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CHAP. I reverse, for several reasons. In the first place, they are interested parties, not merely in a pecuniary sense, but as affecting the prestige of the whole profession. In no other case should we allow interested persons to decide an important matter. Whether iron ships are safer than wooden ones is not decided by ironmasters or by shipbuilders, but by the experience of sailors and by the statistics of loss. In the administration of medicine or any other remedy for a disease, the conditions are different. The doctor applies the remedy and watches the result, and if he has a large practice he thereby obtains knowledge and experience which no other persons possess. But in the case of vaccination, and especially in the case of public vaccinators, the doctor does not see the result except by accident. Those who get small-pox go to the hospitals, or are treated by other medical men, or may have left the district, and the relation between the vaccination and the attack of small-pox can only be discovered by the accurate registration of all the cases and deaths, with the facts as to vaccination or revaccination. "When these facts are accurately registered, to determine what they teach is not the business of a doctor but of a statistician, and there is much evidence to show that doctors are bad statisticians, and have a special faculty for misstating figures. This allegation is so grave and so fundamental to the question at issue, that a few facts must be given in support of it.

The National Vaccine Establishment, supported by Government grants, issued periodical Reports, which were printed by order of the House of Commons, and in successive years we find the following statements: In 1812, and again in 1818, it is stated that "previous to the discovery of vaccination the average number of deaths by small-pox within the (London) Bills of Mortality was 2,000 annually; whereas in the last year only 751 persons have died of the disease, although the increase of population within the last ten years has been 133,139."

The number 2,000 is about the average small-pox