Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/386

370 twenty-three cases, the most advanced minds among doctors at home, as well as in all the capitals of Europe, were hospitable to the discovery and perceived the immense benefits likely to flow from it. On the 27th of November, 1798, Jenner vaccinated two children of a Mr. Hicks with lymph taken from a farm at Stonehouse, this gentleman being the first private subject to allow the experiment on his children.

Lady Ducie was the first person of rank who gave tangible support to the practice by having her only child vaccinated. No better comment on the better day in which we live exists through the diffusion of knowledge by the newspaper press, daily recording the discoveries of scientists, than the audacious attempt made in London to supplant Jenner, which came near being successful, and during its progress beclouded his discovery and caused him great anxiety, notwithstanding which the story of the triumphant adoption of the practice in all the enlightened countries of the earth reads like a fairy tale. Monarchs honored him, decorations and gifts were showered upon him, and, in the height of his joy, there was not wanting the one black drop to keep him humble and sober, in the existence of a knot of anti-vaccinationists whose pestilent successors are not yet vanished from the face of the earth, though very recently towns in which their influence has ruled have been scourged with smallpox. At this juncture he wrote to his friend Gardner: "At present I have not the most distant doubt that any person who has once felt the influence of perfect cow-pox matter would never be susceptible of smallpox, but on the contrary, when the disease has been excited by the matter of cow-pox in an imperfect condition, the specific change of the constitution necessary to render the contagion of smallpox harmless is not produced; and in this point of view there is a close analogy between the propagation of the cow-pox and the smallpox. Therefore, I conceive that it would be prudent, until further inquiry has thrown every light on the subject that it is capable of receiving, that—like those who were the objects of my experiments—all should be subjected to the test of variolous matter who have been inoculated for smallpox."

Another circumstance of a different sort at times tried Jenner's accurate and scientific soul. He had vaccinated thousands gratuitously, and taught many persons to perform the operation correctly; clergymen and noblemen and women learned to perform the operation, strictly according to his instruction, and applied their knowledge on thousands of the people dependent upon them with perfect success; but doctors, wise in their own conceit, caused every now and again disaster, by not being careful enough about the exact "right time" to take the lymph in the arm-toarm practice that had generally disseminated itself.