard with a cooling fountain. They had well-managed hospitals, no nearer approach to a gymnasium than a hip- podrome, or public horse-race track, which was now and then used for foot-races; but their public parks were the finest in Europe and they had a regular system of street cleaning. And without an attempt at anything like vac- cination these cleanly Mussulmans enjoyed im- munity from a disease that scourged their northern, neighbors almost into madness, for some of the roving bands of self-torturers seem to have gone actually crazy and flayed them- selves with knotted thongs, rabidly persisting in the idea of ascribing the epidemic to an in- sufficient abuse of their wretched bodies. They tore their hair, implored passersby to kick them for pity's sake, mixed their food with wormwood and camped in the open fields. FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 43 Camp-life did help a little. It was observed that the mortality of the penitent bivouacs was decidedly lower than that of the walled towns, and thousands removed their families to tents in the hills and woods, at the risk of getting their females captured by robber-knights. Well-to-do Spaniards overcame their relig- ious scruples and sought refuge on the other side of Ebro. As far off as France and Flan- ders a rumor had spread that at the south end of Europe there was a sanitary Goshen, a land spared by the international plague, and the sea- port town of Moorish Spain became crowded with refugees. An outbreak of smallpox was thus caused at Velez Malaga, but the city fathers did not go into convulsions, and contented themselves with isolating the stricken strangers on a coast island and warning the rest to keep away from the Moorish bazars. The rationale of the latter precaution may be found in the fact that these markets of miscellaneous merchandise were fre- quented by traders from all parts of northern Europe, and the Moors probably wished to 44 VACCINATION A CRIME. avoid the risk of adding fuel to a flickering fire and thus provoking a conflagration that might imperil their own homes. Of contagion from sporadic cases they were evidently not afraid, as long as the colonies of refugees did not develop slum-ghettos. A king of Aragon sent his two sons to Cor- dova with royal presents to a Moorish doctor in whose care they were lodged and nursed for a few weeks while in their birthland no man was safe from the attacks of a smallpox plague that had made its first appearance in Barcelona, and spreading inland, had invaded the very highland hamlets of the Pyrenees. Moorish physicians were also induced to visit several cities of Christian Europe in the crisis of smallpox epidemics, but they were un- able to help. Against the influence of grossly unsanitary conditions their prescriptions re- mained ineffectual, and as their excellent in- tentions could not be doubted, bigots were con- firmed in their belief that " the immunity of Moorland was due to talismans that lost their power in a country of the Cross." FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 45 Was that talisman the genial sun of the south? Much farther south, in Nubia and Abys- sinia, smallpox rages like an unquenchable fire, seemingly smothered during the hunting sea- son, but soon fanned into blaze again by the beastly domestic habits of the aborigines, and in 1520, at a time when the population of Span- ish America consisted chiefly of bloated slave- drivers and kennel-housed slaves, a smallpox plague invaded Mexico and devoured 2,850,000 lives. Ruiz Valverde estimates the fearful ag- gregate for Mexico and Yucatan at three mil- lions, " without counting the fugitives that de- serted the plantations and perished miserably in the mountains of Gautemala." At present nearly every Mexican family dwells in a house of its own; the cities, though not paragons of cleanliness, are models of roominess; broad streets and numberless su- burban gardens, and Mexico, with a mini- mum of cowpox swindle, enjoys a maximum of immunity from smallpox. In Christian Europe, too, the deadliness of smallpox epidemics abated as soon as a revival 46 VACCINATION A CRIME. of common sense began to abate the predispos- ing conditions. The night of medieval superstition was broken by more and more unmistakable signs of dawn. " And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake"; scholasti- cism produced a few real inquirers; Italy ex- perienced a classic revival; the Protestant Re- volt broke the mental fetters of the North. Na- ture, re-asserted her rights; as Heinrich Heine puts it, " men proceeded to fumigate their wives and sweep their houses, as after a weath- ered pestilence." The yoke of feudalism was broken about the same time. In thousands of European cities ring-walls were torn down, pestering moats filled up and planted with shade-trees. Suburbs sprang up; cities began to grow outward, in- stead of upward and downward. Garden cot- tages took the place of slum-dungeons. Diet improved. The rising power of trades- unions secured a bit of butter for the dry crust of the workingman. Monastic beer-cellars were turned into roothouses; waste fields were FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 47 planted with fruit trees. Counts and Barons no longer thought it necessary to adorn their tables with wash-tub-sized goblets, and some of them procured actual washtubs. The influence of Averhoes initiated a crusade against munici- pal abominations; garbage was carted to subur- ban ravines; jailers were forced to remove their prisoners from subterranean cesspools to venti- lated cells. Irremediable rat-warrens were torn down to make room for wider and cleanlier streets. Nor should we omit to mention the fact that the clinical methods of dealing with smallpox underwent an important change more than a century before Dr. Jenner's time. In 1666 Dr. Thomas Sydenham published his famous " Treatise on Fevers " and demonstrated to the satisfaction of all sane contemporaries that re- frigeration, and not sweat-box torture, is the true specific for the cure of all pyretic disorders, including measles and smallpox. Every bio- graphical summary of his career will be found to include a paragraph to the effect that the great sanitarian " discovered the efficacy of a 48 VACCINATION A CRIME. cooling regimen in smallpox, by which discov- ery he saved many thousand lives." The medieval plan of treatment consisted in clapping the patient in a vapor-bath chamber and trying to " sweat the impurities out of his system," at the risk of sweating out his life at the same time. If he shrieked for a drop of cold water he was fuddled with elder-blossom tea. If he gasped for a change of air they car- ried him into a dry-hot room for a while, and then back into the steam-trap again. Thus en- couraged the microbes multiplied like druggists in a Kansas temperance town, and if the martyr survived his ordeal, his face, neck and hands resembled so many buckshot targets. Sydenham in England and Herman Boer- haave on the continent, introduced a better plan, and in the course of the eighteenth cen- tury the fires of smallpox flickered down to the embers. Quarantine precautions might help to some degree; but the main reason was that the flames had only little to feed upon. A filth-disease cannot wax strong even in a half-cleaned coun- FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 49 try. That a new supply of fuel could at any time revive the conflagration was, however, proved in 1707 when Danish sailors carried the sparks of smallpox to Iceland, among a popu- lation reeking with train-oil and insect-haunted furs. A barrel of turpentine could not have blazed up with more startling effect. In Rei- kiavik whole streets were depopulated; the af- frighted natives fled to the highlands, but took their train-oil bottles along, and if a rational Norway physician had not arrived in time the island might have returned to the prescriptive tenure of the white foxes and polar bears. As it was, a full fourth of the entire population suc- cumbed the first year, and some 1500 the year after, when the contagion spread to the wretch- ed settlements of the west coast. How little smallpox was dreaded on the con- tinent twenty years after is proved by a rescript of Frederick Wilhelm, the father of Frederick the Great, who declined to permit one of his generals to shift a manoeuvre (sham battle) camp on account of a smallpox outbreak in a neighboring village. "Lass er sich nicht so 50 VACCINATION A CRIME. leicht bange machen," he wrote in reply to the general's report " doch mag er immerhin sorge tragen die Kerls von den Dirnen fortzuhalten." -" Don't make such a fuss about trifles; but all the same, it may do no harm to keep the boys in camp after dark." (Autumn of 1731.) In 1762 his son took winter-quarters in Bres- lau, without troubling himself about a small- pox scare in the Oder-suburb, merely ordering the infected streets to be fumigated. Admiral Sil vela had smallpox aboard when he started for the West Indies in 1784, but touched at the Cape Verdes only long enough to land his patients, and refused to quarantine the infected flagship, pleading the strictness of his orders, a decision afterwards approved by a Court of Inquiry, not otherwise disposed to shield the defendant. In other words, the pathological demon of the Middle Ages had been tamed down to a hobgoblin, years before Edward Jenner pro- mulgated his vaunted method of exorcism. And all the results claimed for his specific have been experienced in every country where the FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 51 progress of sanitary reform rivals that of Great Britain and Northern Germany. In Belgium and Norway smallpox has been " stamped out " without the assistance of cowpox ped- dlers; in North America local option with a strong preponderance in the scale of common sense, has in many States of our Union suf- ficed to keep epidemics in check; in France the anti-cowpox departments have actually enjoyed a more complete immunity than their compulsion-bullied neighbors. It might even be demonstrated that total abstinence, both from alcohol and cowpox virus will in that respect, make attention to municipal hygiene comparatively unimportant, for the sober and unvaccinated Turks have lately been spared by smallpox epidemics that can hardly be said to have been expurgated by the brooms of street cleaners. " Yet the facts remain," reiterate the Jenner bigots, " that the two most thoroughly vac- cinated countries can boast the smallest death- rate from smallpox." " Add the equally indisputable fact," com- 52 VACCINATION A CRIME. ments an American humorist, " that stove-pipe hats and a high grade of culture are always found together. There is no exception to that rule. Witness the semi-barbarism of our som- brero-wearing cowboys. Fur-capped Mosco- vites may copy our institutions of learning, but the Tartar peeps out of every disguise. Real, superior, civilization can develop only under the auspices of a stove-pipe hat." The coincidence, in fact, is a great deal more complete in the hat case; for Switzerland, and the option States of our Union break the vac- cinator's chain of experimental evidence. What both arguments really prove is that civilized nations are not above the foible of imitating fashionable follies, and that they have adopted the stove-pipe fad from France and the cowpox craze from England. Suppose a syndicate of silk-hat manufac- turers should use statistics of that sort to en- force a stove-pipe ordinance in Chile and Aus- tralia? If bewildered delegates should endorse the proposition, the cost to their representatives would not exceed $5.00 per office-holder or FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 53 five cents per taxpayer, while the cowpox de- lusion involves a far more grievous financial burden, besides an incalculable loss of life, health and self-respect. B- Does vaccination protect individuals against smallpox? In 1804 Dr. H. C. Proctor of Bristol, Eng- land, published a list of 22 persons who had been attacked by variola within a few weeks after having undergone the Jenner process, and of whom eight had died in spite of careful medical attendance. He had taken the precaution to get the cor- rectness of his statements attested in due legal form, i. e., by sworn witnesses, and for nearly a month the converts of the cowpox doctrine awaited the explanation of their oracle in anx- ious doubt. Dr. Jenner at first seemed inclined to ignore that indictment, but the comments of his critics getting rather shrill, he finally came out with a conjecture to the effect that in those exceptional, and apparently really in- explicable cases the contagion of true smallpox might have fastened upon the system of the 54 VACCINATION A CRIME. patients before they had made up their minds- too late under those circumstances-to try the effectiveness of his specific. That silenced non-professional skeptics for the time being, though medical men might won- der how the two forms of blood-poison could have kept a simultaneous hold on the organism of the victims, since there seemed no doubt that vaccine virus had " taken " in every case. But then came the epidemic of 1810; glaring cases of failures were reported from Sweden and Prussia; the accumulation of damaging ev- idence became more and more formidable. Scores of the victims were proved to have been rustics, dwelling far apart from the danger of smallpox contagion at the time they had been " protected," in other cases the interval since the disappearance of cowpox pustules was so long that a prior infection by smallpox germs could not possibly be supposed to have escaped notice or remained dormant for months and years. The cowpox league, by that time, had ex- tended its ramifications all over Europe, but FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 55 the opposition party, too, had organized here and there and were favored by the impartiality of numerous statistical publications. Hospital reports, it is true, were apt to be garbled, and, as Dr. Creighton points out, the cowpox ring was disposed to avail itself of the fact that the marks of vaccination are rarely permanent, and that doubtful cases could be classed as " unvaccinated." But the very intolerance of the compulsion laws tended to checkmate that trick in some countries of continental Europe. With or without the evidence of telltale scars, it was known that in several German states a child could not dodge cowpox any more than baptis- mal water, and the statistical reports of Bava- ria dismayed the Jenner gang by the admission of the fact that in a single year 3,994 vaccinated persons had died of smallpox, and that the to- tal number of those who had been attacked by true variola and who had been undoubtedly previously vaccinated exceeded 29,000! Similar, though less circumstantial reports came from Italy, from Holland, and from the VACCINATION A CRIME. 56 compulsion departments of France. In Great Britain hundreds of vaccinated patients died from smallpox every year, and in some cities of Ireland the death-rate from variola was sus- pected to have increased since Jenner's time, though the advocates of compulsion could plead the large number of admittedly hostile families, who had paid fines rather than surrender their children to the lancet bullies, and who event- ually, it was supposed, had fed the flames of variola epidemics till the conflagration de- voured pros and antis alike. A most memorable test of that theory was at last furnished by the reports from the Franco- Prussian seat of war. Nearly all the German soldiers had been vaccinated in childhood, and all, without a single exception almost, had been re-vaccinated in the recruiting depot. Thou- sands had been re-vaccinated twice. Nevertheless, the unsanitary condition of camps and town-quarters provoked a smallpox epidemic almost as destructive as a cholera pestilence. The army surgeons, no doubt, had done all they could to enforce sanitary regu- FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 57 lations, but camps were shifted from day to day; whole regiments had to bivouac in rain storms or in the more dreadful sunlight glar- ing on hillocks of ill-buried carcasses. In some camps galloping horses kicked up shreds of decaying flesh; the so-called graves being mere tumuli with a thin crust of loam or sand. In the smaller town barracks, churches and mu- nicipal halls did not begin to accommodate the enormous garrisons, thousands had to be quar- tered in private residences or were huddled together in barns and factories. The enforce- ment of sanitary hygiene became impossible; by sacrificing every minute of their scant leis- ure the men could barely keep themselves free from vermin. The microbes of contagious diseases fastened uncontrollably, and 53,288 able-bodied men, with their system saturated with cowpox lymph, were seized by smallpox as characteristic and virulent as anything ever observed in the unvaccinated leper cities of the Far East. And Prof. Adolph Vogt, an impartial in- quirer and competent collector of statistics, 58 VACCINATION A CRIME. adds that " the Bavarian contingent, which was re-vaccinated without exception, had five times the death-rate from smallpox that the Bava- rian civil population of the same ages had, al- though re-vaccination is not obligatory among the latter." The same epidemic swept over North Ger- many and Great Britain, and in some thor- oughly vaccinated English cities claimed so many victims that the inference could no long- er be explained away. Indignation meetings took the form of mass assemblies; the cowpox bullies shrunk into hiding places, and in Lei- cester had to vanish on pain of being cut into shoe-strings with their own lancets, as one em- phatic agitator expressed it. Leicester is a mid-England city of some 180,000 inhabitants, highly educated (close to Rugby College, and with numerous academies of its own). It is a charitable town; buried Richard III., when the world had rejected him; offered a last refuge to Cardinal Wolsey; a city full of benevolent institutions and conservative associations; but on this occasion conservatism was flung to the FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 59 winds; thousands upon thousands of staid- burghers joined the parade, that celebrated the revocation of the compulsion laws, and the flag-carriers flaunted the motto : " From horse- grease, cowpox and calf-lymph, good Lord deliver us." That " horse-grease " allusion referred to a theory tracing the origin of cowpox to ulcers that appear on the heels of ill-stabled horses (emphatically a " filth disease ") and are com- municated to the hands of stable boys, and, thus eventually to the udders of milch-cows. The Leicester insurgents believed in radical anathemas while they were about it. The mass-meeting had been swelled by del- egates from neighboring villages and hundreds of vociferous rustics, but before they dispersed, a reform champion of their own city called them to order and pledged them to " make Leicester town a model of sanitation, and thus teach the country the true way to keep out smallpox." Leicester has kept that vow, and with its total freedom from cowpox slavery now (A. 60 VACCINATION A CRIME. D. 1900) combines the prestige of having a lower death-rate from smallpox than any large city of Europe or North America. The Leicester Declaration of Independence took place in 1872, and thrice since that time accident has refuted the insinuation of the compulsion party that the exemption from epi- demics was merely a matter of good luck, and that the first spark of smallpox contagion would sweep the city like a wildfire. Small- pox did happen to get introduced in 1881, and again in 1895 and 1896, but the spark died out, extinguished simply by lack of fuel. The old town with its numerous rat-alleys and mediaeval rookeries is kept as clean as a temple of health; dirt-diseases have no chance to de- velop before their seed-plot is carted away and burned or sold to the agents of a fertilizing manufactory with their depots several miles beyond the corporation limits. There are strict milk inspections and an abundant supply of pure, cold water. School buildings are thor- oughly ventilated, the truck-gardeners of the suburbs have to keep their liquid manure in FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 61 cemented tanks, outhouses are cleaned by con- tract, several hundred mud-ponds have been filled up and sown over with lawn grass. Try where it may, the imp of a dirt-disease cannot find a loophole of entrance. The chain of circumstantial evidence against the claims of the compulsion party is thus com- plete, and their last vestige of a basis for a defensive plea may be summed up in the fact that the actual existence of a cowpox fever tends to postpone an attack of smallpox for a week or two. And all that implies is the circumstance that the disorders of the human organism are or- derly enough to take their turn. A violent toothache thus insures temporary immunity from headaches. A fever relieves the misery of dyspepsia; the symptoms even of consump- tion abate in deference to the disorders of preg- nancy. In other words, while the victim of vaccine virus is moaning with nausea and the pains of his swollen arm, he is tolerably safe against the contagion of a municipal smallpox plague. He 62 VACCINATION A CRIME. may visit the pesthouse if he feels like walking, and can exhibit the presumptive proofs of im- munity if he should apply for the position of a sick-nurse. But the moment his scabs drop he had better forbear the tempting of Providence. There are cases on record of true variola having taken a deadly hold within a month after the cow- pox fever had relaxed its grip. The second sweep of a recurrent epidemic often cuts a wide swathe among those who had been vaccinated thoroughly during the beginning of the scare. Thousands, yes, hundreds of thousands of smallpox patients have perished with the plain- est scars of the vaccination lancet on their bodies. Re-vaccination! Make surety doubly sure! are the cuckoo cries of the cowpox league in every smallpox panic. But to what purpose? To postpone the risk for a week or two? For, to be quite safe, the operation would have to be repeated till the pa- tient's cuticle had been covered with confluent sores, till all the blood in his system had been FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 63 brought into a ferment of putrid cowpox pus. And after a years interval of misery, who could hope to be safe, if man-for-man re-vaccination had four times increased the smallpox liability of the Bavarian troops, i. e., made their sick- rate four hundred per cent, larger than that of non-vaccinated civilians ? That Franco-Prussian epidemic, by the way, put a spoke in the wheel of another cowpox sophism. Contagious diseases, suggest the Jenner converts, may assume an uncontrollable and remedy-defying degree of virulence, and thus, perhaps, come to override a generally re- liable preventive. The blaze developed among the unprotected. But it so happened that keen- eyed observers were on hand in 1870, and thought it worth while to prove and record the fact that in epidemic-stricken City of Cologne " the first unvaccinated person attacked by smallpox was the 174th in order of time, in Bonn, the same year, the 42d, and at Liegnitz, the 225th." Nor is there the slightest proof that even for the brief term of its actual prevalence, cowpox 64 VACCINATION A CRIME. has a greater protective influence than any other skin-disease. We might just as well in- oculate our children with erysipelas virus. For all the actual benefit in obviating, or rather postponing, smallpox, the lancet bullies might poison our blood with measle pus. By way of delectable variety they might treat a few of their customers to a dose of scarlet fever. C.-Is vaccination a lesser evil ? The admission of the horrid evils entailed by the cowpox practice is frequently coupled with the plea that legislators are sometimes obliged to curtail the privileges of personal freedom, and must test the value of coercive laws by the greatest benefit of the greatest number. Tak- ing a plowboy from his father's farm and clap- ping him into a brass-buttoned jacket may not promote the success of agricultural enterprises, but barrack life, evil associations, loss of work- ing time, all become lesser evils if compared with the horrors of hostile invasions, which standing armies tend to prevent. But suppose a superstition-crazed nation should undertake to protect itself by the sac- FALLYCIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 65 rifice of human lives on the altar of a carnivor- ous divinity? That plan was actually tried by the worshipers of Moloch, though it tran- scends belief to realize the fact that from sixty to seventy-five boys and virgins were thus im- molated every year-as long as their god could be made to behave, for in war-scares the num- ber of his victims was frequently doubled. But will future ages credit the power of the cow- pox delusion when they read the sworn state- ment of a metropolitan registrar general that in the city of London alone tzuo hundred chil- dren die every year from disorders initiated by the lancet of the vaccinator? A probable total of 1500 a year for the British Islands, 15,000 for Europe and 18 to 20 thousand for the Jen- nerized countries of Christendom? Were those people actually crazy, they will ask, or such abject cowards that they would submit to death and disease in their most disgusting forms rather than record an open protest against the arrogations of a gang of bullies and hirelings? For we should remember that for one case of death there are a score of virus-blighted lives, VACCINATION A CRIME. 66 a hundred more or less weakened constitu- tions. A British agitator against the compul- sion law used to illustrate his lectures with cal- cium-light copies of photographs exhibiting the ghastly effects of vaccine virus; limbs de- formed by the rotting out of large pieces of bone; eyeless faces; bodies literally covered with incurable sores. But who can compute the number of victims of less glaringly evident after-effects of the cursed poison? Whenever there is the slightest tendency to an internal disorder the most seriously involved organ will absorb the blood-poison, a latent and possibly curable disease will become aggravated to a virulent and perhaps incurable degree. Consumption is one of the disorders that has undoubtedly often been complicated by vaccine virus; there is a record of a series of experi- ments instituted by Dr. M. Toussaint of Paris who vaccinated a tuberculous cow, and with the lymph of her pustules inoculated a number of animals (rabbits, dogs, guinea-pigs), all of whom developed symptoms of tuberculosis. Leprosy has been spread in the same way. FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 67 Dr. Morell Mackenzie a few years ago pub- lished a treatise on "lepers and the phenome- non of their horrid multiplication,"-not re- ferring a direct charge against his Jenner colleagues, but stating facts that prove the dire consequences of the mistake which for many years refused to recognize leprosy as a conta- gious disorder. As shown in a former chapter, syphilis, in its deadliest forms, has been inflicted on whole communities, bullied into submission to a vac- cine clique. Erysipelas and measles, eczema and a num- ber of less virulent skin-complaints have been traced to the cowpox curse, as clearly as de- lirium tremens to the alcohol curse. Would it be a "greater evil" to make vacci- nation optional in the case of adults and a penal offense in the case of minors, and calmly brave the risks of a disorder that has proved as amen- able to natural hygiene as scrofula and scabies, and which, fifty years before the dawn of the Jenner era, had already been brought under 68 VACCINATION A CRIME. control as effectively at least as cholera and ty- phoid fever? It should never be forgotten that about the middle of the eighteenth century the influence of Lady Mary Montague and a few of her dupes induced the British government to sanc- tion the practice of inoculation from smallpox pustules. The Montague, or Turkish plan con- sisted in selecting a specially mild case of vari- ola and using the pus with a view of artificially reproducing the disease in the same, compara- tively harmless form, and thus insure protec- tion against the contagion of virulent epidem- ics. As the apostle of a prophylactic, i. e., a disease-preventing specific, Lady Mary had nothing to learn from Dr. Jenner. Her project proved directly disastrous to a number of indi- viduals, but those who survived the attack of smallpox were fairly safe from similar infec- tions for years to come. The trouble was with indirect complications. Blood impurities of all sorts entered the pa- tient's system along with the germs of the great filth disease. Magistrates were besieged with FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 69 plaintiffs who exhibited children in every stage of cutaneous putrefaction. Cripples, hobbling along the street, carried placards warning their fellow-men against the delusion of the Turkish nostrum. Parliament at last got tired of medi- ating between the quacks and their victims, and made inoculation a penal offense; but not be- fore the profits of the practice had evolved a large horde of hungry fee-hunters and herds of asses braying the praises of La Montague as assiduously as our highly respectable prac- titioners now chant hosannahs in honor of Ned Jenner. Twenty-eight years of license and emolu- ments had sufficed to develop precisely the same virulence of bigotry that now marks con- version to the gospel of cowpox. The licen- tiates were not satisfied with their privileges and clamored for national compulsion laws, for inoculation and re-inoculation at the pistol's mouth, for the summary suppression of all dis- senters. The craze spread to New England, to Hol- land and France. But finding the public at last 70 VACCINATION A CRIME. aroused to a perilous pitch of indignation, the hallelujah shouters changed their tune, and de- nounced the " paramour of the Padisha " as the originator of the greatest outrage that had ever been practised on British subjects,-of an evil far greater at all events than the small and yearly decreasing risk of smallpox. That risk has been still further diminished by a century of sanitary progress, and the Leices- ter experiment has demonstrated the possibility of reducing it to zero. The claims of the Jenner doctrine have been reduced to the same figure-or below, since there is a strong suspicion that in France, at least, vaccination has increased the prevalence of smallppx. The experience of the Franco- Prussian war points the same way. The Jen- ner bullies should really apologize to the Moloch priests. The practice of sacrificing chil- dren in the vague hope of preventing war was certainly horrible enough, but what should we think of the morality or intelligence of its ad- vocates if they had continued to enforce it after FALLACIES OF THE JENNER DOCTRINE. 71 being confronted with proof that it tended to provoke war? Yet who knows? The heartlessness of busi- ness associations has no ascertained limits, and it is not impossible that a syndicate of Pheni- cian priests and fuel-peddlers would have ad- vocated the perpetuation of their holocausts af- ter conceiving a strong individual suspicion that they tended to aggravate the risk they were intended to prevent. Vaccination was legalized just about a hun- dred years ago. In the course of that century its international list of murders-no, let us give our worst enemies the benefit of a doubt and call it homicides-must aggregate some hun- dred thousand. Its results in cripples and chronic invalids probably a full million. Of victims to intermittent ailments from fifteen to twenty millions. By how much can vaccination be said to be a less grievous evil than the risk of variola, and, as Herr von Arnim adds, the additional peril of discrediting the authority of government medicine men ? 72 VACCINATION A CRIME. Let us see-by about as much as the risk of rationalism would have been a greater evil than the 2,500,000 murders-no, beg pardon again -homicides, of the Holy Inquisition. CHAPTER III. THE COWPOX FEDERATION AND THE SECRET OF ITS PERSISTENCE. A.-Conservatism. The Vis Inertia, as philosophers call the passive resistance of dead bodies, is akin to their reluctance to depart from a beaten track. They persist because conservatism implies less trouble than innovation; or, to be quite cor- rect, they persist as long as conservatism im- plies less trouble than innovation. If chemicals make it too hot for a bullet at the bottom of a cartridge it can depart in a hurry. The same rules hold good in the world of moral phenomena. The masses dislike to change deep-rooted habits. They want to stay where they have grown. If they move at all they prefer to pursue the path leveled by the footsteps of their fathers. The incidental in- conveniences of such trails matter compara- tively little. They are established and must be 74 VACCINATION A CRIME. followed to whatever end. Doctrines, so gro- tesquely absurd as to defy the exaggerations of burlesque, have been maintained through a long series of centuries and defended at the risk of limb and life, just because they had the sanction of previous generations. Once implanted and permitted to sprout, a tenet sticks till it is up- rooted by force. For nearly two thousand years the natives of Egypt venerated a black bull, and the Hindoos still believe in the sanc- tity of the Hanuman ape, a black bushwhacker with a long tail and white side-whiskers. No filthier or more mischievous brute roams the forests of Hindostan, but whenever he happens to enter a village the elders go into convulsions of homage and think it a privilege to anticipate the wishes .of the greedy marauder. Garden- ers groan, but have to submit. There are districts that have been devastated by the raids of Hanuman apes, and a few years ago the British government offered a number of superstition-ruined rustics a gift of free homesteads in Burmah, but when they em- barked in the Delta of the Ganges, the govern- THE COWPOX FEDERATION. 75 ment commissioner was dismayed to see that every village chief had taken a couple of sacred apes along. Hanuman apes had been wor- shiped by their forefathers and they thought it impossible to get along without them. And for no other reason emigrants to our free Republic have brought an assortment of cowpox bullies along. Nine out of ten immi- grants probably hated vaccination as they hated poison, filth and disease, but they deferred to authority, and the magistrates of their settle- ments decided to appoint a cowpox commis- sioner because functionaries of that sort were on the pay-roll of Old England communities. Even thus the settlers of Salem appointed witch hunters, and the Spanish West Indian colonists heretic catchers. No Phenician colony would have thought itself complete without an expert in chaining and roasting children for the pro- pitiation of Moloch. But those alleged lesser evils are apt to be- come intolerable, with results not anticipated in the programme of their supporters. In the crisis of the Bengal famine the secretary of 76 VACCINATION A CRIME. Lord Elphinstone noticed a stout Hindoo snatching up a club in a rush for his store- house, and a minute after saw a troop of sacred apes tearing downhill, a whoop at every jump, or clutching their tails with expressions of pain- ful surprise. Peter Arbuez, the champion cre- mator of Old Castile, at last roasted the wrong rationalist, and was treated to a hiding that made him welcome the improvement of climatic conditions when he landed in Dante's Picnic Grounds. Those Rivalta vaccinators, too, plied their profitable lancet once too often and have never since been able to sit down with entire comfort. Their visits to the border districts, at least, in- dicate a dislike to sedentary recreations; cow- hides, as it were, have triumphed over cow- pox, and according to last reports the knout- armed mountaineers are still left strictly alone, -partly, perhaps, also in consideration of their threat to cross the border and settle in Switzer- land, where compulsory cowpox was knocked out by the plebiscite of 1897. B.-Corporation spirit. THE COWPOX FEDERATION. 77 It would be an affront to the intelligence of the medical fraternity to doubt that thousands of European and American physicians have by this time lost their faith in the value of vac- cination. In Germany Vogt's "Impf Glaub" (the lymph dogma) alone is believed to have opened the eyes of several hundred sanitarians who have quietly dropped cowpox from their private list of reliable prophylactics. Dr. Creighton's " Natural History of Cow- pox and Vaccinal Syphilis " has done the same for Great Britain, and the author is in almost daily receipt of professional communication, tending to confirm his conclusions. Dr. Vier- rois, the French Anti-Jenner, has maintained his rank in several learned societies whose med- ical members voted to confirm his honors. In this closing hour of the great reform century it would probably not be too much to say that several thousand medical contemporaries could not be coaxed or bribed to pollute the blood of a helpless child with cowpox. But, withal, it must also be admitted that the enormous plurality of these sanitary rational- 78 VACCINATION A CRIME. ists prefer to keep their convictions to them- selves. Many of them have attained a pro- fessional prestige that could not be jeopardized by a hue and cry of free-hunting hirelings. Some have retired from practice and could defy the malice of calumniators. Not a few have reached an age when, like Cardinal Retz, they must often feel tempted to " indulge in the luxury of a little truth-speaking, before leaving this planet." The trouble is that they consider it 11 un- professional " to speak out where the trade- secrets and trade-shams of the fraternity are concerned. They have vaccinating friends in one place and Jenner-duped cousins in another; there is cowpox bully across the street; their patients have for years patronized a druggist who deals in vaccine points; all things consid- ered the medical clairvoyant would much pre- fer to connive at deep-rooted delusions or pro- mote the cause of truth by proxy. In reply to a communication from Dr. J. D. Creighton he would cheerfully forward a long list of cowpox victims known in his own neigh- THE COWPOX FEDERATION. 79 borhood, but under same cover might send a confidential note requesting his esteemed cor- respondent to withold his name " for reasons you will appreciate without specification." Would those discreet and highly respectable contemporaries break their silence where a vote or two could turn the scales of a critical test- case? We cannot be sure. Unchallenged silence, we know, implies neither concealment of truth nor affirmation of falsehood,-'from a legal point of view. It might be supposed that man- hood, philanthropy, the love of justice, would decide the question from a higher standpoint. We cannot be sure. But it so happens that only a few years ago the conscience-no, the corporation conscience, of the medical brotherhood was tested in a similar crucible, and the results are worth men- tioning. The legal rights of female physicians were at stake, and a trenchant British reformer sums up the case as follows: " The common law of Great Britain admits all mankind, and not the male half only, to the study and prac- VACCINATION A CRIME. 80 tice of medicine. But the special Act of 1858 excludes all those not registered upon produc- ing a license granted by one of the British ex- amining boards. Now these examining boards were all mem- bers of the leading medical schools. If the Legislature had taken the precaution of adding a clause compelling those boards to examine every worthy applicant, the Act would have been a sound public measure. But that precaution was omitted, and unfor- tunately the respectable Union had an over- powering interest to exclude qualified women from medicine; they had the same interest as the watchmakers' union, the printers' union, and others, to exclude qualified women, though in this case they debarred the most fit, God having made women, and not men, the medical (sick-nursing) sex. By the unwariness of legislators the clique was tempted, more than any clique could bear and proceeded to close the doors of medical schools to female applicants. Against unqual- ified female practitioners they never acted with THE COWPOX FEDERATION. 81 such zeal and consent; and why?-the female quack is a public pest, and a good foil to the Union; the qualified doctress is a public good, and a blow to the Union. The British medical union was now in a fine attitude by Act of Parliament. It could talk its contempt of medical women, and act its terror of them, and keep both its feigned contempt and its real alarm safe from the test of a public examination. For all that, one woman contrived to get upon the register by having an American diplo- ma and passing the examination of the Apoth- ecaries' Society. She gained access to one great hospital, and all went smoothly till some sur- geon examined the students viva voce; then Miss Garrett was off her guard and displayed too marked a superiority; whereupon the med- ical students played the woman, and begged that she might be excluded, and I am sorry to say, for the credit of our sex, that this woman- ly request was complied with by the womanish males in power. However, at her next hospital, Miss Garrett 82 VACCINATION A CRIME. was more discreet, and took pains to conceal her galling superiority. All her trouble ended where her competitors began-at the public examination. She passed brilliantly and is now an English apothecary. But she had not registered her diploma a week, before the Apothecaries' Society received six hundred letters from the medical small-fry in town and country, threatening to send no more boys to the apothecaries, but to the College of Sur- geons, if ever another woman received an Apothecary's license. Now in England all men tremble at the threats of a trades-union; so the apothecaries instantly cudgelled their brains to find a way to disobey the law and obey the bullies. The medical press gave them a hint and they passed a by-law forbidding their students to receive any part of their education privately, and made it known at the same time that fe- male applicants would not be permitted to study the leading subjects publicly. And so they baffled the legislature and outlawed half the nation by a juggle. THE COWPOX FEDERATION. 83 In order to exclude female students from the hospitals their rivals resorted to the usual coward's weapon-slander. A weekly period- ical, in which usually every writer seemed to be a scholar, published such communications as this: "It appears that girls are to associate with boys as medical students. We beg to suggest that there are other places besides dis- secting rooms and hospitals where those ladies may relieve themselves of the modesty which they find so troublesome. But fathers nat- urally object to this being done at their sons' expense." In the hope of deprecating that infamous insinuation one of the female candidates re- minded the faculty that there were a great many more wards in the infirmary than any male student could, or did, attend, and that the male might reserve the monopoly of two- thirds of the wards and grant the girls the mere right of occasional admission to one- third. Yet this gentle proposal was rejected with 84 vaccination a crime. rude scorn, and in aggressive terms. Such is the spirit of a trades-union. And against this series of cruel outrages not one of a thousand male physicians ventured to record a protest. It would be absurd to sup- pose that in the richest country of Europe there were no medical practitioners above the fear of pecuniary loss from the competition of a few dozen women. In London City alone probably hundreds of old doctors were wholly indifferent to such considerations. But a representative associa- tion of their colleagues had discussed and de- cided the question, so they considered it "un- professional" to contradict. Corporations are proverbially soulless, and, judging from their connivance at preposterous delusions, might often be supposed to be equal- ly senseless. The members of a trades-union renounce the right of private judgment; but as soon as the embargo is removed their common sense is apt to return, and at the end of the eighteenth century, when the inoculation of human beings with smallpox virus was made, THE COWPOX FEDERATION. 85 a penal offence, and medical associations for- mally renounced the practice, it was as openly denounced by hundreds of physicians who only a few years ago could not have been persuaded to sign their names to a treatise questioning the utility of the Montague plan. For a year and a half, indeed, a torrent of vituperation was poured forth like the flood of a dambreak; long pent-up convictions had found a vent; it was no longer unprofessional to admit the truth. C.-The Dread of Exposure. Next to the commission of a blunder, its ad- mission is the worst thing that can happen to a learned association; and it is amazing how long the corpse of an error is often kept en- throned and worshiped after its soul has fled. "Wert thou a priest? If so, vain are my strug- gles; Egyptian priests would never own their jug- gles," says the apostrophist of a mummy; and as late as A. D. 210 Imperial Rome maintained a col- 86 VACCINATION A CRIME . lege of augurs-soothsayers founding their predictions upon the flight of crows and the cackle of chickens, and who in Cicero's time had already become so rationalistic that two of them rarely could meet without laughing. The Copernican system of astronomy had been clearly demonstrated before the death of the propounder, but for the next hundred years universities continued to rehearse the old-time doctrine. Should they admit having been grossly mistaken? Perish the thought; so generation after generation of students was gravely informed that the sun whirled around our firmament with the speed of lightning, and that stars, a trillion miles away, revolved around our little planet in twenty-four hours. Aristotle had already taught those things, and if that venerable citadel of error was al- lowed to collapse, what other buildings might not tumble at the same time? "Giving up witchcraft means giving up the Bible," said John Wesley, when one of his friends proposed to repudiate the spook- mongery of the Middle Ages. THE COWPOX FEDERATION. 87 Hence also one mainstay of the cowpox de- lusion. If doctors should admit that for near- ly a hundred years they have worshiped a fetish, might not the public extend its incon- venient inferences to other topics? Drugs, ointments and sweat-boxes might come to look shrewdly suspicious to a one-eyed man. It is so much safer to sit still and wait till an anachronistic idol tumbles to pieces of its own accord. Moreover, admitted pursuit of a wrong road implies neglect of the right one- baneful, often fatal, neglect, in questions of life-and-death importance. Connivers at the cowpox swindle dislike to confess that they have so long ignored the true cause and neglected the true preventives of smallpox. In 1884 Dr. A. M. Ross, a Canadian physi- cian with eyes and opinions of his own, called the attention of the Montreal police to the monstrously unsanitary condition of certain suburbs. Hundreds of outhouses had not been cleaned for years, and when abandoned had frequently been left open, or covered only with 88 VACCINATION A CRIME. boards and a few pailfuls of ashes. There were lanes where every family appeared to have a dump-pile of its own, and to pride itself upon its stately dimensions. Drinking water was drawn from shallow wells, often unavoid- ably contaminated by the drainage of these garbage hills. Overcrowding in some of the factory wards had become a grievous and growing evil; back-chambers and attics were sub-let by tenants who had barely room enough for their own families, and for a few pennies a week extra the garret lodger was often given the privilege of sharing his den with transient boarders. In some rookeries the boards of the stairs were slippery with filth, and in the pit called a court-yard fluid refuse had formed pestering puddles. Were they not afraid an epidemic would avenge the neglect of these abominations? asked Dr. A. M. Ross. What epidemics? they begged to inquire. The ward physician had reported nothing wrong. It seems that there was no regular board of health for emergencies of that kind: THE COWPOX FEDERATION. 89 but a certain number of medical inspectors were expected to watch the premonitory symp- toms of contagious diseases. "Well, typhoid, for instance," suggested Dr. Ross, "or a smallpox epidemic." "No special risk of typhoid at this time of the year," was the reply, "and as for smallpox, a good many of those people have been vac- cinated, and re-vaccination would soon check the spread of the contagion." The doctor returned to the charge once or twice, but could not get them to realize the im- minence of their peril. There were no chances for fees in sanitary reforms. The summer ended, and a long, bitter winter helped to ex- purgate the foul slums to some degree; but the next summer was unusually damp and sultry, and about the end of June (1885) the pre- dicted epidemic of smallpox did blaze out like a pitch-fed fire. Some fifteen hundred patients were stricken the first week, and in spite of as- siduous vaccination, nearly two thousand the next. "An epidemic of cowardice and madness 90 VACCINATION A CRIME. followed," says Dr. Ross; the populations of whole streets were driven to the cowpox slash- ers like sheep to the shambles, but the flames would not down, the conflagration of variola in its most malignant form continued to rage for two months and three weeks, and in spite of all precautions spread to several neighbor- ing towns. The aggregate of the death-list exceeded four thousand; that for the city of Montreal alone is stated as 3,400. Isolation of the patients at last checked the contagion; but its fuel might be far from being exhausted, and once more Dr. Ross urged the adoption of radical sanitary remedies. Few of the local doctors would risk a direct contradiction of his arguments, but they could not be got to support them either; it might imply a plea of guilty to a charge of gross ne- glect if they admitted that anything but vac- cination could have prevented that epidemic. The Franco-Prussian evidence (then fifteen years old and confirmed by numerous analo- gies) had exploded that theory; but the Cana- dian cowpoxers clung to their straw. Hadn't THE COWPOX FEDERATION. 91 they been ready to vaccinate all applicants, years ago? Was it their fault that Canada had no compulsion laws? It wouldn't do to refuse a doctor's medicine and then blame him for the death of the patient. That vaccination had failed to save in so many local cases could be explained away by the usual sophism: The applicants had come too late. Smallpox, though not externally appreciable, had already fastened upon their organism at the time when they concluded to trust Dr. Jenner. They had mistaken a preventive for a remedy. Profes- sor Pasteur's antidote could not be expected to save a man whose veins are already throbbing with the virus of hydrophobia. The growlers should have come a year sooner. Yet that's what the soldiers of the German army had done in every case; every mother's son of them had been vaccinated in childhood and re-vaccinated by the recruiting officers, a year or a year and a half before the invasion of France. Yet in thousands upon thousands of cases crowded quarters alone had sufficed to nullify 92 VACCINATION A CRIME. that precaution. Personally the ill-housed troopers generally kept themselves fairly clean; they were obliged to change their linen and given a chance to bathe at regular intervals; their rations, too, were far more digestible than those of the conscripts that fought the Seven Years' War ("black rye bread and such berries as the wayside thickets provided," many and many a day); they were not allowed to fuddle with intoxicants, and carried rasp- berry vinegar to mitigate the microbes of bad drinking water. But crowding could not be prevented where whole army corps had to be huddled into half-grown towns; and that one grievance sufficed to develop a smallpox plague as destructive as any cholera epidemic. . Could it be doubted that dietetic mistakes, vice and neglect of cleanliness, plus crowded slums, had sufficed to accomplish rhe same re- sult in Montreal? Dr. Ross was familiar with all those facts and can hardly have failed to urge them; but the Jenner clique remained deaf. They could not afford to acknowledge the correctness of a THE COWPOX FEDERATION. 93 tenet that would tend to expose their incom- petence. D.-Business Interests. After freely admitting the venial foibles that prevent thousands of honorable physicians from taking the field in defense of truth and health vs. the Jenner doctrine, we must men- tion one main support-in many cases the only and last support-of the cowpox practice, viz.: the emoluments of vaccination. In the United States the minimum fee of the operator is a dollar per patient; in Austria it is only a florin (48 cents); in France from five to ten francs. There are times when a busy vaccinator can thus earn fifty dollars a day-say ten times his usual income, in the case of a young country practitioner. A conscience salve of that kind can explain a good many things if we remember that me- dieval fuel dealers denounced heretics in the hope of booming the sale of faggots. A sheriff gets about $10, plus traveling ex- penses, for delivering a young sinner to the warden of a State reformatory, and only a 94 VACCINATION A CRIME. year ago they caught an Ohio official who manufactured charges of truancy and collared unprotected youngsters left and right for the sake of raking in wholesale perquisites. State bounties of five dollars per wolf scalp and $3 per coyote have induced enterprising contemporaries to stable the wild relatives of the cams domestitus and feed them like fight- ing cocks, with a view of increasing the output of whelps. The cowpox fee in Great Britain is settled by local option and varies from two to five shillings, yet a compensation of only six pence (worth about a shilling in that frugal age) sufficed to crowd the audience halls in charge of an usher who gave scrofula victims the benefit of the royal touch, the King's Evil miracle, as they called the idiotic ceremony. The less harmless practice of inoculating children with smallpox virus averaged the op- erator three shillings per patient, and with the risk of damage suits impending over their heads, the country doctors of the eighteenth century hustled about, drumming up victims, THE COWPOX FEDERATION. 95 and enjoyed a red-letter day if they could in- duce the superintendent of an orphan asylum to give them a wholesale contract. There are records of numerous complaints of families who had been bullied or frightened into sub- mission to the life-endangering operation and who, naturally, wanted the law to make the bully defray a part of the resulting expenses- poor working people, many of them with two or three ulcer-covered children in the hospital. Yet then as now the poison syndicate clamored for stricter and stricter legislation and came near forcing compulsion upon real estate mag- nates with numerous tenants, as well as upon the commanders of garrison towns and the trustees of public schools. Our cowpox bullies, too, are inveterate lobbyists, and in some English counties formed regular business associations and collected campaign funds for subsidizing the press. Similar syndicates sprang up in France in Louis Philippe's time, but the present French Republic having given the different depart- ments the privilege of local option, these 96 VACCINATION A CRIME. juntas collapsed in nearly all the anti-districts, as a proof that they had not the slightest faith in the strength of their own arguments. Fees and compulsion was their battle-cry, and they flocked to districts where remonstrances could be answered with a policeman's bludgeon. One main cause of the public revolt that led to the repudiation of the compulsion laws in Great Britain was the fact that the infamous trade of blackmailing spies and informers had sprung up in every larger city. With or without the direct demand of a bribe, the harpy would warn a family father that he had a case against him, "plain proofs of harboring unvaccinated children and de- pendents; aggregate fines very heavy; repeti- tion and contempt of court added in one case." Then a week of suspense and a second warn- ing: "Lucky I'm the only witness thus far." The defendant then often took the hint and silenced the vampire for the time being, but risked to be bled again and again. Others, in- deed, ignored the menace and boldly con- fronted the court with an absolute protest and THE COWPOX FEDERATION. 97 a declaration of their resolve to yield to noth- ing but brutal force. Germany is said to have States with special constables for the physical enforcement of vac- cination laws against obstreperous dissenters. "Objectors are held down by four men and cowpoxed by force,'" reports a French ob- server. English Dogberries hesitated to go to that length, but imposed heavier and heavier fines, and the renowned British agitator Tebb is known to have been thus fined not less than fourteen times. Would-be blackmailers would have got nothing but black eyes from the hands of that champion; but they reaped a rich harvest in the haunts of timid shopkeepers, invalids and unprotected widows. An orator of the Leicester Reform League denounced that industry in terms that came near provoking a vendetta riot; the harpies shrunk out of sight, but were saved only by the timely repudiation of the law that had drawn them forth as the sun of a pestilential swamp draws forth venomous reptiles. 98 VACCINATION A CRIME. Besides, there is the vaccine ring: a lively traffic in "lymph" and vaccine points, in choice animals for "lymph culture." "Sterilized lymph," they call a hocused new variety of cowpox virus, with a suggestion of a guaran- tee against the microbes of other germ dis- eases, as if any such result could be warranted as long as the sterilizing process has failed to neutralize the vitality of the vaccine microbes. Altogether, the fees, trust-prices charges and perquisites derived from the cowpox practice in the course of a year must aggregate several millions in the United States alone, and as long as the golden eggs of that goose can be squeezed out by proper manipulation, Dr. Ed- ward Jenner will continue to be classed with the chief benefactors of the human race. E.-The Meddle Mania. An American jurist of professional expe- rience in the Kuklux districts, remarks that people who would forgive a highway-robber or a rapist will not forgive a "whitecapper," and proceeds to explain that there is a more odi- ous motive of aggression than hunger or lust. THE COWPOX FEDERATION. 99 It is the meddle-mania, the sneaking, prying propensity for interference with a neighbor's private business. In communities where the chances for manlier pastimes are scarce the in- dulgence of the meddle-greed is for thousands the favorite employment of their leisure hours. A ceaseless round of gossip, backbiting and slander-mongery has become the staple amuse- ment of our rural districts, where the virulence of Sabbatarian bigotry has killed out the ath- letic sports of our forefathers. It infects hy- pocrisy-ridden little country towns, it makes villages untenable to the lovers of peace and retirement, it is the main cause of the exodus that has crowded our large cities at the expense of rustic communities. Spies and eavesdroppers haunt the retreat of every newcomer in these pest-centers of gos- sip ; they prowl about the premises after dark, they cross-examine children and servants, a committee of slanderous sluts is itching to get hold of some tenable pretext for scandal. And if their curiosity is baffled, they rack their brains for ways and means of direct in- 100 VACCINATION A CRIME. trusion. They feel tempted to try the effect of calumny for raising a mob. They envy their medieval exemplars, who could take out a search-warrant on a charge of heresy or witchcraft. Compulsory vaccination laws furnish that much desired pretext. They open a gate to aggression. They enable every noisy, greedy, malicious and blackmailing bully of a cow- poxer's hireling to force his way into private residences. Low-minded busybodies are no- toriousljr the most zealous applicants for the position of a dragoonade vaccinator, so much so, indeed, that in many countries respectable physicians dislike an appointment of that sort, as a decent sheriff dislikes to be saddled with an executioner's job. "Ich Konnte mich schwer entschliessen," says Dr. A. T. Lutz, of Vienna, "den Armen mit den despotischen Methoden unserer Gesctze im wortlichster Sinne auf den Leib zu riicken-sie wortlich und buchstablichb is auf Blut zu drangsalen"-"I loathe the idea of having to tackle the poor in their humble re- THE COWPOX FEDERATION. 101 treats and force the despotic methods of the vaccine code home upon them-home, in the literal sense, into their very blood." The vulgar cowpox bully, on the other hand, exults in the chance for advertising his importance at the expense of his moral and in- tellectual superiors. He sees an opportunity to gratify his vicious propensities, as well as his hunger for fees, and, as Prof. Tebb proved by a long list of victims, is not above the tempta- tions of blackmail and private vengeance. Dr. Brissot, too, states that in feud districts of the Cevennes, as in Italy, the dread of being ruined by a lymph-poisoner is ever present with the helpless rustics, and a correspondent of the Gerichts Zeitung mentions the cases of a Hungarian surgeon who was stabbed by the father of a child that had been cowpoxed, with fatal results, and of two Italian vaccinators who were scared into exile by the avengers of a syphilis epidemic. It must be admitted that in neither case the malicious intention of the operators was clearly proved, but the hideous fact remains that the law facilitates that ne- 102 VACCINATION A CRIME. plus-ultra of diabolism; the serpent-trick of blood-poisoning is always apt to suggest its abuse for purposes of reptilian virulence and vindictiveness.- "No man should be entrusted with a chance for tampering with his fellow- man's blood," says the author of the "Lymph Dogma." It is probable enough that the Jenner bigots of the eighteenth century could not forsee such consequences of their zeal; but that zeal went too far the moment it passed the limits of local option, for as sure as crimes hatch crimes, every violation of natural justice tends to be- get another. CHAPTER IV. DEFENSIVE RESOURCES. A.-Local Organization. In the vigilant defense of personal rights and personal liberty America yields to no country of the world, and reforms that found no abid- ing place in the Old World have met with a hospitable reception on the west shores of the Atlantic. But let us rise above prejudice and confess that in the methods of organization our reformers could learn a good deal from their British colleagues. Old England agitators, it is true, are favored by the accident of a geographical advantage; theirs is a land of concentrated population; with the same expenditure of time and ticket-fare their lecturers can reach millions, while ours reach a few thousand; but, on the other hand, they have to contend with more strongly en- trenched prejudices, with hereditary aristo- 104 VACCINATION A CRIME. crats, with an alliance of state and church, with medieval blue-laws, and what not. Perhaps the very difficulty of pushing the chariot of progress across such obstacles has developed their superior science of ways and means. British liberals thoroughly realize the advantages of the strength-in-union principle, they confer and cooperate, theirs has become a land of political reform-meetings-"legislation by picnic," an M. P. sneeringly called it; they collect votes by house-to-house visits, they lec- ture, bustle and agitate with restless activity. As a consequence, conservative Old England was enabled to take the vanguard of progress in free trade, in the abolition of slavery, in the repeal of the compulsory vaccination laws. The last of these triumphs was won by a harder fight than the second. England is the home of the Jenner doctrine; the life-blighting delu- sion in some districts had struck its roots so deep that its eradication would have overtaxed the individual strength of a Hercules. The Cowpox League had friends at court, and branches, with legal advisers and mutual aid DEFENSIVE RESOURCES. 105 funds, in every county. But the superior or- ganization of the opposition party at last proved too much for its staying powers. The compulsion bullies were out-argued, out-scared, out-petitioned, and finally crush- ingly out-voted. In America the same means would lead to the same result. In the first place the friends of reform should ascertain the number of their sympathizers in every community. Next to the "know thyself" maxim there is no factor of success like the "know thy fellow-believers." Fraternization, it is true, has its drawbacks, but they are out- weighed by its advantages. Only a few weeks ago that point was argued before a convention of rationalists. The prejudice against dissen- ters, it was urged, might make it undersirable for peace-loving individuals to have their con- victions published; but a plurality agreed that the meeting of half a dozen rational friends would offset the aloofness of half a hundred -well, another word beginning with an f- without mentioning flunkeys and fanatics. 106 VACCINATION A CRIME. And, fortunately, the propaganda of the Jen- ner doctrine has not yet reached the Holy In- quisition phase of its development. The croaks of its dupes would be drowned by the cheers of reformers, if the experience of New England agitators can be accepted as a criterion. Wher- ever organization has overcome the initial dif- ficulties, its promoters are apt to be surprised at the number of their sympathizers. Outside of the Cowpox Ring and its direct sphere of in- fluence, Jennerism has, in this, country only few sincere supporters. In a town of 20,000 inhabitants a close canvass would reveal about five thousand outspoken opponents of compul- sion, five thousand secret friends of reform, and several hundred agnostics, who dislike cowpox, but hesitate to formulate a verdict one way or other before time has cleared what appears to them a whirl of conflicting arguments. The local vote once sifted, the reformers should agree to meet at regular intervals. There will be no lack of topics to discuss; the leaders should acquaint neophytes with the chief argu- ments against the tenets of the cowpox creed. DEFENSIVE RESOURCES. 107 Debates will result in conversions. Enthusi- asm will be fanned by every report of an addi- tional grievance. And agitators may rest as- sured that potent primeval instincts of the hu- man soul will fight on their side: The hatred of aggression, the loss of health, nay, of life itself; parental affection, the wrath of vendetta rising to avenge the fate of a beloved child -moral dynamics, very different from the twaddle excitements about shirtwaists, candle- sticks and Mormon missionaries. Various names have been proposed for the American modifications of the British "Repeal Clubs" (since nearly every one of our States has a vaccination law of its own, and not two of them in the same stage of oppressive devel- opment). "Anti-Compulsory Vaccination So- ciety" is clearly too long, and the omission of the second word would not much mend mat- ters, since a plurality of our friends would be abundantly satisfied with a local option compro- mise. "Municipal Rights" would be too vague, and "Sanitary Reform" covers only one phase of the problem, but the "Leicester Liberation 108 VACCINATION A CRIME. Festival" was a happier inspiration, and I would suggest the word "Liberation League." Before the Leicester Repeal Club could wear a victor's crown its members marched in procession with a huge banner, bearing the legend: "From cowpox, horse-grease and calf- pox, good Lord, Deliver us." All things considered, "Liberation League" would be the fittest name The local leagues should make a rule of re- cording all the characteristic cases of cow- pox outrages reported from their neighbor- hood, also their results in epidemics, malignant skin-diseases and fatal complications. The evi- dence in specially memorable grievances should be formally attested, with specifications of rec- ords and witnesses, to forestall the favorite trick of the counsels for the defense. B.-Lecture Bureaux. The influence of oratory has been modified by its frequent abuse, but under the auspices of a just cause the limits of its power have never been ascertained. Louis Kossuth's har- angues disrupted an empire; Peter the Her- DEFENSIVE RESOURCES. 109 mit hurled Europe against the oppressive Turk; Wilberforce wrested the chain of slavery from the hands of the West Indian planters. A speaker like Daniel Webster could practically free whole cities from the risk of cowpox ag- gressions, for years to come. The vaccine bul- lies would continue to threaten and intrigue, but would not dare to brave the odium of actual compulsion. In a former chapter I have men- tioned an episode of that sort reported from poor, trampled Italy. The representatives of a semi-despotic government would have sided with the agent of the ring, through right or wrong, but public indignation for once rose above the dread of tyranny, and the fee-hunt- ing surgeons experienced a lapse of memory whenever the term of the Rivalta district came around. Their official backers would probably have refunded their extra expenses for the sake of a test case, but they could as easily have been hired to tease a wounded tiger in his den. The orator in that case had been a simple farmer, mourning the dead of his vaccine-pois- oned family, but his appeal roused passions 110 VACCINATION A CRIME. that could not be exorcised by official rescripts, and at the first available opportunity a hundred avengers would have risked their lives without a moment's hesitation. Castrozzis, an agitator for the liberation of Greece, traveled about with the relics of several slain patriots, and it would be a good plan for an anti-cowpox orator to illustrate his lectures with stereopticon views of memorable victims of vaccine virus: cripples deformed by the ero- sion of their bones, eye-less and lip-less faces, children covered from head to heel with a mass of confluent sores. Lecturers should also assist the propaganda of local leagues. Under the spell of an impas- sioned harangue, hundreds will throw away the mask of non-committal neutrality and openly join the ranks of the reformers. I have witnessed mass-conversions of that sort at more than one religious revival and temperance convention. As a representative of a national league the lecturer should, moreover, come provided with a fund of emergency expedients, and assist in- DEFENSIVE RESOURCES. 111 quirers with practical suggestions, both as to sanitary and legal remedies. Farmer Van Buren, of St. Lawrence County, New York, a few weeks ago, shot and killed a man detected in the act of setting fire to his stables, and was on the point of crossing the river to avoid an indictment; but just before compromising himself by actual flight, he met a legal friend who persuaded him to trust his troubles into the hands of any American jury; and a lecturer of legal attainments might moderate the enterprise of the cowpox bullies by assuring his hearers that even in the Sul- tanate of Padisha Roosevelt a man has as much right to fight in defense of his blood as of his barn. C.-The Pozver of the Press. Prejudice, the chief ally of superstition, has for years closed the gates of free debate to the friends of sanitary reform, and in America two other causes contributed to handicap the plain- tiffs of the cowpox controversy. One of these causes is the lack of general in- formation upon questions which happened to 112 VACCINATION A CRIME. find their chance for con'clusive settlement only on the other side of the Atlantic. The other explanation can be found in the circumstance that in our own country the cowpox curse has only recently entered the aggressive state of its development. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century the vaccination statutes of nine out of ten States were dead-letter laws. Trade competition was comparatively light, and physicians, as a rule, were too well off to fill their pockets by unpopular expedients. Where school trustees had adopted the exclu- sion by-law the manner of its enforcement prac- tically anticipated the "conscience clause" of the British reformers; scores of unvaccinated children were admitted without medical in- vestigation ; there were no ring bullies to badger magistrates and cross-examine teachers. About the end of the nineteenth the cowpox adder began to show its fangs, but took care to discriminate in the choice of its victims. Intrusive cowpoxers stung at the expense of rural communities, and in large cities, gen- DEFENSIVE RESOURCES. 113 erally limited their aggressions to wards with a large percentage of outlanders. Helpless foreigners, tamed by bureaucratic outrages of their native lands, ignorant, often, of our law, language and means of redress, were apt to submit, and not only answer the immediate purpose of the boodle ringers, but help them to establish a legal precedent. The cowpox serpent thus sneaked into its present vantage ground without provoking a hue and cry and has ever since contrived to dep- recate publicity of its tricks. Like the slave- holders in Buchanan's time and the blue-law despots of Garfield's, our vaccine syndicates know how to profit by the Duke of Savary's admonition: "Don't underrate the influence of the press; if you are right, provoke discus- sion; if wrong, purchase silence at any toler- able price." Our adversaries have adopted the shameful part of that advice. We ought to adopt the other. The problem of provoking discussion has been facilitated even by the imperfect or- ganization of our reformers who in the course 114 VACCINATION A CRIME. of the last year (1900) alone have reported scores of cases that could have been made to attract attention by their objective interest, and aside from their social and sanitary signifi- cance. With the aid of international cooperation our panoply of arguments could be made con- troversion-proof ; familiarity with the test- cases of the last thirty years would enable our champions in every country town to silence their opponents as Prof. W. Carpenter could silence a dealer in "metallic tractors," as Baron Herschel could have silenced a believer in the medieval system of astronomy. Provoke discussion, but do not rely on the importance of the issues to do all the rest. Let us keep the decisive facts before the public and supplement them by arguments derived from the local experience of every community. Quote the conclusions of experts like Toussaint and Creighton, of leaders of science like Alfred Russell Wallace, who denounces the Jenner doctrine as one of the three most baneful de- lusions of the nineteenth century, second in its DEFENSIVE RESOURCES. 115 power of mischief perhaps only to the alcohol curse. Our adversaries will resort to their favorite weapons and try to blind the public by a dust- whirl of sophistry, but that trick will not off- set our advantage of logical armament-an ad- vantage which the public never fails to recog- nize where its judgment is not biased by deep- rooted prejudices. And, luckily for our cause, the cowpox su- perstition has not yet acquired the prestige of an American article of faith, though, as Dr. Peebles informs us, it came near attaining that rank in some parts of Europe, where children were "generally baptized and vaccinated on the same day." The great plurality of our coun- trymen are either in sympathy with our propa- ganda, or fairly qualified to referee the im- pending duello in an impartial manner, and it will not be difficult to force the contest into an arena of local option, even before the national triumph of legislative reform. Class legislation can become too unpopular for enforcement, as the British Stockbreeders' 116 VACCINATION A CRIME. Association found to their cost when they tested the validity of the law making sheep- stealing a capital offence. The ghost of feudal- ism was on their side, but the enormous pre- ponderance of public opinion was against them, and there are cases on record where defend- ants, caught red-handed with a cargo of illegal mutton, were acquitted by acclamation, and with comments that made the counsel for the prosecution anxious to drop the indictment. The influence of the press will turn the scales against cowpox laws already balanced by the activity of our agitators, and the history of compulsory vaccination in America may re- peat the episode of Kess Martony, where a number of Hungarian farmers captured two blood-poison bullies and treated them to a dose of their own medicine, i.e., dragged them to a barn, stripped them and compelled them to cowpox each other till their stock of "commer- cial lymph" was exhausted. So was the pa- tience of the public in that neighborhood, and the press championed the cause of reform in a manner that obviated the risk of legal proceed- DEFENSIVE RESOURCES. 117 ings. The district jury could have been obliged to take up the matter, but the bullies, scratching, and cursing their luck, had van- ished, and could not be induced to provoke cu- taneous complications. Pamphlets, printed by thousands for free dis- tribution, aided the press crusade in the last decisive contest of British compulsionists and repealers; and in Switzerland the reformers tried the same expedient, with great effect, in the crisis of the Rivalta sensation. Law-abiding to a degree unknown on the south side of the Alps, the republican highland- ers had taken umbrage at the recklessness of the Italian avengers, and came very near em- phasizing their disapproval by voting a federal compulsion law, but the impassioned appeals of a reformer turned the tide of public sentiment in the nick of time. Some 200,000 circulars were distributed by volunteers, just a week be- fore the plebiscite that gave the cause of com- mon sense a preponderance of some fifteen hundred votes. The power of the printing press could thus be made to aid legislative re- form, besides promoting the propaganda of 118 VACCINATION A CRIME. sanitary education and the organization of Liberation Leagues. Principiis obsta, "resist the beginnings, crush danger in the bud," is an ancient rule of wis- dom, which, in this case, we have no right to ignore. Infant dragons have been mistaken for harmless lizards, as in 1208, when the rep- resentatives of a monastic order were entrusted with inquisitorial powers by legislators whom no gift of prescience enabled to anticipate the results of their imprudence, or, in the words of an American orator, to "see the horizon of the future turn red with the fires of the auto da fe." Nor did Las Casas, the philanthropic promo- ter of negro slavery, suspect the outcome of his project, nor, let us hope, did the promoters of "trusts" and "protective" tariffs. They knew not what they were doing; but the abettors of the cowpox conspiracy have lost that excuse. The crawling, slimy intruder has approached under cover, for many years, but has now been dragged into daylight, and should be crushed before it has had time to complete its develop- ment into a strangling hydra. CHAPTER V. THE STIMULANT DELUSION. A.-The Secret of the Stimulant Vice. The curse of gluttony has been plausibly at- tributed to the temptations of idleness and the departure from the sensible one-meal plan of pagan antiquity. It is, indeed, a mere perver- sion of a natural instinct; but how shall we ac- count for the prevalence of the poison-vice- the passion for health-destroying and abso- lutely useless stimulants? Pious temperance lecturers admonish us to "control our appe- tites," and speak of the stimulant habit as they would of the sexual instinct, or of a boy's way- ward passion for out-door sports. Shall we be asked to believe that our Al- mother Nature tempts us to our ruin? That a baneful habit, without a single redeeming tend- ency, is the result of a normal appetite? It must be admitted that the power of that appe- tite can hardly be overrated. Every poison- 120 VACCINATION A CRIME. vice is progressive, and tends to enslave the will of its victim till the attempt at resistance comes to resemble a struggle with a monster tightening the clutch of its coils from day to day. "Doctor, it is no use hiding the truth any longer," said a patient of Prof. Isaac Jennings, "I told you a lie when I said that I was dragged along by a gang of loafers and had to drink through fear of bodily violence. The plain truth is that I cannot stop drinking. I have stood my ground for a number of days and once for an even week, but the hankering for liquor gets worse and worse and at last simply intolerable. The mere sight of a saloon drives me crazy. Perishing with thirst in sight of a spring couldn't be much worse. I know that hunger is nothing compared with the misery I have suffered in trying to keep my pledge. I thought it would be better to tell you the truth; and now, if I knew a place on earth where a man could live and couldn't get liquor, I would go there in a minute." Among the military desperadoes whom the THE STIMULANT DELUSION. 121 French had brought from Algeria to Mexico we had an opium-eating Zouave, who had twice broken into the regimental hospital to procure the means of gratifying his besetting vice, and who was at last informed that the captain of his company had locked up the sup- ply of opium in his trunk, and would shoot any trespasser caught inside of his tent. That state- ment was a mere stratagem, adopted in prefer- ence to the alternative of sending the monoma- niac to jail; but a few weeks after Captain B. was one night awakened by a noise under his camp-bed, and in the light of the moon rec- ognized his drug-crazed Zouave, trying to un- screw the hinges of a heavy wooden chest! Dr. Mussey, in an address before a medical society, mentioned a case that sets this subject in even a stronger light. A tippler was put in- to an alms-house of a Massachusetts country town. Within a few days he had devised va- rious expedients to procure rum, but failed. At length he hit upon one that proved successful. He went into the wood-shed of the establish- ment, placed one hand upon a block and, with 122 VACCINATION A CRIME. a sharp axe in the other, struck it off at a single blow. Then, with the stump raised and streaming, he ran into the house, crying: "Get some rum! Get some rum. My hand is off!" In the confusion and bustle of the occasion somebody did bring a bowl of rum, which the toper contrived to snatch, and after draining the last drop exultingly exclaimed: "Now, I am satisfied!" What can exhortations avail against a pas- sion of that sort? We should learn to treat it as the advanced stage of a physical disorder, rather than as a controvertible moral aberra- tion. What should we think of a moral reformer trying to reason with a hydrophobia patient ? But, luckily, the comparison holds good in regard to the origin, as well as the results, of the poison vice. Like rabies, the stimulant ma- nia is a wholly abnormal condition, fastened upon the organism by violent means-nay, we might add-in spite of better safeguards than those protecting a human being from the at- tack of a mad dog. THE STIMULANT DELUSION. 123 The naturalist, Buckland, maintains that a sort of natural horror warns dogs and children at the approach of a strange cur, trotting along with foaming chops and blood-shot eyes. Unfortunately many youngsters of our spe- cies seem to lack that instinct, but there is no doubt that to the palate of a normal child the taste of rum, beer, hashish and opium is vio- lently repulsive. In spite of the far-gone de- generation of our race our children still share the most important protective intuitions of Na- ture-guided animals. They abhor the vitiated air of our city tenements; they need no lecturer on practical physiology to impress the benefits of outdoor exercise; their instincts revolt against the absurdities of fashion and the un- natural restraints of our sedentary modes of life. And the same inner monitor warns them against dietetic abuses. Long before Bichat proved that our digestive organs are those of a frugiverous animal, children preferred ap- ples to sausages, and sweetmeats to greasy- made dishes; they detest strong cheese and shudder at the smell of sourcrout. 124 VACCINATION A CRIME. And no human being ever relished the first taste of a "stimulant." As a novelty, tea seems insipid; coffee (unless disguised by milk or sugar) offensively bitter; laudanum acrid, caus- tic; alcohol as repulsive as corrosive subli- mate. Of lager beer-"the grateful and ex- hilarating beverage which our brewers are now prepared to furnish at the rate of 800,000 gal- lons a day"-the first glass is shockingly nau- seous, so much so, indeed, as to be a fluid sub- stitute for tartar emetic. But, in deference to the example of his elders, the young experi- menter repeats the dose, and thus finally breaks down the resisting power of his organism. "We first endure, then pity, then embrace." The persistent obtrusion of any poisonous substance at last modifies the functions of our digestive organs in a way to accommodate the unnatural habit. Swallowing virulent drugs-even arsenic- again and again, finally establishes what phy- sicians call a "state of tolerance", the direct protests of the organism cease. An abnormal change has been wrought, and if the experi- THE STIMULANT DELUSION. 125 menter now tries to stop the poison-dose he is apt to find that the invited fiend has become his master. The once-abhored, and long-rejected, poison has become an indispensable stimulant. And it is a curious fact that the violence of that unnatural craving is proportioned to the virulence of each poison, and to the degree of the original repugnance. Any child can learn to relish chocolate in a day, the percentage of virulent ingredients is so small that many of our sanitarian friends may be pardoned for doubting their existence. At all events there is nothing specially repulsive about the taste of cacao, and almost any chocolate drinker can break the fetters of his habit at the first attempt. The taste of tea is much more decidedly re- pugnant, and Dr. Samuel Johnson confessed that he didn't stop guzzling his besetting tip- ple because he "lacked the moral strength, and, indeed, the inclination for further rough-and- tumble tussles with an imp that had tripped him so often." Alcohol is almost as repulsive as sulphuric 126 VACCINATION A CRIME. acid or permanganate of potassia, and to break its chains requires the effort of a giant. "Hear me first a few words," said the friend of an eloquent clergyman, "and then you may proceed. I am sensible that indulgence in this habit will lead to loss of property, to loss of reputation and domestic happiness, to prema- ture death and the irretrievable loss of my im- mortal soul, and now, with all this conviction resting firmly on my mind and flashing over my conscience like lightning, if I still continue to drink, do you suppose anything you can say will deter me from the practice?" Morphine is so bitter that a trace of its pow- der can be tasted in the air, all in all about the most offensive drug of the vegetable king- dom; yet its grip on an habitue can almost never be wholly broken. Chinese dope-fiends in prison have been known to commit suicide; the torment of their unsatisfied craving had overcome the very fear of death. As Dr. Benjamin Rush sums up that strange tendency of baneful drugs: "The farther we stray away from nature, the longer and harder THE STIMULANT DELUSION. 127 we shall find the road back to health." In other words, the ugliest stimulant fiends take the firmest hold. They scratch and bite when we first attempt to hug them, but their strangling embrace is hard to break. It tightens till it threatens to choke out the vital spark, together with the resisting strength of their victims. For by-and-by the jaded system fails to re- spond to the spur; the poison-slave has to re- sort to stronger stimulants or else to larger and ever larger doses. The gathering night thus can be made to give way to an occasional fiickering-up of the vital flame; but the progres- sive nervous exhaustion at last defies every remedy ; the worshiper of the poison-demon must consummate his self-sacrifice; the shadow of his doom has settled on his soul, and all the strongest stimulants can now do for him is to recall a momentary glimmering of the light that filled the unclouded heaven of his child- hood. In order to distinguish a poison-stimulant from a harmless and nutritive substance, na- 128 VACCINATION A CRIME. ture has thus furnished us three infallible tests: i. The first taste of every poison is either bitter or repulsive. 2. The persistent obtrusion of the noxious substance changes that aversion into a specific craving. 3. The more or less pleasurable excitement produced by a gratification of that craving is always followed by a depressing reaction. The first drop of a wholesome beverage- milk, cold water, cider fresh from the press- is quite as pleasant as the last; the indulgence in such pleasure is not followed by repentance, and never begets a specific craving. Pancakes and honey we may eat with great relish when- ever we can get them, but if we can't, we won't miss them as long as we can satisfy our hunger with bread and butter. In midwinter, when apples advance to six dollars a barrel, it needs no lectures and midnight prayers to substitute rice-pudding for apple-pie. A Turk may break- fast for thirty years on figs and roasted chest- nuts, and yet be quite as comfortable in Swit- THE STIMULANT DELUSION. 129 zerland where they treat him to milk and bread. Not so the dram-drinker. His "thirst" cannot be assuaged with water or milk, his en- slaved appetite craves the wonted tipple-or else a stronger stimulant. Natural food has no effect on the poison-hunger; nature has noth- ing to do with such appetites. B.-The Plague of Poisons. The first choice of any particular stimulant seems to depend on such altogether accidental circumstances as the accessibility or cheapness of this or that medium of intoxication. Orchard countries use distilled or vinous tip- ples ; grain-lands waste their products on malt- liquors. The pastoral Turkomans fuddle with Koumiss, or fermented mare's milk; the Ashantees with sorgo-beer; the Mexicans with pulque (aloe-sap) ; the Chinese and Persians with opium and hashish (Cannabis Indica) ; the Peruvians with the acrid leaves of the coco tree. Even mineral poisons have their vo- taries. There are thousands of arsenic eaters in the southern Alps. Arsenious acid, anti- 130 VACCINATION A CRIME. mony, cinnabar and acetate of copper, are mis- taken for digestive tonics by Spanish and South American miners. By the process of fermentation rice, sago, honey, sugar, durrha (sorghum vulgaris), dates, plums, currants, and innumerable other berries and fruits, have been converted into stimulants. The pastor of a Swiss colony on the Llanos Ventosos in the Mexican State of Oaxaca told me that the In- dians of that neighborhood stupefy themselves \yith macerated cicuta, a kind of water hem- lock, and remarked that the delirium and sub- sequent reaction of a cicuta debauch corre- spond exactly to the successive phases of a whisky spree; the only difference being in the price of the tipple. If intoxication were a physiological neces- sity, it would, indeed, be folly to buy stimulants at the dram-shop, since cheaper poisons would serve the same purpose. A dime's worth of arsenic will protract the stimulant fever for a week, with all the alternate excitement and dejections of an alcohol revel. A man might get used to phosphorus and inflame his liver THE STIMULANT DELUSION. 131 with the same lucifer-matches he uses to light his lamp. We might gather jimson weed (said to create a dislike to alcohol) or aconite, or fuddle with mushrooms, like the natives of Kamtschatka, who prepare a highly intoxicat- ing liquor from a decoction of the common speckled fly-toadstool. These facts teach us two other valuable les- sons, viz.: that every poison can become a stim- ulant, and that the alcohol habit is character- ized by all the symptoms that distinguish the poison-hunger from a natural appetite. One radical fallacy identifies the stimulant habit in all its disguises: its victims mistake a process of irritation for a process of invigora- tion. The self-deception of the dyspeptic phil- osopher, who hopes to exercise his blue-devils with the fumes of the weed that has caused his sick-headaches, is absolutely analogous to that of the pot-house sot who tries to drown his cares in the source of all his sorrows; and there is no reason to doubt that it is precisely the same fallacy which formerly ascribed remedial virtues to the vilest stimulants of the drug- 132 VACCINATION A CRIME. store, and that, with few exceptions, the pois- ons administered for "medicinal" purposes have considerably increased, instead of de- creasing, the sum of human misery. The milder stimulants (light-beer, cider and narcotic infusions) would be comparatively harmless, if their votaries would confine them- selves to moderate doses. For sooner or later the tonic is sure to pall, while the morbid crav- ing remains, and forces its victim either to in- crease the quantity of the wonted stimulant, or else resort to a stronger poison. A boy begins with ginger beer and ends with ginger rum; the medical "tonic" delusion progresses from malt extract to Munford's Elixir; the coffee-cup leads to the pipe and the pipe to the pot-house. Wherever the nicotine habit has been intro- duced, the alcohol habit soon follows. The Spanish Moors abstained from all poisons, and for seven centuries remained the teachers of Europe in war as well as science and the arts of peace-free-men in the fullest sense of the word; men whom a powerful foe could at last expel and exterminate, but never subdue. THE STIMULANT DELUSION. 133 The Turks, having learned to smoke tobacco, soon learned to eat opium, and have since been taught to eat dust at the feet of the Muscovite. When the first Spaniards came to South Amer- ica they found in the Patagonian highlands a tribe of warlike natives who were entirely igno- rant of any stimulating substance, and who have ever since defied the sutlers and soldiers of their neighbors, w'hile the tobacco-fuddled red-skins of the North succumbed to fire-water. International statistics have revealed the re- markable fact that the alcohol vice is most prevalent-not in the most ignorant or most despotic countries-but among the commercial nations that use the greatest variety of milder stimulants-Great Britain, France, and East- ern North America. Hence the apparent paradox that drunken- ness is most frequent among the most civilized nations. The tendency of every stimulant habit is towards a stronger tonic. Claude Bernard, the famous French physiol- ogist, noticed that the opium-vice recruits its female victims chiefly from the ranks of the 134 VACCINATION A CRIME. veteran coffee-drinkers; in Savoy and the ad- joining Swiss cantons Kirsch-wasser prepares the way for arsenic; in London and St. Peters- burgh many ether drinkers have relinquished high-wines for a more concentrated poison, and in the seaport towns of northern Egypt Persian opium-shops have eclipsed the popu- larity of the Arabian coffee-houses. The ancient Greeks knew only one stimulant -wine; the Northmen, beer; the American In- dians, tobacco. We have adopted all three, be- sides tea from China, opium from India, cof- fee from Arabia, and fire-water from the lab- oratory of the German chemists. To this list the modern French have added chloral and ab- sinthe, and the patent-nostrum traffic is in- creasing the horrid aggregate at the rate of five drug-tonics per year. We see, then, that every poison-habit is pro- gressive and thus realize the truth that there is no such thing as a harmless stimulant, because the incipience of every unnatural appetite is the first stage of a progressive disease. The facts from which we draw these conclu- THE STIMULANT DELUSION. 135 sions have long been familiar to scientific spe- cialists, and have separately been commented upon; but in science, as in morals, the progress from special to general inferences is often amazingly slow. The ancient Spartans would have shuddered at the idea of buying and sell- ing a burgher of their own city, but had no hesitation about enslaving the Greeks of the neighboring States. The Romans enfranchised the citizens of Latium, and at last the natives of the entire Italian Peninsula, but kidnapped all the "barbarians" they could lay their hands upon. The French and Spaniards of the last century were deeply shocked at the indiscrim- inate man-hunts of the Algerian corsairs, and even refused to retaliate, because, in spite of their turpitude, many of those misbelievers had something like a Caucasian skin on their faces. But those same moralists thought it perfectly proper to capture and cowhide the black sons of Ham, though miscegenation could not al- ways be avoided, and auctioneers thus some- times got hold of a white slave, till William 136 VACCINATION A CRIME. Wilberforce at last arrived at the grand gen- eralization that all human slavery is wrong. More than a hundred years ago Dr. Boer- haare entered an emphatic protect against rum, French high-wines, and "other adulterated spirits," but confessed a predilection for a drop of good old Schiedam. Dr. Zimmermann ob- jected to all distilled liquors, but recommended an occasional glass of wine, and a plate of beer- soup-the latter a Prussian invention, and one of those outrages on human nature that em- bittered the childhood of Frederick the Great. The hygienic reformers of our own country de- nounce intoxicating drinks of all kinds, but connive at mild ale, cider, opiates, narcotics, and patent "bitters." The plan has been thoroughly tried and has thoroughly failed. We have found that the road to the rum-shop is paved with "mild stimulants," and that every bottle of medical bitters is apt to get the vender a permanent cus- tomer. We have found that cider and mild ale lead to strong ale, to lager beer and finally to brandy, and the truth at last dawns upon us THE STIMULANT DELUSION. 137 that the only safe, consistent and effective plan of reform is Total Abstinence from all Pois- ons. C.-Aids to Total Abstinence. In tracing the causes that led to the present development of the poison-vice, we should not overlook the influence of another principle, which I might call a reaction against the effect of a wrong remedy. We cannot serve our cause by ignoring its weak points, for if we persist in closing our eyes to the significance of our mistakes, our enemies will not fail to profit by our blindness. We cannot work in the dark. In order to reach their goal the friends of Temperance must see their way clear, and I trust that no earnest fel- low-laborer will misconstrue my motive if I venture to say the whole truth. The matter is this: At a time when the civilization of antiquity had become extremely corrupt, a society of ethical reformers tried to find a panacea for vice, as we now seek a rem- edy for intemperance. But, instead of recog- nizing the local causes of the evil, they ascribed 138 VACCINATION A CRIME. it to the innate perversity of the human heart. They, too, failed to distinguish between natural appetites and morbid appetencies, and misled by the glaring consequences of perverted pas- sions, they conceived the unhappy idea that man's natural instincts are his natural enemies. In order to crush a few baneful nightshades and poppy-blossoms, they began a war of ex- termination against the flowers of this earth. But that attempt led to an unexpected result: the soil of the trampled fields engendered weeds that were harder to destroy than the noxious herbs of the old flower gardens. The would-be reformers had overlooked the fact that it is easier to pervert than to suppress a natural instinct; but the history of morals during the last twelve hundred years has illus- trated that truth by many dreadful examples. The suppression of national freedom led to an- archy. Celibacy became the mother of the ug- liest vices. The attempt to suppress the pur- suit of natural science led to the pursuit of pseudo science-astrology, necromancy, and all sorts of dire chimeras. The suppression of THE STIMULANT DELUSION. 139 harmless pleasures has always fostered a penchant for vicious pleasures. The austerity of the Stoics helped to propa- gate the doctrines of Epicurus; in Islam the era of the Hanbalite ascetics was followed by the riots of the Bagdad caliphate; and the open li- centiousness of the English anti-Puritans, as well as the secret excesses of their northern neighbors can be distinctly traced to the mis- taken zeal of the party which had waged a long and unrelenting war against every form of physical pleasure, and hoped to find salvation by the suppression of natural desires. "According to that code," says the author of the "History of Civilization," "all the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyful instincts of the human heart were sinful. They looked upon all pleasures as wicked in themselves, merely because they were pleasant. Their great object in life was to be in a state of constant affliction; . . . . whatever pleased the senses was to be suspect- ed. It mattered not what a man liked; the 140 VACCINATION A CRIME. mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. What- ever was natural was wrong." If it were possible that such dogmas could ever again overpower the common sense of mankind, we should welcome the poison-mania as a lesser evil, for it is better to seek happiness by a wrong road than to abandon the search al- together. It is better to taste a forbidden fruit than to destroy all pleasant trees. But it is impossible that such chimeras should have survived their native night. After the terrible experience of the Middle Ages it is impossible that any sane person should fail to recognize the significance of the mistake, and we cannot hope to maintain the field against the enemies of temperance till we have de- prived them of their most effective weapon; we must furnish practical proofs that they, not we, are enemies of human happiness; that we make war upon vice and not upon harmless pleasures. It is a significant fact that in every civilized country of this earth drunkenness is rarest THE STIMULANT DELUSION. 141 among the classes who have other and better means of enjoyment. In the United States, where the "almighty dollar" confers unlimited privileges, the well-to-do people are the most temperate in the world; the poor the most in- temperate. In Turkey, where the lower classes are indulged in many pastimes that are con- sidered below the dignity of an effendi, the poison-vice is actually confined to the upper ten; temperance reigns in the cottage, while opium-smoking and secret dram-drinking pre- vail in the palace. In Scotland, where all classes have to con- form to the moral by-laws that discountenance holiday recreations, total abstinence is ex- tremely rare. For-"Nature will have her revenge, and when the most ordinary and harmless recrea- tions are forbidden as sinful, is apt to seek com- pensation in indulgences which no moralist would be willing to condone. The charge brought against the Novatians in the early ages of the Church can, with equal plausibility, be brought against the Puritans in our own 142 VACCINATION A CRIME. day. One vice, at all events, which Christians of every school, as well as non-Christian mor- alists are agreed in condemning is reputed to be a special opprobium in Scotland; and the strictest observance of all those minute and op- pressive Sabbatharian regulations has been found compatible with consecrating the day of rest to a quiet but unlimited assimilation of the liquid which inebriates, but does not cheer. And under the old regime to be drunk in pri- vate would have been accounted a far less hein- ous offence against the dignity of the Sabbath than to whistle in the public street." {The Saturday Review, July 13, 1879, P- 75-) There is, indeed, no doubt that the "snuf- fling, whining saints who groaned in spirit at the sight of Jack in the Green," have driven as many pleasure-seekers from the playground to the pot-house, as despotism has turned free- men into robbers and outlaws. For the practical alternative is not between conventicles and rum-riots, but between health- ful and baneful pastimes. Before we can begin to eradicate the poison-habit we must make THE STIMULANT DELUSION. 143 reform more attractive than vice; and as long as the champions of temperance shut their eyes to the significance of that truth, their legis- lative enactments will always remain dead-let- ter laws. Our worst defects we owe, in fact, less to the shrewdness of our beer-brewing opponents than to the blindness of our Sabbatharian al- lies. A free Sunday-garden, with zoological curi- osities, foot-races and good music, would do more to promote the cause of temperance than a whole army of Hudibras revivalists. A free public gymnasium would serve the purpose of regeneration more effectively than a hundred Sabbatarian blue-law leagues. "Every one," says the historian-philosopher Lecky, "who considers the world*as it really exists, and not as it appears in the writings of ascetics and sentimentalists, must have con- vinced himself that in great towns, where mul- titudes of men of all classes and all characters are massed together, public amusements of an exciting order are absolutely necessary, and 144 VACCINATION A CRIME. that to suppress them, as was done by the Puritans of the Commonwealth, is simply to plunge an immense portion of the population into the lowest depths of vice." (History of Rationalism, Vol. II., p. 286.) "Sir," said Johnson, "I am a great friend to public amusements, for they keep people from vice." (Boswell, p. 171.) Individuals should be treated on the same plan, and the most effective aid to total absti- nence from stimulating poisons is a liberal al- lowance of healthful stimulants in the form of diverting pastimes and outdoor exercise., For the chief danger of a relapse is not the attractiveness of intoxication, but the misery of the after-effect, the depressing reaction that follows upon the abnormal excitement, and for several weeks seems daily to gain strength against the reformatory resolves of the patient. This apathy of the unstimulated system can become more intolerable than positive pain, and embitter existence till, in spite of prayers and pledges, its victims either relapse into alco- hol or resort to equivalent stimulants-chloral, absinthe, or opium. THE STIMULANT DELUSION. 145 In stress of such temptations the prophylactic influence of a soul-stirring occupation is al- most as effective as in the deliquium of disap- pointed love. Ennui is the chief ally of the poison-fiend. On the militaer grenze, the "military fron- tier," of Eastern Austria, a soldier's life is a ceaseless guerrilla-war against smugglers, out- laws and Bulgarian bed-bugs, but hunting privileges make amends, and hundreds of gar- rison officers solicit transfer to that region as to a refuge from the temptations of city-life- "a Schnapps Kur" (whisky cure), as they express it with frank directness; and for sim- ilar purposes many of Fremont's contempo- raries took the prairie-trail to the adventure- land of the Far West. The traveler Gerstaecker found that the Cal- ifornia rum-shops got their chief patronage from unsuccessful miners; the successful ones had better stimulants. For the first month or two the convalescent should not content himself with negative safe- guards, but make up his mind that temptations 146 VACCINATION A CRIME. will come, and that active warfare is nearly always the safest plan. The alcohol habit is a physical disease, and a program of com- petetive gymnastics will obviate its relapses more effectually than a season ticket to a tab- ernacle of perpetual prayer. A Rocky Moun- tain excursion, a visit to the diggings, a month of seaside rambles and surf-baths will do more to help a reformed toper across the Slough of Despond than a car-load of tracts. But such excursions should be undertaken in company. Soldiers in the ranks will endure hardships that would melt the valor of any solitary hero; and in the presence of manly companions the spirit of emulation and "ap- probativeness" will sustain even an enervated fellow. Fasting, too, is a great system renovator. A weekly fast-day, made endurable by diverting pastimes, will restorate the digestive apparatus in cases where tonic bitters would fail. Besides, a single dose of medicated brandy is always apt to revive the dormant poison-pas- sion. A mere spark may rekindle the smoth- ered flame. THE STIMULANT DELUSION. 147 A young priest from one of the West Indian Islands once consulted Dr. Benjamin Rush for an of the lungs, and was advised to try certain vegetable specifics. "I am satisfied that your prescription is do- ing me good," said he, at the next interview, "but I wish you would let me steep it in some good old Geneva." "No, indeed, sir!" said the doctor, with em- phasis, "no man shall look me in the face on the day of judgment and tell the Almighty that Dr. Rush made him a drunkard." "It should always be borne in mind," says Prof. Sewell, "that such is the sensibility of the stomach of the reformed drunkard that a repe- tition of the use of alcohol, in the slightest de- gree, and in any form, revives the appetite; the patient may be unable to resist the temptation of enlarging the dose; the blood-vessels of the stomach again become dilated and the morbid passion is reproduced." Alcohol haj no remedial value. But that would be a trifle if it were not for the progres- sive tendency of the liquor habit. By a single 148 VACCINATION A CRIME. glass of alcoholic "stimulants" thousands of convalescing topers have lost their hard-earned chance of recovery; poor, struggling wretches, swimming for their lives, and at last approach- ing a saving shore, have been pushed back into the surging whirlpool, and perished, almost in sight of the harbor. The only chance of a rad- ical cure consists in the hope of guarding the patient against all stimulants, and I would as soon snatch bread from a starving man as that last hope from a drunkard. Next to physical exercise, exciting occupa- tions will help most to divert the toper's mind from the temptations of the transition period. Ambition, pride, even acquisitiveness, may thus be utilized, for a time at least. For, after the tempter has been kept at bay for a couple of months, his power will reach a turning point; the nervous irritability will sub- side, the potency of the poison-hunger will de- crease from day to day. After that the main point is to gain time, and give Nature a fair chance to complete the work of redemption. CHAPTER VI. THE DREAD OF FRESH AIR. A.-Consumption Factories. Consumption has become a far more destruc- tive disease than smallpox. Among the civil- ized nations of our latter-day world it causes one-seventh of the total mortality, and twenty- eight of a hundred deaths are due to lung dis- orders of some sort or other. Yet the same century that submits to the en- forcement of a doubtful remedy for variola ne- glects the absolutely certain preventive of pul- monary consumption. In France, in Germany, in Italy, in Great Britain and civilized North America, under the very eye of accomplished physicians, lung microbes are hatched and dis- seminated as systematically as our Fish Com- missioners hatch and disseminate salmon eggs. Philanthropists who contribute millions to reg- ulate the theological opinions of the masses do not think it worth while to spend one cent for VACCINATION A CRIME. 150 the purpose of dispelling the life-blighting de- lusion of the fresh-air dread. No other word will describe the infatuation of millions whose objection to open windows has nothing to do with the fear of mosquitoes and miasma, but who act on the sincere belief that the nauseous, overheated and breath-polluted atmosphere of a crowded tenement is more wholesome than the pure air of the out-door world. For the air-famine of our dwelling-houses is not limited to southern fever-swamps. The dread of life-air manifests itself in the hovels of California mining villages as in the palaces of New England pleasure resorts, in farming dis- tricts as in manufacturing towns, in hermitages as in metropolitan lodging-houses. Lung-microbes have thus been evolved with a success that makes consumption a worse scourge than war. Without counting pneumo- nia and other fatal lung-diseases, tubercular phthisis alone claims a million victims a year. And the quantum of the mischief is still ag- gravated by its quality. Consumption fulfils no scavenger's mission; the most voracious is, THE DREAD OF FRESH AIR. 151 withal, the most fastidious disease, and selects its prey from the most industrious classes of the noblest nations: hard-working mechanics, devoted supporters of large families; bread- winning laborers and prize-winning students. For the last fifty years its ravages have stead- ily increased, but the excess of the evil has finally revealed the means of deliverance, and' the worst scourge of the human race has one redeeming feature: that its cause, and, conse- quently, its proper cure-however strangely ne- glected-have at last been determined with in- disputable certainty. Not more than fifty years ago the. consump- tion problem was still a crux medicorum; the disease seemed almost unaccountable and wholly incurable. Practical physicians had ascertained the value of several secondary remedies, the pro- phylactic influence of fat and phosphates (cod- liver oil, etc.), and of abstinence from strong liquor; but they had failed to recognize the great specific. Misled by the most prevalent of all popular delusions, they ascribed consump- 152 VACCINATION A CRIME. tion to the influence of a low temperature, and tried to cure it by sending their wealthier pa- tients to a warmer climate, and the poorer to an air-tight sick-room. There were hospitals where consumptives were nursed with a care that would have in- sured recovery from almost every other dis- ease; but here all calculations were defeated by the result of one wrong factor; the chief efficacy of the treatment was supposed to de- pend upon the exclusion of every breath of fresh air. But statistics have at last exploded that de- lusion. It has been ascertained that consump- tion is essentially a house disease. North and South, the death-rate from consumption was found to bear an exact proportion to the per- centage of the inhabitants habitually engaged in sedentary and indoor occupations. Towns suffer more than the rural districts, cities more than country towns, manufacturing cities more than commercial and semi-agricultural cities; weaver-towns more than foundry-towns. " If a perfectly sound man is imprisoned for THE DREAD OF FRESH AIR. 153 life," says Baron d'Arbly, the Belgian re- former, " his lungs, as a rule, will first show symptoms of disease, and shorten his misery by a hectic decline, unless he should commit sui- cide." Moreover, it has been shown that in non- industrial (uncivilized or pastoral) regions a low temperature seems to afford a protection against pulmonary disorders. Professor Jacoud found that, at an elevation of 4,000 feet, the cold Alpine districts of northern Savoy are almost free from lung-diseases. The medical statistics of the Austrian army have established the fact that recruits from the Tyrol, from Ca- rinthia and the Carpathians (Transylvania), i.e., from the highest and, consequently, the coldest, provinces of the empire, enjoy a re- markable immunity from tubercular consump- tion. Dr. Hjaltelin, a resident of Iceland, states that in the upland settlements pulmonary disor- ders are almost unknown. There is a story of a temperance lecturer who could infer the prevalence of drunkenness in ev- ery community by the size of the poor-house; VACCINATION A CRIME. 154 •and in the temperate zone consumption statistics alone would enable us to compute the amount of indoor work incidental to every trade. In the Italian cities that have largely engaged in the production of textile fabrics, consumption has become as frequent as in Lancashire. Irre- spective of race differences and special dietetic habits, the habitual breathing of vitiated air leads to the development of pulmonary scrofula. And science has furnished the explanation of that result. Physiology has demonstrated that air is gaseous food, and respiration a process of digestion. The atmosphere furnishes the raw material of that pulmonary food; the labora- tory of the lungs separates its component parts, retains the nutritive and expels the indigestible elements. By breathing the same air over and over again the atmospheric aliment thus becomes azotized, i.e., depleted of its life-sustaining prin- ciple, and more and more unfit to supply the wants of the animal economy The continued inhalation of vitiated air fills the respiratory organs with indigestible ele- THE DREAD OF FRESH AIR. 155 ments, which gradually accumulate beyond the dislodging ability of the vital forces, and at last corrupt the tissue of the congested organ, and favor the development of parasites. The tenants of ill-ventilated dormitories, fac- tories and sweat-shops are breathing pulmonary excrements. And that breath-polluted air is a far worse lung-poison than the impurities that float visi- bly in the atmosphere of mills and cotton facto- ries. Millers breathe, perhaps, more dust than any other human beings; yet they attain a good old age; their besetting trouble, asthma, is rarely a fatal disease, and altogether different from pulmonary consumption. Nay, Professor Haller of Essen, Prussia, demonstrated that knife-grinding can be made a comparatively harmless occupation by giving the workmen an abundant supply of cool, fresh air. This ar- rangement secured the workshop against over- heating, and air-stagnation, and the sick-rate of his employees decreased one-half, though he was unable to protect them against the risk of inhaling fine particles of steel-dust. A screen of 156 VACCINATION A CRIME. magnetized steel-wire intercepts the coarser particles, but not the smaller-a fact ascertained by the microscopic examination of the lungs of several animals that had been kept alive in the shop for weeks, protected like their biped room- mates, by magnetic muzzles. By thorough ventilation alone, the death- rate of steel-grinding establishments can be re- duced below that of ill-ventilated sweat-shops. In other words, the most horrible of all mechanical hmg-congesters are less deadly than dustless, but breath-polluted, air. Under a microscope the particles of inhaled steel-dust look like selections from the dump- pile of a hardware store: some of them resem- ble knife-blades, others needles, tacks, hooks, files, cork-screws, lance-heads, and bits of broken saws. And that miscellany of torture implements, sticking to the sensitive membranes of the lungs, penetrating their tissue and resisting re- moval like barbed fishhooks, is actually less life- endangering than the miasma which millions of THE DREAD OF FRESH AIR. 157 air-dreading parents force their children to in- hale night after night! Friends and philanthropists, had we not bet- ter relinquish the enforcement of Sabbatarian blue-laws for a while and organize a crusade against consumption hatcheries? B.-Catarrh Superstitions. The fabled basilisk could be killed by a look- ing-glass, and it may be hoped that the catarrh- superstition cannot forever survive a demon- stration of its monstrous absurdity. "Open that window, why don't you?" a sanitarian asks his sweltering neighbor; " ninety degrees, by your own thermometer, and your children all gasping for a breath of fresh air." "Yes, but the sun is just setting; and one of those mrls has been on the sick-list all summer; she might catch cold again." "What? Fresh air cause a catarrh? Ac- cording to that, outdoor creatures ought to be all eaten up with lung-diseases, and the fact is they don't know the meaning of catarrh, pneu- monia and consumption. A thousand-no, a 158 VACCINATION A CRIME. thousand million different animals, birds and bugs have breathed fresh air since the dawn of creation, and have never been hurt by it." "Why, but they are outdoors all the time; what causes colds is a draught." "A draught? Air in motion? A wind- current stirring is just what makes the air pleasant at this time of the year; it purifies it, carries off stagnant and polluted strata of the atmosphere and brings life-air in the place of them. Have you never been walking outdoors, when there is not a breath of air stirring and noticed how much better you feel when a cool breeze springs up? " " It might be different if you keep walking, but sitting still in a draught brings on a cold." "So? What about winter-travelers, then: men, women and children, sitting still in a sleigh, and a snowstorm sweeping the coun- try at the rate of forty miles an hour? Do they catch cold? Are they in any way the worse for a trip of that sort (unless they have too many pocket-flasks along) ; don't they feel decidedly better? Their brain cleared, their THE DREAD OF FRESH AIR. 159 appetite sharpened, the dust blown out of their lungs; ' braced ' and invigorated in every way, though their air-currents are a hundred times stronger, and a hundred degrees Fahrenheit colder, than those you now want to withhold from your children?" " But sleigh-travelers are outdoors alto- gether, and those draughts that don't hurt them might cause colds when they enter a house." " Is that it? Let's see. According to that theory a mixture of indoor and outdoor air hurts our lungs? Or do you suppose it's dan- gerous to breathe indoor and outdoor air by turns? Have you never seen brakesmen and street-car conductors stepping into warm air and out in the cold again, a hundred times a day? Or seen a cobbler at work in a little, home-made shop, with a single door, that's opened by customers every quarter of an hour, and, in cold weather, by loafers, every quarter of a minute? Does that kill the owner of the shop? Does it hurt him in any way, except, perhaps, by hurting his feelings at the thought 160 VACCINATION A CRIME. of the wasted fuel and high coal prices? A smithy is open altogether, outdoor air and in- door air getting mixed, all the day long, yet workmen of that class are notoriously long- lived. You might say a smith 'works off' his colds by sledge-hammering and moving about ; but a cobbler doesn't; his peg-hammer doesn't weigh three pounds, and he sits still, for hours together. And yet he has a better chance of survival than the man in a sweat-shop that isn't opened more than three or four times a day. Sweat-shoppers are coughing their life away; the cobbler doesn't. Don't you think it just possible that they die, and he lives, because his door is opened oftener, and because he gets more fresh air mixed with his indoor atmos- phere? Air famine is a sort of starvation. Look at that pale-faced girl of yours. Won't you let me open one of these windows, now? " " Oh, don't, Doctor! The sun is down now, and it stands to reason that night air causes colds." " Night air? Could you oblige me to men- tion a single one of those reasons? Let me tell THE DREAD OF FRESH AIR. 161 you a fact: There are species of apes that live half a century in their native woods, but have never been kept alive in a menagerie more than a year or two. Consumption kills them all. Yet many of those menageries are so care- fully heated that they are really much warmer at night than the forests of the tropics, be- sides being fitted with double doors and ves- tibules that protect the cages against every draught of cool air. They had a building of that sort in Cincinnati, Ohio, and, to make doubly sure, put their pair of chimpanzees in a cage with double plate-glass all round. For all that-or on account of all that-their fine man-apes both died the second summer. In their native haunts, in the great forests of western Africa, they live about as long as their darkey neighbors, or longer, for, near Sierra Leone, an old male, with a big scar on his head, had been seen and recognized by three different generations. The equator be- ing near, you might think it's warm there for- ever; but the truth is that in the rainy season the sea-wind, sweeping through the drenched 162 VACCINATION A CRIME. woods, often makes the mercury shrink forty degrees, and in mid-summer thunder storms often break out, that rage like tornadoes, all the night long, and must make things lively for bald-headed patriarchs-for chimpanzees build no nests that could resist a common shower for more than ten minutes. And some two hundred different military surgeons have confirmed Dr. Arbely's statement that lung- diseases abate while soldiers are in the field, bivouacking or sleeping in airy tents; but re- appear as soon as the same soldiers return to their barracks. So you see that, instead of causing catarrhs, night-air actually cures them." " But it might hurt a weakly person." "Does it hurt fawns and young rabbits? They romp about in the moonlight, and the babies of our Mexican neighbors sleep where their parents do, on the railed-in texadas of their flat roofs. Invalids are carried there as soon as the sun is down; experience has proved that glaring sunlight would hurt them, but THE DREAD OF FRESH AIR. 163 moonlight won't. Or are you afraid of the darkness? Does air get dangerous during the temporary absence of light? Then, why do you trust yourself to your bedroom, after the gas is turned off? The fact is that you are afraid of dark, pure air, but trust your life to dark, foul air. Besides, there is now still half an hour of daylight left, and this is really the most pleasant part of the twenty-four hours. Neither too cold nor too warm, and a breeze straight from the mountains, with a trace of honeysuckle and pinewood perfume. Just open a window and give that air a chance to tell its own tale, and you won't believe it could kill anybody." " Oh, no, it wouldn't kill us, I suppose; but we might catch cold." Exit sanitarian, with all sorts of unmention- able reflections, and one half-mentionable one, to the effect that swift-killing night-air would sometimes be a lesser evil. For the temporary survival of aerophobia lunatics generally proves a curse to the neighborhood all around; their 164 VACCINATION A CRIME. lung-sick children sally at inervals, and the microbe hatchery distributes its produce in meeting-houses, street-cars, and crowded school-rooms. CHAPTER VII. AIR POISONS. Daily surfeits make dyspepsia incurable, and for similar reasons no catarrh-cure avails a pa- tient whose lungs are perpetually saturated with atmospheric impurities. There are bedrooms barred against the possibility of ventilation by the precaution of nailing down the window- sashes. Shanty-boats are frequently lighted by " bull's eyes," or round pieces of glass fitted immovably in the woodwork, and, instead of doors, have hatchways, with rarely opened trap-doors. In 1878, when a by-law of the London Health Bureau required tenement own- ers to provide specified means of ventilation for every hundred cubic feet of room-space, a com- mittee of landlords protested, on the ground that few of their tenants would appreciate the innovation, and that many of them would be apt to resent interference with their habit of keeping their rooms hermetically closed the 166 VACCINATION A CRIME. year round. In many of these dungeons three generations share the same bedroom, which sometimes, besides, answers the purpose of a kitchen, nursery, and sick-room, the same air, with an unspeakable melange of gaseous pol- lutions, penned up for months, to save a few pennies' worth of coal. Dr. F. H. Wheatley, of Manchester, Eng- land, also proved that the prevalence of lung- diseases in the British army was chiefly, if not exclusively, due to the air-poisons of barrack dormitories; "rarely ventilated at all," he de- scribes them, " never half sufficiently aired, reeking with bed odors and tobacco fumes." " As a consequence," he adds, " some of the finest regiments in the service are decimated by disease to a degree almost equalling the death- rate of an active campaign." East European garrison dens are even worse. Shamyl-Ben-Haddin, the Circassian hero chief- tain, who was captured by the Russians in the winter of 1864, had no reason to complain of his treatment till he was transferred to Nov- gorod, and compelled to sleep in the guard- AIR POISONS. 167 house of the city armory. His dinner was sent from the officers' mess-room, every day, and his admirers added presents of sweetmeats and fruits; but a week after his arrival the captive mountaineer demanded an interview with the post-commander, and offered to renounce his liberal rations and subsist on black bread and beef, like the private soldiers of his guard, and also to surrender some valuables he had con- cealed about his person, on condition that they would permit him to sleep in the open air. One more week of such nausea and sick head- aches, he said, would force him to commit sui- cide, and, if his request was refused, God would charge the guilt of the deed on his tormentors! They decided to comply with his preference, though the winter was not yet over, and it was, perhaps, the first time they had heard anybody object to warm air on account of its impurity. School-rooms often spread the germs of contagious catarrhs, and it is possible that the supposed depravity of incurable truants is really a deference to health-protecting instincts, to a normal child's horror of concentrated air- 168 VACCINATION A CRIME. poisons. Jean Paul, the German apostle of Nature, relates that he used to secure a seat in a certain corner of an overcrowded village school-house, where a knot-hole in the wall established a communication with the outdoor atmosphere. Through this orifice he imbibed comfort and inspiration, as from a flask, but conceived conscientious scruples against the practice, as he could never indulge without be- coming conscious of a temptation to abandon his old parents and his home, and join a troop of wood-cutters or gypsies-not from any va- grant tendencies, or want of dutiful sentiments, but from an almost irresistible desire to make the luxury of fresh air a permanent blessing. " I knew they would charge me with black in- gratitude if I should run away," he says. " Good God! How I longed to prove my af- fection by working for them in wind and weather, fetching in cord-wood from the hills, and splitting it up in the nicest, handiest pieces, carrying messages over the snow-covered mountains, and be back in half the time any- body else would make the trip-do anything AIR POISONS. 169 that would save me-not from my books, but from that glowing Moloch of a big stove, and that stifling, soul-stifling, smell of our dun- geon ! " A correspondent of the Atlanta Constitution mentions a little negro boy, who would rather trot five miles through a sleet storm than spend five cents for a ride in the street-cars, and when reproached with his niggardliness, pointed to his sore feet, and admitted that they had been frozen twice. "You bet, Boss, I wouldn't grudge that nickel," said he, "but the conductors won't let me stand on the platform, and I can't stand it insides. The air just kills me." " An' they hits you, if you want to open a window," he whimpered. To lessen temptations of that sort, and save the trouble of dusting, the window- sashes of many metropolitan trolley lines are screwed down, till the car becomes a man- trap on wheels, a sample-room for all the lung- microbes of the community and adjoining parishes. Vestibules have begun to aggravate 170 VACCINATION A CRIME. the evil, and the doors are opened only enough to let one person at a time in and out. As a natural consequence, street-car con- ductors learn to prefer the snow-swept plat- form, and often envy the " motor-man,who can stick to his vantage-ground and keep mi- crobes at bay, though his staying-powers may get worn out by the insane stand-up regulation. In cities, like Detroit, Mich., where stools are left optional with each car-man, the one on the front platform enjoys an immunity from lung troubles which, on the popular catarrh theory, would be wholly unaccountable, his little caboose being more " draughty " than the pilot-house of a Norwegian steamer. Cockpit quarters, on the other hand, spread disease germs from seaport to seaport, and, ac- cording to the memorable account of Captain Cook, came near proving fatal to a committee of South Sea Islanders, who had accepted an invitation to visit his ship. They had been loaded with knicknacks, and were in the best humor, but a few minutes after clambering down the hatchway to take a look at the sail- AIR POISONS. 171 ors' dormitory, were taken with sneezing fits, coughing fits, and more and more distressing pains in the chest. The next morning most of them were down with a fever, and the only explanation was an old sailor's conjecture that the polluted air of the pit had affected them like a swift-acting poison. He had noticed a similar phenomenon in a seaport of the Sunda Islands, and again on the west coast of Africa. The stifling underground stables of old-time tramway lines developed the air-poison that caused epizootics, or contagious lung-fevers, often as virulent as the Rinderpest. Prairie mustangs get restless on their first confinement in such disease traps, and the Swiss naturalist Tschudi describes the excitement of a pair of pet chamois that had been locked up in a stuffy goat-stable. These pets had been raised in the highlands, and in stress of weather had often volunteered to take refuge in a rain-tight, but sufficiently airy, old barn, but the atmosphere of that goat-prison set them a-sneezing, and making desperate efforts to regain the freedom 172 VACCINATION A CRIME. of the outdoor world. Hearing a noise as of a battering ram, their proprietor fetched the key and decided to release his pets, but on reach- ing the stable found that they had already achieved their deliverance by mounting a pile of hay and butting out a row of shingles near the top of the roof. As it was going to rain, he coaxed them into an old carpenter-shop, where they at once made themselves at home by lying down on a pile of shavings. The genial climate of the South cannot pre- vent the development of lung-microbes, nay, the equator itself affords no protection from the more virulent air-poisons, for the traveler Bates saw the aborigines of western Brazil spitting blood and coughing pitifully, in con- sequence of a disorder contracted on a visit to the ill-ventilated guest-room of a village tavern. The Island of Malta, once the Eden of the Mediterranean, is now cursed with all sorts of lung-diseases, including consumption and chronic catarrhs. About 320 days of each year are cloudless and pleasant; oranges can be win- AIR POISONS. 173 tered in the open air; but the cause of those lung disorders dawned upon Captain Basil Hall, F.R.G.S., when he visited the slums of Port Valetta, and found that lack of building- room had induced many families to take up their quarters in underground tenements, cel- lar below cellar, the lowest being, in some cases, two flights of stairs, or ladders, below the base- ment. No direct breath of fresh air ever en- tered these dungeons; the walls were slimy with mud, and fluid defilements trickled from one floor upon the one next below. But it must be added that these abodes of horror were used only for sleeping purposes, and as places of refuge from exceptionally se- vere rain-storms. As a rule, the islanders pass their days in the open air, and the worst mi- crobe traps of our latter-day world are the hovels of the Russian boers, that keep their turf-oven smouldering day and night, and shroud their small windows with sheep-skins, to keep out every draught of fresh air. Pigs, pups and blear-eyed babies vie in sins against cleanliness; drunken clowns stagger in, and go 174 VACCINATION A CRIME. to sleep, with rain-soaked mantles steaming all night; cookery and drying wash add their quota of fumes, and the space behind the stove is taken up with barrels of fermenting cabbage mash. Ordinary catarrhs would not suffice to avenge such outrages against the health laws of Na- ture, and the air-filth of Muscovy evolves in- fluenzas, those contagious plagues that have be- come a worse curse than smallpox, and a month ago caused several hundred deaths in a single city of our continent. They spread south as far as Constantinople, and west beyond our Rocky Mountains, but in every country select their victims chiefly from a class of city dwell- ers, whose lungs have already been weakened by habitual indoor life. CHAPTER VIII. CURES AND PREVENTION. The drug-curse has aggravated numberless disorders its dupes hoped to cure, and a list of old-time lung-remedies is sufficient to explain how catarrh and pleurisy could so often be fanned into life-devouring consumptions. For the last-named disorder, Dr. Buchan's " Family Medical Library "-not more than thirty years ago about the most popular patho- logical compend-prescribes the following treatment: " In the beginning of a pleurisy the only effi- cient course is to make the patient stand upon the floor, while blood is drawn from a large or- ifice, until he faints or is about falling. . . . If, after the first bleeding, the pain, with the other violent symptoms, should still continue, it will be necessary to take eight or nine ounces more. If the symptoms do not then abate, a third, or even a fourth, bleeding may be re- 176 VACCINATION A CRIME. quisite. Then take: Solution of acetated am- monia, syrup of tolu, tincture of opium, twenty- five drops; wine of antimony, thirty drops. . . . Nothing is so certain as to give per- manent relief as a combination of ipecac, calo- mel and opium." And in that form of the disease known as " bilious pleurisy," " emetics and mercurial cathartics are of the utmost im- portance. . . . Purgatives should be con- tinued through the whole course of the dis- ease ... a blister should be applied, of sufficient size to cover the whole breast! " ("Family Medical Library," pages 174, 183.) At the beginning of the ninetenth century similar outrages were prescribed for every se- vere cold, and the conventional consumption cures justified Goethe's indictment that " drug- mongers, with their hellish nostrums, rage worse than the very pestilence." That those prescriptions were considerably much worse than neglect, or the " Let-Alone Plan," was demonstrated by homoeopathy, and the astonishing record of its results, as com- pared with those of the nostrum method. CURES AND PREVENTION. 177 " It has been tested under all conceivable va- rieties of circumstances," says Dr. Isaac Jen- nings, the author of "Medical Reform," " and for every known form of disease, and has been proved to cure ten patients where drugs cured- or failed to kill-three or four. And all that, in spite of the fact that the dilution of Hahne- mann's medicines is carried to a degree that makes it impossible to ascribe any part of the cure to the recipe. Providence, I believe, is using this method to break up a ruinous and deep-rooted delusion." Dr. Jennings unhesitatingly recommends ab- stinence from all drugs, and reliance upon simple sanitary preventions, calculated to pre- vent interference with the self-regulating tend- ency of the organism, the vis medicatrix Na- ture?, that will not fail to assert itself. For colds in the head he recommends die- tetic restrictions; for consumption, outdoor ex- ercise, and, if possible, outdoor life, till the tubercle-sores have had time to heal. A supreme test of his faith in the efficacy of his plan came in the form of an attack of pleu- 178 VACCINATION A CRIME. risy; but he resolved to stick to the total absti- nence program, and the record of his expe- rience deserves to be framed in every hygienic sanitarium. " For twelve hours," says he, " breathing was, at best, laborious and painful, confining me to nearly an erect position in bed; but the dis- tress occasiond by efforts at coughing was even worse. The confidence of my wife in the 'let- alone ' treatment, which had carried her for years through a number of serious indisposi- tions, on this occasion faltered, and she begged me to let her send for a surgeon to bleed me, or prescribe something to give at least temporary relief, ' for,' said she, ' you cannot live so.' In my own mind there was not the least vestige of misgiving respecting the course to be pursued. "In view of my age, and the nature and sever- ity of the symptoms, it appeared to me rather doubtful whether the powers of life would hold out and be able to accomplish what they had un- dertaken-to put me on my feet again. But I felt perfectly satisfied that whatever could be done to good purpose would be done, by ' due CURES AND PREVENTION. 179 course of law.' My mind was perfectly at ease in trusting Nature's work in Nature's hands. I also felt sure that the symptoms of my present affliction constituted a part of that work, and were aimed directly at the removal of the diffi- culty. Instead, therefore, of being troubled with the idea that I could not live with such symptoms, my conviction was very strong that I could live better with them than without them. In the morning, ten or twelve hours from the beginning of the cold chill, there was some mit- igation of suffering, and the heaviest part of the work was accomplished within the first twenty-four hours. All in all, I suffered much less under the ' let-alone ' treatment than I should have done under prescriptions aimed at the temporary suppression of the symptoms, besides having the curative process made shorter and more effectual." (" Medical Reform," p. 312.) With catarrh, incipient consumption, and even La Grippe, there is much less difficulty in carrying the program of total abstinence to a satisfactory conclusion. 180 VACCINATION A CRIME. But, after all, that plan only saves the pa- tient from the risk of preposterously erroneous prescriptions, without giving him the benefit of Nature's specifics for the cure of respiratory disorders. Those specifics are a non-stimulating sac- charine diet (unmistakably effective in loosen- ing and eliminating phlegm), and the breath- ing of cold, pure air. Honey, or sugar in some form or other, constitute the efficient part of "cough-medicines" that are sold for 50 cents to a dollar a bottle; yet a five-cent plate of sweet rice-gruel would answer the same purpose. Boiled milk (often more digestible than unboiled) with brown sugar and a trace of vanilla flavor, will alleviate coughs that would have defied all the torments of the Buchan treatment, or abated only to flare up again at the first return of the patient's strength. Dates and sweet layer-raisins will do all the remedial work of medicated treacle and involve no risk of distressing after-effects. In a cold climate, fat, too, is a good lung food, and among all fat-containing substances, CURES AND PREVENTION. 181 fresh, sweet cream is about the best, and salt- pork the worst. There is a strong probability that oily and fatty ingredients of our diet serve a remedial by-purpose by counteracting a tuber- culous diathesis; in other words, helping the system to rid itself of lung microbes. The inhabitants of the polar regions consume enormous quantities of that lung-food. Ne- groes, to whom the climate of the United States must be semi-polar, lose no opportunity to gorge themselves with fat meat. The poor monkeys of our Northern menageries are rave- nously fond of sweet milk and cream; instinct teaches them that fat stifles tubercles. The dairy-districts of chilly North Holland enjoy a remarkable immunity from pulmonary diseases. Sandor Czoma, the Hungarian traveler, who passed several years in the highlands of Thibet, states that the Thibetan (Buddhist) monks prolong the lives of consumptives by heroic doses of clarified butter. Cold, pure air, however, remains the chief lung remedy, and as Dr. Dio Lewis always took care to assure his patients, it is by no means 182 VACCINATION A C <IME. necessary that the health-seeker should camp in the open fields in a stormy winter night. He can enjoy all the comforts of a weather- tight roof and a warm bed, while his lungs in- hale pure air of a microbe expurgating tempera- ture. No distress will be experienced by the living tabernacle of those microbes, nay, habit will make the breathing of cold air a positive luxury. Miss Florence Nightingale, the sanitary guardian-angel of the Crimean hospitals, ob- serves that "naturally human beings prefer cold lung-food as they prefer cold drinking water," and that preference increases when either cold water or cold air have to counteract a surplus of organic warmth. The stokers of a Cum rd steamer drink ice-water at the rate of a pint per five minutes, with constant relish, and after a good supper, the occupant of a snug, warm bed has organic warmth to spare, and welcomes the current of cool night air that enables his system to maintain its temperature at the nor- mal medium. A perfunctory faith in the benefits of fresh CURES AND PREVENTION. 183 air prompts many lung-patients to devote an hour or two of each day to outdoor rambles. And that habit should by no means be discour- aged ; but the trouble is that in nine out of ten such cases the mischief of each night tends to undo the benefit of each day. Lung-microbes that have been driven into their hiding places by an hour's brisk walk against a gale from the nuisance-killing north, revive in the artificial summer of a warm stove-room and continue their work of destruction all night. But with the spirits of night fighting on the side of health, a few hours of daylight campaigns will turn the scales, and force the intruders to evac- uate their entrenchments. Yet here, too, prevention is easier than cure. Even in our crowded seaport towns it is easier to avoid lung diseases than to free the system from the taint of their infection. The cause, once clearly understood, can be avoided as we would avoid smallpox or typhoid fever. At the time of the year when the contagion infests our centers of population, persons with sen- sitive lungs should keep away from stuffy as- 184 VACCINATION A CRIME. sembly rooms, libraries, meeting-houses, and the cabins of crowded ferry-steamers. A ten minutes' battle with wind and rain on deck of the ferry-boat is a lesser evil than a ten weeks' struggle with the microbes of a virulent cough. Better stay on the platform of an unventilated street-car, or jump off and lose five minutes by walking a dozen blocks, than lose five years of your life by getting saddled with the consump- tion germs of a fellow passenger. The contagiousness of consumption has been so clearly established that well-managed hos- pitals now isolate the victims of tuberculosis as they would cholera patients, and Dr. Conolly, of the Litchfield (England) Sanitarium, goes so far as to change the nurses of the consump- tion-ward from week to week, to give them a chance to disinfect their lungs from the other- wise unavoidable air poison. For similar reasons the Michigan State School Board requires teachers to protect their class rooms against the contagion of malignant catarrhs. Snuffling and coughing children are sent home before the germs of their disorder CURES AND PREVENTION. 185 taint the air which their schoolmates are obliged to breathe for six hours a day, five times a week, and which in deference to unconquerable prejudices against direct ventilation can be dis- infected only at long intervals. Absolute safeguards against contagion un- der such circumstances are, indeed, hard to en- force, and an appreciation of that fact has a good deal to do with the European custom of engaging private tutors for the children of all families that can possibly afford the expense. Thousands of home-teachers ("Hauslehrer") are employed in Germany, Austria, Russia, Holland, Belgium, and even in republican France, and, by sharing the sports of their pu- pils can impart all sorts of miscellaneous in- formation and thus often teach more in a month than public schools could in a year. But that ad- vantage is a trifle compared with the lessened risk of contagion, in manifold meanings of the word. The Hauslehrer is generally a graduate of some college, waiting his turn for govern- ment employment, and if gymnastics and out- door exercise have invigorated his lungs, his 186 VACCINATION A CRIME. pupils, on the country seat of an agricultural nobleman or well-to-do manufacturer, may reach the middle of their teens without having ever known catarrhs from personal experience. Where public schools are Hobson's choice, sanitarians should instruct their children to make the best of every recess, and try persua- sion, stratagem or bribery, to secure a seat near a window. There are ways and means to es- tablish a draught, appreciable only to close- range observers, and a little extra share of life- air may help to keep microbes at bay. There is no doubt that perfumes have a similar tend- ency, and a handkerchief, drenched with Co- logne, may save doctors' bills and perhaps the expenses of a winding-sheet. But, if, in spite of all such precautions, one of your youngsters should get boarded by a crew of roving mi- crobes, prevent further mischief by isolating him as soon as the symptoms of his affliction begin to manifest themselves: Remove his playthings and his bed to some out-of-the-way room for a week or two, and make him play outdoors as much as possible. CURES AND PREVENTION, 187 A time will come when public schools will teach the rudiments of natural hygiene, but in the meantime parents must do what they can to anticipate that concession to common sense. Acquaint your children with the chief health- laws of Nature, and teach them to shun air poisons as they shun alcohol or contaminated drinking water. In avoiding the contagion of lung diseases it should be remembered that in unventilated buildings the germs of respiratory disorders will retain their vitality for months, and attack a visitor as the starved rats of a deserted house would pounce upon the comestibles of the new tenant. Catarrh-ridden dupes of the night-air superstition close the windows and doors of their bedrooms the very day they vacate a tene- ment, and thus leave a legacy of lung poison for the next comer. Before moving into a sus- pected house, it is, indeed, a good plan to dis- infect it from attic to cellar. Burn panfuls of juniper berries and ollibanum, and let the smoke penetrate every cranny; expose vessels with chloride of lime; then open every window in 188 VACCINATION A CRIME. the house and give the breeze a three days' chance to complete the work of expurgation. The naturalist Buckland mentions a British surgeon who tested an antidote for serpent- virus by provoking the bite of a cobra. The philanthropist Howard deliberately risked his life for the purpose of promoting his projects of prison reform. Would the deliverance of mankind from the curse of life-blighting disorders not warrant the much less serious risk of experiments suffi- cientlv conclusive to settle the air-poison con- troversy? The question whether catarrhs, the most frequent, and consumption, the most fatal, of all known diseases, are caused by cold out- door air or by warm, stagnant and polluted in- door air? Dr. Charles Page, of Boston, tried something of the kind by deliberately exposing himself to the storms of a winter night, and sitting, un- dressed, near the open window of his bedroom, for a number of hours, to ascertain if he could "catch cold" in that manner. All he could ac- complish on that plan was to make himself CURES AND PREVENTION. 189 shiver; "I got cold, very cold," he says, "and after going to bed, got warm again; that was all." No cough, no sneezing-fits, no pulmonary congestion, nothing whatever resembling the symptoms of a catarrh. Yet that negative result might be attributed to the exceptional hardiness of the doctor's con- stitution, and in order to be accepted as wholly conclusive, the test-experiment should not be limited to individuals. Consumption devours a million human lives every year-at least a hun- dred times as many as the aggregate of all the victims of serpent-bites and jail-fevers. Con- sidering the transcendent importance of the question, it should not be difficult to secure a hundred volunteers from the students of Amer- ican medical colleges alone. At all events, i per cent, of the sum which philanthropists yearly expend for miscellaneous reforms would suffice to hire assistants to a dozen experimenters which almost every intel- ligent physician would undertake to engage. Vagrants, sailors and street Arabs would jump 190 VACCINATION A CRIME. at the chance to earn fifty dollars by risking a "cold." The only essential qualification of every can- didate should be complete freedom from ca- tarrh symptoms before the beginning of the microbe chase. Then divide the elect for the indoor and out- door test. Colorado papers, a year ago, re- ported the case of a young hunter who, for a bet of five dollars, ran naked in a zero blizzard, from the stoop of a highland hotel to the top of a snow-covered hill, and returned safe and sound; but the next day was grieved to ascer- tain that his hard-earned bank-note was a counterfeit. For the ten-fold sum scores of enterprising contemporaries, east or west, would agree to undergo Dr. Page's ordeal, or trot barefoot in wet grass, walk about in a rain storm-in short, provoke "colds" by the alleged most ap- proved outdoor methods, but should adjourn (in the evening) to comfortable and thorough- ly ventilated bedrooms. The other half should be invited to ride for CURES AND PREVENTION. 191 a day in crowded street-cars, or pass the night in the unventilated dormitory of a metropolitan lodging-house. Fifty for inside, fifty for outside experiments, and all in charge of responsible referees. The tests to be repeated, for, say, half a week, by which time about three-fourths of the in- siders could be warranted to have developed in- disputable catarrhs. If, in the meantime, not a single one of the outsiders should manifest any trace of a cold, a mathematician would certify the definite set- tlement of the catarrh question. And patholo- gists would add their testimony, to the effect that consumption is essentially a chronic ca- tarrh, differing from a common cold and cough only by greater persistence and virulence. In other words, we would know, what sanita- rians have suspected for years, that in nine out of ten cases lung disorders have been aggra- vated by prevalent misconceptions of their cause. A syndicate of nostrum-mongers, of course, would be apt to protest against an experiment 192 VACCINATION A CRIME. involving a possible sacrifice of human life- though thousands of tenement owners and sweat-shop managers incur that risk unre- buked. In view of that possibility, and also by way of supplementary evidence, I would propose another test. Not a single one of our next zoological rela- tives, the intelligent man-apes of the eastern tropics, has ever survived the third year of his confinement in a northern menagerie. They all die of consumption in a period varying from three to thirty months. The summer of the second year generally proves fatal. That result is persistently ascribed to climatic vicissitudes, though some of those four-handed patients have been guarded against every breath of cold air and nursed and drugged, regardless of expense. A pair of fine chimpanzees in the zoological garden of Cincinnati, Ohio, were housed between double walls of plate-glass, the hall containing their little crystal palace being itself thoroughly warmed and barred against draughts. They lived like princes; in a park CURES AND PREVENTION. 193 enclosure no nabob of the tropics could have kept them half as warm. Result: Death from tuberculosis in its most horrible form at the end of the second year. "Gentlemen, I take it all back,'' said the sur- geon conducting the autopsy, " Tat Rooney' (the male of the two microbe martyrs) is just a mass of tubercles." Mrs. Rooney survived her mate only a few days. The same experience in the Regent's Park menagerie, in the Jardin des Plantes, in the Berlin Thiergarten, in the Philadelphia Fairmount Zoo. All the man-apes received at those establishments were locked up in sweat- boxes, and all, without a single exception, died of lung marasmus. In the interest of science, if not of suffering mankind, an international commission should procure a dozen of these animals and give them the benefit of a fresh-air sanitarium. The sweat-boxers have simplified the experiment; their own plan has been tried so thoroughly and so often that its repetition would be a waste of trouble. 194 VACCINATION A CRIMfi. There would be a possibility of some of the new-plan boarders having already contracted a taint of lung complaints-in ship-cabins, and elsewhere; but that would not make much dif- ference, provided the captives, as usual, should be nearly all young specimens. They should be warmly dressed at the ap- proach of winter, and taught to sleep under cover of woolen shawls, but should never be allowed to enter a room, stable or hall furnish- ing facilities for the development of air mi- crobes. One simple plan for the prevention of that risk would be Prof. Schrodt's arrangement of double dormitories-adjoining rooms, of which one is always aired by wide-open win- dows while the other is occupied; the tenants shifting from one to the other every twelve hours. In addition each room should have an open-air annex that could be used for gym- nastic purposes on every fair-weather day from March till November. The diet should include a liberal allowance of fresh fruit; but also bread, milk and raw eggs, and now and then a dish of sweet cream. CURES AND PREVENTION. 195 No lung-sick visitors to be admitted; no drug dispensers or tobacco smokers. If, on that plan, the relatives of the swift- dying swelter-trap victims should all survive the tenth year of their captivity, the logical in- ference could not very well be mistaken; if in the course of the next twenty years a few of them should die of causes demonstrably uncon- nected with any trace of respiratory disorders, the conclusiveness of the test would again be complete. It would clinch the evidence of the preceding experiment; it would prove that, for a long se- ries of centuries, lung diseases have been at- tributed to the wrong cause and aggravated by wrong prescriptions. THE END.