The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1910-08-12
MAJOR BOUDREN ON VACCINATION
 IN BRITISH INDIA

IN DnlIIOn MUIR To the Editor of the Farmer. Sir:
 May I be permitted to say somethins in closing relative to the pro-vaccination views of that estimable lady. the wife of the missionary to India. who has recently. in a letter to the Farmer. de- tended the rite of vaccination as of assistance in stopping the ravages of small pox, where that disease still prevails.
 Cautiously enough. she defends vac to believe it has done to check small pox in India.
 And yet she was in Connecticut when her letter was written, in a state in which vaccination is less practiced than in India. and in which there is almost no small pox.
 Not in four or five years. l believe. has there been death from small pox in Connecticut.
 But in India, as she herself has shown. the people die of the disease
 Then where does vaccination come in.
 The truth of the matter is that this lady when she thought of India thought of it as a place in which vac cination was little practiced and when she thought of Connecticut she thought of it as @ place where vaccination is the rule and not the exception.
 But, as Mrs. Loat and other of your correspondents have shown. vac cination has prevailed in India since earliest days, is and for almost hund- red years has been rigidly enforced by the British. so that the people of India are better vaccinated than the people of Great Britain. But the much vaccinated people of India die frequently of small pox. while the less vaccinated people of all
 And why is this? The difference is because of the diff ference in the conditions of life in India and in England. The one people are therded together, impoverished. underfed victims of ages of unsanitary environment. As they die of small pOx. so do they of plague and cholera and other fear full diseases of which the people of England. of Connecticut and of other first grade states do not die. because the conditions of life are so unfavor- able in one case and so favorable in the other.
 A few months ago we had a case of small pox in Bridgeport.
  just come off an immigrant ship. His body was scarlet with the wounds of a recent vaccination. Mayhap the very disease in him was due to the contagion of small pox transmitted in the poisonous virus with by some doctor whose brain had been innoculated with belief in this historic superstition of vaccination. And I say to this dear lady that of those swarming millions who during the last 20 years have suffered small pox in India. that upon their bodies. a multitude of their living and dead there was impressed the livid scars of poison put by British surgeons into life currents already enfeebled by heredity, and unfavorable environ ment.
 Always the vaccination fought on the side of death, for it means and always means and always must mean. con- tamination of the life fluids. It means disease and every disease weakens the system somewhat, and hastens some what the journey to the grave. Disease administered to the swarm ing herds of India by law for more than a century leaves it still the pest house of the continents, threat to Europe, the danger of mankind. Not the unvaccinated are the cause of this. but mans inhumanity to man.
 
 starvation, kept in bondage and filth as the people of India are. were ever subject to pOx, plague and pestilence.
 Even so was it of the people of Eng land herself in the days before an awakening democracy forced rule from absolutism. and obtained. at the point, of the sword. living conditions for the masses of the people. Let this good lady take heed also of Japan. whose people are the most vaccinated in the world. Let her, I beg, read the United States reports upon the enormous small pox mortality in that country. where again the reason is in the con- ditions of life to which crowded population must submit. I will not again ask the Farmer to print those portentious figures. But this dear lady may fall back upon the doctors. as so many do. to 1 find support for her belief in vacci- nation.
 Do not all the doctors believe in vaccination?
 No, not all. Many do. But the doctors also believed in in- noeulation.
 The doctors introduced innoculation | into England upon the initiative of a woman many years ago.
 The custom spread throughout l Europe.
 It made Europe a hot bed of small | pox.
 The disease was grown by the doctors as a market gardener forces lettuce. It kept the doctors busy until the practice was restrained by law. The ancient statute books of Con- necticut still contain the laws that were passed to prevent innoculation. The paper is made in Connecticut upon which will be written the law forbidding the filthy practice of vacci- nation.
 Oh, madame. how many lame. and blind, how many with rotting flesh. | falling from decaying bones have seen because of vaccination. Take pus from the rotting sore of tortured calf. Scarify that poison | into the blood of a babe. That is vaccination. That is contamination of the blood | of the race almost at the source. know only one contamination more deadly.
 And that contamination also is not infrequently communicated by vacci- | nation.
 MAJOR THOMAS BOUDREN.