[back] Smallpox vaccination lies
[extract from] Book: LEICESTER: SANITATION versus VACCINATION BY J.T. BIGGS J.P.
Mr. Hutchinson, a member of the Royal Commission on Vaccination lying over vaccine syphilis
There are other recent cases, including the shameful Leeds case (see " Vaccination Inquirer," July, 1891, page 58), which so indelibly stamps the proceedings of the Medical Department of the Local Government Board with an infamous disregard of professional honesty. Even Mr. Jonathan Hutchinson, in a letter to Mr. Brown, of King's Lynn, dated 14th March, 1891, and published in the " Lynn Advertiser," wrote :—
"During the last ten years, or, perhaps, considerably more, not a single instance of vaccination syphilis has been recorded in British practice. The risk, such as it is, is absolutely avoided by the use of calf lymph, and almost as absolutely by care in the selection of the vaccinifer."
It will scarcely be believed, but such is the fact, that at the very time this letter was penned, Mr. Hutchinson, as a member of the Royal Commission on Vaccination, not only knew of the case of Emily Maud Child, at Leeds, in 1889, but also contributed an article to No. 2 of "The Archives of Surgery," headed, "On three fatal cases of gangrenous ulceration of the arm after vaccination." This was, of course, intended only for professional consumption. He writes :—
"When such symptoms as snuffles, thrush, and eruption on the genitals in infancy are mentioned, not a few will hold that the suspicion is rendered very strong, if not, actually proven, in the same way, nodes on the head, bubo in the armpit, phagedaenic sores, abscesses and eruptions on the genitals occurring in connection with a vaccination sore which has gone wrong, will be held by many as conclusive proofs that syphilis has been introduced. I cannot but freely admit that they bring with them much suspicion, and that this suspicion is strengthened by the fact that well-experienced surgeons who saw these various symptoms and examined them carefully thought that they could be none other than syphilis. Further, there is the fact that two of the infants were thought to have been much benefited by mercurial treatment. . . . The cases look to me quite as much like vaccinia as syphilis. Whatever their real nature, it is, of course, impossible to refuse to recognise them as the direct conequences of vaccination. Any attempt to do this would be, to my mind, a dishonesty."