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 CHAPTER IV

TWO GREAT EXPERIMENTS WHICH ARE CONCLUSIVE AGAINST VACCINATION

who disbelieve in the efficacy of vaccination to protect against small-pox are under the disadvantage that, owing to the practice having been so rapidly adopted by all civilized people, there are no communities who have rejected it while adopting methods of general sanitation, and who have also kept satisfactory records of mortality from various causes. Any such country would have afforded what is termed a "control" or test experiment, the absence of which vitiates all the evidence of the so-called "variolous test" in Jenner's time, as was so carefully pointed out before the Commission by Dr. Creighton and Professor Crookshank. "We do, however, now possess two such tests on a limited, but still a sufficient, scale. The first is that of the town of Leicester, which for the last twenty years has rejected vaccination till it has now almost vanished altogether. The second is that of our Army and Navy, in which, for a quarter of a century, every recruit has been revaccinated, unless he has recently been vaccinated or has had small-pox. In the first we have an almost wholly "unprotected" population of nearly 200,000, which, on the theory of the vaccinators, should have suffered exceptionally 54