far the greatest member of the Vacarescu family in the male line was Iancu (1786–1863), the son of Alexander. He received an excellent education not only in Greek but also in German and French, and was well versed in the literature of the West. An ardent patriot, he sided with the national movement in 1821, and assisted in establishing the Rumanian theatre, translating many books and plays from German and French into Rumanian, notably the Britannicus of Corneille, a literary event of no small importance at the time. He inaugurated modern Rumanian poetry. In 1830 appeared his first volume of verse. He died in 1863. A niece of Alexander is the gifted writer Elena Vacarescu (Helene Vacaresco), who inherited the poetical talent of her family and has enriched Rumanian literature with her Bard of the Dimbovitza, and other poems and novels in Rumanian and in French. (M. G.)
VACARIUS (1120–1200?), Italian civilian and canonist, the first known teacher of Roman law in England, was doubtless of the school of Bologna, though of a later generation than the hearers of Irnerius. He was brought to Canterbury, possibly by Becket, together with a supply of books upon the civil law, to act as counsel (causidicus) to Archbishop Theobald in his struggle, which ended successfully in 1146, to obtain the
transfer of the legateship from the bishop of Winchester to himself. We next hear of Vacarius as lecturing at Oxford, in
1149, to “crowds of rich and poor,” and as preparing, for the
use of the latter, a compendium, in nine books, of the Digest
and Code of Justinian, “sufficient,” it was said, “if thoroughly
mastered, to solve all legal questions commonly debated in the
schools.” It became a leading text-book in the nascent university,
and its popular description as the Liber pauperum gave
rise to the nickname pauperistae applied to Oxford students
of law. Nearly complete MSS. of this work are still in existence,
notably in the cathedral libraries at Worcester and Prague and
in the town library at Bruges. Fragments of it are also preserved in the Bodleian and in several college libraries at Oxford.
The new learning was not destined to make its way without opposition. King Stephen silenced Vacarius, and ordered the destruction of the books of civil and canon law which had been imported by Theobald. The edict to this effect seems, however, not to have been in force after the death of its royal author in 1154 (“eo magis virtus legis invaluit quo eam amplius nitebatur impietas infirmare,” Joh. Sarisburiensis). There is ample evidence that the civil law was soon once more a favourite study at Oxford, where we learn that, in 1100, two students from Friesland were wont to divide between them the hours of the night for the purpose of making a copy of the Liber pauperum. Whether or no Vacarius ever resumed his Oxford lectures after their interruption by Stephen we are not informed. In any case he was soon called off to practical work, as legal adviser and ecclesiastical judge in the northern province, by his old friend and colleague at Canterbury, Roger de Pont l’Eveque, after the promotion of the latter, in the year of Stephen’s death, to the archbishopric of York. Thenceforth the name of “magister Vacarius” is of very frequent occurrence, in papal letters and the chronicles of the period, as acting in these capacities. He was rewarded with a prebend in the collegiate church of secular canons at Southwell, half of which he was allowed in 1191 to cede to his “nephew” Reginald. He is last heard of in 1198, as commissioned, together with the prior of Thurgarton, by Pope Innocent III. to carry into execution, in the north of England, a letter with reference to the crusade. It is doubtless to the second half of the life of Vacarius that the composition must be attributed of two works the MS. of which, formerly the property of the Cistercian Abbey of Biddleston, is now in the Cambridge University library. One of these, Summa de assumpto homine, is of a theological character, dealing with the humanity of Christ; the other, Summa de matrimonio, is a legal argument, to the effect that the essential fact in marriage is neither, as Gratian maintains, the copula, nor, as Peter Lombard, consent by verba de praesenti, but mutual traditio.
Authorities.—Most of the original authorities are textually set out and annotated by Prof. T. E. Holland in vol. ii. of the Oxford Historical Society’s Collectanea (1890). Wenck, in his Magister Vacarius (1820), prints the prologue, and a table of contents, of the Liber pauperum, from a MS. how lost. He returns to the subject in Stieber’s Opuscula academica (1834). F. Maitland in the Law Quarterly Review, xiii. pp. 133, 270 (1897), gives a full account of the Cambridge MSS., printing in extenso the Summa de matrimonio See also Muhlenbruch, Obs. juris Rom. i. 36; Hanel, in the Leips. Lit. Zeitung (1828), No. 42, “Intelligenzblatt,” p. 334; Savigny, Geschichte, iv. 423; Stolzel, Lehre von der operis novi denunt. (1865), pp. 592–620, and in the Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte, vi. p. 234 ; Catalogue general des MSS. des bibliothèques publiques de France: Départements, t. x. Lieberman, in the English Historical Review, xi. (1906), pp. 305, 514, identified Vacarius with one “Vac.” of Mantua, the author of Contraria legum Longobardorum, but withdrew this antecedently improbable suggestion (ib. vol. xiii.) after T. Patella had shown, in the Atti della R. Academia di Torino, xxxii., that “Vac. Mantuanus,” the author of the Contraria, must have been “Vacella,” who, in 1189, was a judge at Mantua. (T. E. H.)
VACCINATION (from Lat. vacca, a cow), the term originally devised for a method of protective inoculation against smallpox, consisting in the intentional transference to the human being of the eruptive disease of cattle called cow-pox (vaccinia). The discovery of vaccination is due to Dr Edward Jenner (q.v.), at the time a country medical practitioner of Berkeley, in the vale of Gloucester, whose investigations were first published in 1798 in the form of a pamphlet entitled An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, &c. Many years previously, while he was an apprentice to a medical man at Sodbury, near Bristol, his attention was directed to a belief, widely prevalent in Gloucestershire during the latter half of the 18th century, that those persons who in the course of their employment on dairy farms happened to contract cow-pox were thereby protected from a subsequent attack of small-pox. In particular, his interest was aroused by a casual remark made by a young countrywoman who happened to come to the surgery one day for advice, and who; on hearing mention made of small-pox, immediately volunteered the statement that she could not take the disease, as she had had cow-pox. On coming up to London in 1770, to finish his medical education, Jenner became a pupil of John Hunter, with whom he frequently discussed the question of the possibility of obtaining protection against small-pox. On his return to his native village of Berkeley in 1773, to practise as a medical man, he took every opportunity of talking over and investigating the matter, but it was not until May 1796 that he actually began to make experiments. His first case of vaccination was that of a boy eight years of age, named James Phipps, whom he inoculated in the arm with cow-pox matter taken from a sore on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairymaid, who had become infected with the disease by milking cows suffering from cowpox. It was apparently not until 1798 that he made his first attempt to carry on a strain of lymph from arm to arm. In the spring of that year he inoculated a child with matter taken directly from the nipple of a cow, and from the resulting vesicle on the arm of the child first Operated upon, he inoculated, or, as it may now be more correctly termed, "vaccinated," another. From this child several others were vaccinated. From one of these a fourth remove was successfully carried out, and finally a fifth. Four of these children were subsequently inoculated with small-pox— the “variolous test”—without result. The success of many such experiments, in his own hands and in those of his contemporaries, led Jenner to express his belief—"a mistaken one, as events have proved—that the protective influence of vaccination would be found to last throughout the lifetime of the person operated on. Obviously he did not realize the fact that the data at his disposal were insufficient for the formation of an accurate judgment on this point, since time alone could prove the exact duration of the protection originally obtained. Subsequent experience has demonstrated that, as has been well said by a writer in the Edinburgh Review, “even after efficient vaccination a slow progress away from safety and towards danger is inevitable, and re-vaccination at least once after childhood is necessary if protection is to be maintained.”
