18 - The Great Pox
from Part II - The Reign of Compulsion
Summary
If there was one source of danger that ranked above even erysipelas in the minds of anti-vaccinationists it was syphilis – the Great Pox, the ‘disease of diseases’. The argument dated as far back as the years when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was in the vanguard of advocates of the ‘Byzantine Operation’. In one of the earlier adverse comments William Wagstaffe suggested in 1722 that an inoculator might seriously reflect
that when he injects matter into the blood in this way it may be possible and even probable to communicate another Distemper, besides the Small Pox. Suppose the person the matter is taken from has the King's Evil, the Pox, Madness or some other inveterate disease. What would be the consequence of the method in such a case?
In the following year Sir Richard Blackmore, in a Treatise upon the SmallPox, raised the same objection:
it is very probable, that the seeds of other distempers may be communicated with those of the Small-Pox, contained in the prurient matter taken from the ripe pustules of the patient […] It is allowed that the principles of the King's Evil, of Consumption, Lunacy, and Venereal Disease are conveyed from fathers to their children successively through many generations: and are therefore called hereditary: a sad inheritance!
These warnings were not seriously taken up, perhaps because during the first twenty or so years from the introduction of inoculation the number of operations performed could be counted in hundreds, and the possibility that ‘other distempers’ could be ‘insinuated’ with the smallpox could be discounted.
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- The Vaccination ControversyThe Rise, Reign and Fall of Compulsory Vaccination for Smallpox, pp. 223 - 230Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007