A DOCTOR’S REASONS FOR OPPOSING VACCINATION.

 In opposing vaccination I am aware that it is a thankless task to
 brave the abuse and antagonism which everyone who attempts to move
 forward in the work of medical progress is sure to encounter.

In order that I may not be regarded as prejudiced against the dogma of vaccination, I will preface my remarks with the confession that I was at one time myself a confiding dupe of the “tradition of the dairymaids.”  While attending medical college I was told that inoculation with cow pox virus was a certain preventive of small-pox, and like most other medical students I accepted with childlike faith and credulity the dictum of my teachers as so much infallible wisdom.  After an experience derived from treating a number of cases of post-vaccinal small-pox in patients who gave evidence of having been recently and successfully vaccinated, I awoke to a realisation of the unpleasant fact that “protective vaccination” was not all that was claimed for it.  I thereupon began a study of the vaccination problem in all its bearings.  After several years of reading, observation and experience I became fully convinced that “successful” vaccination not only fails to protect its subjects from small-pox, but that, in reality, it renders them more susceptible to this disease by impairing their health and vitality, and by diminishing their power of resistance.

Personally, I have known of recently vaccinated patients dying from small-pox while having the plainest foveated vaccine marks upon their bodies, and I have seen other individuals who had never submitted to vaccine inoculation have variola in its mildest and most benign type.

In view of such experience I refused to ignore the evidence of my own senses, and determined to follow the dictates of reason instead of the dogmas of faith, and have, consequently, for the past fifteen years refused to pollute the blood of a single person with vaccine virus.

I oppose vaccination because I believe that health is always preferable to disease.  The principle and practice of vaccination involves the introduction of the contagion of disease at least twice, and, according to numerous authorities, many times, into the human organism.  The disease conveyed by vaccination causes an undeniable impairment of health and vitality, it being a distinctly vaccine “lymph,” is taken from a lesion on the body of a diseased beast, and inserted by the vaccinator into the circulation of healthy children.  The performance of such an insanitary operation, in the very nature of the case, is a violation of the cardinal principles of hygiene and of sanitary science....  Moreover, this operation is in direct controversion of the basic principles of aseptic surgery, the legitimate aim of which is to remove from the organism the products of disease, but never to introduce them.