(8)
A MOST SUPERSTITIOUS PERIOD
in which Jenner lived, when live frogs were swallowed for the cure of worms; when cow dung and humanexcreta were mixed with milk and butter for diphtheria; when the brains of a man who died a violent death were given in teaspoonful doses for thecure of small-pox. Even Jenner had invented, not merely a cure for small-pox, but also one for hydrophobia, which quite takes the steam out of Pasteur’s treatment. All you had to do was to duck the man who had been bitten three times in a stream of running water, only taking care that each time you ducked him life became almost extinct. (Laughter.) He said he never knew that to fail under any circumstances. (Renewed laughter.) He evidently had an idea that persons bitten by a mad dog became possessed of an evil spirit, and should be treated as they used to treat the witches. So much for Jenner.
When he first of all heard the story of the cow-pox legend that the dairymaids talked about, that if you only had cow-pox you can’t have small-pox, he began to mention it at the meetings of the Medico-convivial Society, where the old doctors of the day met together to smoke their pipes, drink their glasses of grog, and talk over their cases. But he no sooner mentioned it than they laughed at it. The cow doctors could have told him of hundreds of cases where small-pox had followed cow-pox, and Jenner found he would have to drop it. In 1796, however, he performed
HIS FIRST EXPERIMENT
as it is called. He took a boy named James Phipps and ‘inoculated him with some lymph which he took from a cow-pox vesicle. A short time afterwards he inoculated this boy with small-pox, and for very solid reasons which could be explained, the small-pox did not take. “Now,” said Jenner, “is the grand discovery. This will answer my purpose, and I shall soon be able to get another paper for the Royal Society,’’ to follow in the wake of the glorious cuckoo, which has been wittily termed “the bird that layed the vaccination egg.” (Laughter.) That was in 1796, and we are close upon the century since that wonderful experiment. Russia is preparing to celebrate it, and the
Bristol medical men are sending round for subscriptions for £1,000 in order to purchase the relics of this wonderful man—such as his snuff box, his lancets, and the chair the great man sat in—to put in the museum of the Bristol University. I have noticed that the doctors have omitted one important article which appeared in the Bristol , Exhibition—
A HAIR FROM THE TAIL OF THE FIRST COW
that supplied the vaccine lymph. (Loud laughter.) I am sorry they have left that out. I am sure nothing would so stir the hearts of the coming race of medical men as an evidence of belief in the principle contained in the old herb book by which a person had to carry a hair of the tail of the dog that bit him. (Laughter.) I do not know whether
