Memphis daily appeal. [volume] (Memphis, Tenn.) 1847-1886, 1882-02-17
THE EVILS OF VACCINATION.


The country was laboring under the happy
delusion that if medical jurisprudence had
established any one point satisfactorily it
WAS that vaccination was preventive of
smallpox and that there was but little dan
ger attending the precaution. But a. discus
sion has broken out on this subject which is a
surprise to the country. A perusal of this
discussion causes the blood of all TO curdle
aud much alarm to those who have re-
Gently been vaccInated. If some of the ply
sicians are to be believed, the preventive
remedy is worse than the disease. An arti-
Gle has recently appeared written, it is said,
by an eminent surgeon of the Federal army,
in which it is shown that disease and death
have been brought into families by the use
OF impure vaccine matter. The writer
saws OF his own personal knowledge
that sixty-one true and noble sol
diers of the Union army, who had
bravely come forward to defend their coun-
try and fight its battles, and who had con-
ddiugly submitted to vaccination as one of
the preliminary requirements, had been in
oculated with syphilis, and insists that vac
cination often communicates syphilis, and is
the prolific parent Of scrofula, consumption,
ricketts,, cancer and similar diseases. The
writer, in his opposition, goes ta,-+ tfSs
kissing is dangerous experiment, "that
may transform a saint into a charnelhouse
of decayed virtues and moral obliquities;
and that since our great war this disease has
been spread broadcast through all classes of
1. III
maintains that the bovine virus is often i'm
pure, and transmits disease down to many
generations. DIR. c. r. S. Curtis, a physician
at Quincy, Illinois, exposes the fallacy of
this army surgeon by showing that "such
accidents have never been reported by the
best authors and observers of England, and
only one or two supposed cases of the kind
are reported from France, while many of
the greatest German pathologists deny its
possibility, after having tried upon their
own persons to produce syphilis from vac
cine lymph taken from patients known to be
laboring under the disease. In regard to the
second point, in which it is alleged that
sixty-one true and noble soldiers of the war
were inoculated with syphilis under the pre-
tense Of being vaccinated, an interested and
inquiring public would like to be informed
who was responsible for this culpable out
rage, and why court-martial was not held |
to inquire into the history of the crime |
They would be glad to know where
the responsibility of such reckless
and disgraceful wholesale malprac-
tice and contamination of the blood
of brave and loyal soldiers rested. Perhaps
the surgeon-in-chief to the Second Division |
of the Sixteenth Army Corps might en-
Tighten us on that point" All this talk |
about the dangers of vaccination is the
merest bosh. Millions of people have been
vaccinated in the United States during the
past two menths, and the country has heard |
no reports of the evils predicted by the sensa-
tional physicians who seek notoriety by de-
vaccination. We presume eight |
or ten thousand people have been vaccinated |
here in Memphis during the past four weeks
without any evil results.