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HORSE-GREASE COW-POX.
"This," said Jenner, "is the life-preserving fluid," and he went home to write about the wonderful virtues of horse-grease cow-pox. However, it was necessary to perform an experiment, and he inoculated a boy named John Baker with horse-grease, direct from the horse's heels. He intended later to inoculate him with small-pox in order to see whether it would take, but it was something like the case of the man, you remember, who had an idea that if he only gave his horse a gradually diminishing diet he would at last be able to keep it on nothing. You remember that the horse died before the experiment could be completed, and it was the same with John Baker, for the poor boy died in the workhouse directly afterwards from a contagious fever contracted from the inoculation. ("Shame.")
He then took some of the horse-grease cow-pox and inoculated six children, and without waiting to see the result or to prove whether it would take or not he rushed to London to get his paper printed. And in that paper he had the audacity to assert that it was not necessary to wait to see the result because the proofs he already had were so conclusive, and the experiments had told such an extraordinary tale—although he had completed but one experiment in his life, and that did not prove it at all. That boy James Phipps was hawked about the country as a proof of vaccination, but he had not been inoculated with horse-grease cow-pox at all, but with spontaneous cow-pox, which Jenner now declared in his second paper was absolutely useless and unprotective against the disease. But as soon as the paper was published the outcry was tremendous. "What," said the people, "take horse-grease, filthy grease from horses' heels, take that and put it into the blood of a child!" No, they would have nothing to do with it. They did not mind having cow-pox without the horse, but they could not think of having the cow-pox with the horse in it. Dr. Pearson wrote Jenner telling him he must take the horse out, or "it would damn the whole thing." Consequently—there is no accounting for taste—they denounced horse-grease cow-pox, but were prepared to accept spontaneous cow-pox. What did Jenner do? Did he attempt to stick up for his creed or to prove that he was right? No;
HE WANTED MONEY.
He said he was looking forward "in the fond hope of enjoying independence," declaring he was in an impecunious condition. He accepted the verdict of the people. They wanted cow-pox; they should have it. And accordingly he wrote a third paper and tried to wipe out what he had written before. With the exception of a solitary footnote in that paper horse-grease cow-pox was not mentioned at all, and he fell back on the spontaneous cow-pox theory which he had previously denounced as useless and unprotective. This spontaneous cow-pox is what we are recommended to have by Dr. Bond in almost his last clause, i.e., having lymph direct from the cow which is denounced by the discoverer himself as absolutely unprotective against the disease in question.
