Dr. Martin on Vaccination [From the Erie, (Pa.,) Observer.] Dit. Wilkins—Dear /Sir: There is nothing connected with the extreme oc- cupation of mj*- time that I feel more than the incapacity which it inflicts on me of not answering such letters as vour last as their importance demands. In order to write this imperfect answer 1 have been obliged to rise at 5 a. m., and so get an hour or two of time tree from the calls of patients. The letter of ■ J. S. Skeels is like every other that I have seen from an anti-vaccinator; lull of assertions and statements calculated to frighten ill-in- formed people, and to fill them with the belief that Jenner was little less than a fiend, and that the great army of his fol- lowers, including the vast majority of the medical profession, and all the men who give solidity, respectability and reliability to the profession of medicine, are heart- less creatures; either knaves or idiots, who, for the sake of the generally very paltry tee received for vaccination, or be- cause they are fools, persist in an abomin- able practice, utterly destructive of hu- manity and far worse than small-pox, &c., &c., and all this in spite of the calm log- ical light, making their errors so manifest, which radiates from the wise and disin- terested Skeels. The simple answer to this charge against the medical profession is, that before the introduction of vacci- nation small-pox practice was, without exception, the most lucrative ot all a phy- sician’s business. In every great city of Europe were physicians who did nothing else but attend small-pox, and at exhorbi- tant rates. Would a man make a decent living, year in and year out, now, who at- tended nothing but small-pox cases? Ev- ery one who will think will see that be could not, and in this one fact is ample proof of the vast benefit conferred on hu- manity by the discovery of Jenner. For- merly small-pox was tiie constant dread of every human being who had not been through it, and even those were filled with constant apprehension for their friends and relations who had not yet passed the dread ordeal. Thackeray, by the magic touch of genius, has given (Esmond, chapter 8) a most graphic and clear idea ot the old, constant-haunting dread which all men had of this hideous ; this most loathsome, fearful and fatal of all human epidemics, and I would advise ali who think that we owe nothing but blame and haired to Edward Jenner to read the chapter referred to. I have an enormous collection of works on vaccination—over 1,000—to which I am continually making additions. A leading feature of this col- lection is that it contains, as far as possi- ble, all that has been written against vac- cination. I subscribe to all the publications of the English Anti-Vaccine League, and read every fortnight the “Anti-Vaccina- tor,” a wonderfully absurd little paper, which is the organ of the fools of Eng- land who must have some instrument through which to bray. I have carefully read all the rubbish to which I refer. It is all alike ; all like Skeels’s letter ; made up of bald statements and assertions, to answer ali of which in detail is simply impossible, as no human being can possi- bly get at the foundation of a tithe of them. I have patiently traced to the foun- tain head many score of the horrid stories of the effects of vaccination, and I assure you that, as a result of vaccination with the true animal vaccine virus, or even that from the human subject carefully se- lected, I have never seen or known of a case in which a single human being has suffered any real trouble. This experi- ence of mine extends over my whole pro- fessional life of thirty years, during all of which I have especially studied small-pox and vaccination, and during the last sev- enteen of which these subjects have been my daily and hourly study. I know that there is no man in America who has had the facilities for the pursuit of this study that I Lave enjoyed, and I have conscien- tiously availed myself of these facilities. As an instance, I may state that during the past three and a half months I have re-vaccinated and vaccinated over eleven thousand 'patients, a large proportion of whom I have seen a second, and even a third time, and thus been enabled to study the infinitely various types and varieties in which the imperfect vesicle of re-vac- cination manifests itself. During the two years and five months which have elapsed since I introduced into America the Beaugency cow-pox and the practice of true animal vaccination, I have vaccina- ted 831 heifers; every one of which has been under my constant surveillance through every stage of the disease. I only 2 lUfiats ea&tdaea thuau who da set know me that l am well qualified to write and speak authoritatively on vac- cination. I have spoken of the “ Anti- Vaccinator:” nothing could so perfectly manifest the inherent weakness ot all the opposition to vaccination as the wretched drivelling of this, its chosen, and only or- gan. The great, and to all candid in- quiring minds, perfectly conclusive sta- tistics of the comparative mortality in the French and German armies, are made the subject of a “ leader” in a late num- ber of the “Anti-Vaccinator.” This “ leader” is heralded as a most iriumphant refutation of us followers of Jenner and believers in vaccination. If is such a perfect specimen of reckless assertion and total disregard of all sound and log- ical reasoning; it so perfectly and fairly illustrates literally all that is written and said against vaccination, that I shall soon re-publish it, as an appendix to a pamph- let which I am preparing, with the inten- tion of affording something like clear and fair notions on the imperatively import- ant and woefully misunderstood subject of vaccination. Let us look for a moment at the statistics. They are official; have every possible guarantee ot accuracy; they were prepared not by mere doctors, who might have had an “ axe to grind,” but by the almost innumerable officials of both armies, who reported the cases, the aggregate of which they represent just as they would have reported to headquar- ters the casualities from bowel complaint or bomb shells. The general result of all these collected reports was presented at the late statistical congress held at St. Petersburg. They are simply perfectly authentic, with every possible guard and guaranty against error. They present to the consideration of all rational human beings a general fact; so conclusive, so perfectly establishing the prodigious benefit of proper vaccination, and above all re-vaccination, that no one who really seeks truth cau, after its careful study, he at all shaken in his perfect confidence in the perfect protection thus afforded, by a thousand Skeelses or a million rumors of “ awful cases”—“dreadful arms”—“eating ulcers”—all of which, on investigation, if investigation were possible, as it seldom is, would prove to have no real relation to true vaccination at all. The general fact was that the enormous army of Germany, subjected to all those fearful exposures and hardships of war which so inevitably tend to render disease serious and of fa- tal tendency, even with the best and most assiduous care; acting in a country in which a dreadful epidemic of *01*1-1 was raging, lost 208 «»«n from various disease during the whole war ; while the French army, which never wa3 of three- fifths the size of that c»f Germany, lost by death from the same diseases 23,408. The German army was vaccinated thoroughly, twice for every child born in Prussia, and almost every infant born in the other kingdoms and principaliti s of Germany is vaccinated during the first year of lile, and also re-vaccinated at about the 12th year. But, in addition to this, every man, on entering the army, is again vaccinated. If the operation fails to produce a specific effect, it is immediately repeated, and if this tails, re-vaccination is repeated at certain intervals duiingthe whole lime the individual remains in the service, or until a specific effect vs obtained. When this specific effect is reached, sooner or later, he is pronounced safe for the re- mainder of life, and perfectly overwhel- ming accumulations of evidence prove that the assurance is correct. In the ar- my of France all was wrong and rotten. Thousands of the French recruits of the new levies were quite uuvaccinated and re-vaccination was in no wise compulso- ry. The consequence was that the French army -was practically an unyaccmated army. The contemptible sham of vac- cination under the Government of the late arch charlatan, Napoleon III, is made manifest by the fact that the entile ap- propriation made lor the entire support of the immensely important matter ot the propagation of the animal or cow-pox virus of' Beaugency was about $1200, (6,000 francs.) This annual sum is much less than my monthly expenditure lor the same purpose. All that could possibly be done witli such a paltry sum, even by the noble, disinterested and enthusiastic De- paul, was to vaccinate about fifty animals annually; a number so insufficient that animal vaccination could never be, and never wfcs, properly developed in France. It was not till I gave up a large and lu- crative practice and with my son devoted undivided attention to this infinitely im- portant specialty, with aproluse expendi- ture of money, that its great advantages were, for the first time, made evident. I now feel certain that very soon I shall be able to perfect my methods and tests so that I can fully ascertain the absolute perfection of every particle ot virus ob- tained from my animals, and thus obviate defects due to imperfect kuowledge of adiffieult subject in- cident to the first commencements of such enterprizes, and which will lie found 3 inseparable from animal vaccination, if carried on with imperfect knowledge and insufficient means, and with the sole inten- tion of makingthe largest possible amount of money with the smallest possible expen- diture, and at the same time undersell those who devote to the enterprizs that unremitting labor and constant large out- lay, without which it cannot be properly carried on. As I have before said, the one great fact taught by the Franco-Ger- man statistics is inestimable, and to all candid men conclusive. What is the an- swer of the “ Anti-Vaccinator” sage? “If your re-vaccination, &c., is such a perfect protection why did the 203 die—vvny did anybody die ?” No allowance for excep- tional cases—no allowauc ; lor failure of the operation now and then among the vast number of new recruits, and seizure by small-pox before it could be success- lully repeated—no allowance for delay in vaccinating from occasional deficiency in supply or freshness of virus. None at all. If one person dies of small-pox in an ar- my, the rule of which is re-vaccination, even although lie was not re-vaccinated, it proves that re-vaccination is worthless, or worse—while the death of 28,648 men in an army of not much more than half the size, the rule ot which was no re-vaccina- lion at all and next to no vaccination, proves nothing at all. Tuis is the gist of the “ Anti-Vaccinator’s” “triumphant” refutation of this hard and vital fact, for a lot of verbal trash, insinuating that these statistics, with which doctors had little or nothing to do, are doctors’ and “doctored” statistics, and of course not to be relied upon, may go for nothing, but the usual and inevitable rhetorical fin- ishing and ornamentation of all the anti- vaccination diatribes. Statistics, from the most methodical and mathematically re- liable official source iu existence, are “ doctors’ figures,” while all the ravings, and old woman’s tales, a thousand times told, and gaining some additional lie at each repetition; every wild assertion of ignorance and malignity which meets the anti vaccinator’s purpose is “ confirma- tion strong as Holy Writ,” and must be accepted without hesitation or question, and is so accepted by fools, who cannot see how utterly incompetent they are to decide on questions which have puzzled the wisest heads, but which to them seem perfectly settled bv a few such utter, baseless lies. In Skeels’s letter several “awful” cases, said to have resuited from vaccination, are stated. I know the facts connected with only one of these asserted cases, and will state them presently. The case is that of the people nominally “vac- cinated” at Westt'ord, Mass., (not Wcst- porl; the critical and accurate Skeels has not even got the name correctly) in April, 1880, three of whom died very soon with very terrible symptoms, and many others very narrowly escaped death by most careful, scientific and bold treatment, by one of the best surgeons of New Eng- land, Dr. Gilman Ivimball, of Lowell. These terrible cases did, and still do, and will continue to do, through all-time, an infinite deal of harm to humanity and the cause of vaccination, but, as will be seen, they really had nothing whatever, except in name, to do with vaccination at all, but were the result of gross malprac- tice, which,.I am sorry to say, is not un- common, and from which similar results, though often escaped, may occur at any time. Before I give the true narration of the Westford cases, let me say that, al- though I have seen disease and death di- rectly following “vaccination”—which would not have occurred if vaccination had not been done, and in which, in some few instances, not the fatal ones, howev- er, were directly induced by vaccination— they were cases where the grossest and most culpable ignorance and carelessness was displayed in the selection of vaccine virus, or improper methods of perform- ing the operation, or reckless exposure of the vaccinated arm to direct and long con- tinued cold, or to vaccination of people'in very diseased conditions and in whom certain cutaneous diseases were latent and were brought to the surface by the vacci- nation, in a manner always beneficial to the patient, but always, too, involving the physician in dispute, blame and trouble. Some of these latter cases are inevitable from the vaccination of people who are exposed to small-pox contagion and where we cannot delay vaccination till the pa- tient’s system should be in a better state, but many of the cases could be foreseen and the operation postponed to a better occasion, if the physician possessed that knowledge, and tact, and foresight which all physicians should possess, but which I am sorry to know that we all do not pos- sess. Daring the past four months I have vac- cinated over eleven thousand people with the pure cow-pox, or animal virus, of Beaugeucy. As I vaccinate at least one fresh animal every day, the virus has nev- er been more than twenty-four hours from the heifer. I have produced nearly eighty per cent, of specific effect in re-vaccina- tion cases, and the full, perfect, typical vesicle of vaccina {not vaccinia; vaccina 4 was the original and correct name) in every primary case, at the first or second, and in some very rare cases the third, at- tempt. In all this vast number there was but one had case ; one which I shall soon publish for the instruction of the profession. In this case, under very pe- culiar circumstances, the part of the arm on which was the eruption of re-vaccina- tion at its height, lay lor over four hours embedded in snow and exposed to a driving, wet, cold snow-storm. The con- sequences were great pain for the first fif- teen minutes, then total cessation of pain, for the painful part had been frozen, its vitality destroyed, and paih ceased, of course, with the death of the parr. The man, a very imprudent 'one in all that concerned himself, gave it no thought, and when I was called to see him the arm was in a very bad condition, but under proper treatment was quite well in three weeks. What a treat such a case would have been to Skeels and the phi- losophers of his school! How such a case, judiciously narrated as simply an effect of impure and poisonous vaccination, would have frightened people from the protec- tion which a most wonderful and benefi- cent discovery and practice made avail- able and offers to all. Beside this case there was a young man who had a small abscess in the arm-pit, two months after re-vaccination, but as he had eleven of them in the same place the year before, he fortunately did not ascribe the trifling ail- ment to vaccination, though, probably, the Bkeelsian school of sages are quite able to prove that the dangers of vaccination are retro-active, and there is no doubt that the vast proportion of their '■'consequences'' are no more consequences than if they had occurred a year before vaccination. I will now briefly state the Westford cases, and will do so, not from hearsay or newspaper reports, but from absolute per- sonal observation, for I was summoned as an expert by the coroner’s jury on the three people who died, and visited all the survivors who were at the time of the in- quest under treatment. I was furnished with all the papers by the foreman of the coroner’s jury, and urged by him to pre- pare a narrative of the whole case, and offered full compensation for my trouble and remuneration for all expense and out- lay. I wished to make the publication, and should have done so were it not from the feeling that my doing so would have been liable to be regarded as from a desire not to elucidate truth, but to expose and injure the unfortunate practitioner (I will not call him physician) to whose shocking, but not unusual, malpractice ail the dread- ful tragedy was due. In the latter part of March, 1800, the people of the little agricultural town or village of Westford, in this State, became alarmed by the vi- cinity of one or more cases of small-pox and the Selectmen employed the two physicians of the place to vaccinate the people. One of these p hysicians was a homoeopath, and, o! course, according to the ideas of the immaculate school of regulars to which 1 belong—but all of whose notions and dogmas I do not ad- mire—a quack. The other was a “regu- lar,” in full feather, a member ot the Mass- achusetts Medical Society, and all the rest of it. I am sorry to say that most of the medical experts summoned to the inquest, in great numbers, coincided in their testi- mony,or tendency rather to screen irom the odiftm of his malpractice their “regular” brother—a laudable thing as far as it did not interfere with the elucidation of truth, but which in this case was very wrong and injurious in its effect on the public miud. I wish here to say that I have no sympathy with “irregulars,” eith- er in medicine or anything else, hut neith- er do I think that the malpraciice oi any one should be smoothed over by sophis- try, however ingenious. The agent of the Selectmen oi Westford purchased from the city physician of Boston, for seven dollars, a quantity o! vaccine virus, taken from the arms ot children vaccina- ted in his office. This virus was partly in scabs and partly on quill slips wr “points.” The evidence at the inquest showed that all this virus was inert; good for nothing, as indeed was almost all the old, effete vi- rus of long humanization then in use. The homoeopath used all his share with- out inducing vaccine or any other effect, injurious or beneficial. The “regular” had three ot the scabs. Half of one of these he used with the same utterly negative ef- fect as his irregular “brother.” He be- thought, him that he was using up his virus too quickly and at that rate the whole town of Westford could not be vaccina- ted, even at the princely outlay of seven dollars, so he determined to adopt a meth- od taught him by his “preceptor,” and now we come to the malpractice which the eminent physicians who were at the inquest should, for the benefit of human- ity, have made clear and manifest, even if in thus maintaining and explaining the truth a “regular” brother had been in- jured, or even ruined. The method which the physician’s “preceptor” had taught and practiced, and which he was very sure had nothing at all to do with the 5 terrible results observed at Westford, was to break up the 2 1-2 scabs which re- mained, put the pieces into a bottle with a little snow water, (this snow water he insisted on decidedly, because he said he wanted the purest water). Whenever he wished to make a “vaccination” he shook up the mixture, dipped his lancet in it and “vacciuated.” In this way tor, I think ten or eleven days, he “vaccina- ted” a fair share of the people of West- ford without any effect whateyer, good or bad; but on the eleventh or twelfth day, when it was in evidence that when the vial was opened, notwithstanding the the ‘purity’ of the snow water, there was emitted a stench which, in a moment, filled the room, he “vaccinated” twenty- five people, old and young. What we doctors call dissection sores—diffuse ab- cess, &c., &c.,—ai once ensued in more Ilian half the cases. Three of the eldest, and so least prepared to resist such poi- soning of the blood, died very soon, with very terrible symptoms and suffering; some dozen others were only saved by most prompt and energetic treatment, and even those were left with maimed and useless arms ; of the remainder, only a very few' escaped quite clear. At the inquest, I am very sorry to say, that in the face of all this, many eminent men, wishing to screen the city physician, tried to maintain that these terrible effects arose not from anything wrong in the virus, but because ot \the broken, bad state of the constitutions of those vaccinated; i. e., that all the bad, broken constitutions in Westford were vaccinated, by a most strange coincidence, on one day, while hundreds vaccinated during the previous eleven or twelve days, with the very same virus, presented no symptoms at all. Oth- ers, wishing to screen the regular “broth- er,” saw in the results nothing whatever reflecting on the method ol using the vi- rus, but a very decided malignity in the virus employed. It is no wonder that the testimony of medical experts is at once the wonder and contempt of their breth- ren of the law. The truth was expressed in my testimony before that inquest, viz: That the fearful results were clearly to be ascribed to the development of a septic poison of iatense and virulent malignity, at a certain stage of the decomposition of animal matter; that up to a certain time this poison did not exist; that after a cer- tain and very brief period it was destroyed by the progress of decomposition, but that if inoculation was made with decompos- ing animal matter, during this brief peri- od, such effects as those noticed and de- plored at Westford were inevitable, if the inoculation was perfect; that is, if the poison, even in the smallest quantity, en- tered the circulation. I cited the world- famous experiments of Orfila which, how- ever, the ‘‘experts” had never seen or heard of till I transalated their record aloud from Orfila’s hook at the inquest. In these experiments M. Orfila had cut up the lean of beef and mutton, mixed it with water (whether snow water or not he failed to mention) and inoculated animals with the mixture, from day to day, just as the Westford M. D. had done. On a day corresponding to the day of the professional murder of tlie Westford vic- tims, just such symptoms appeared in the animals, and no treatment being used in these cases almost always terminated in death. I said that beef and mutton were not usually considered poisonous and in oculation with a solution of either would produce no effect till, in the course of de- composition, this dreadful poison wa3 de- veloped; that the evidence showed that the scabs, whatever they might have had of vaccine quality when originally col- lected, had none when obtained by the Westford authorities ; that they were then simply animal matter, as inert aud power- less as fresh beef or mutton, but in any animal matter, whether leather, or glue, or blood, or muscle, beef, mutton, or scab, at a certain stage of its decomposition in water an intense poison would be devel- oped, and its inoculation would inevitably be followed by terrible consequences. The verdict of the jury was that the thiee Westford victims came to their death by the use of vaccine virus, origi- nally bad, and rendered worse by an im- proper mode of employing it. It was, on the whole, a fair verdict, the only “badness” of the virus was its utter want ot efficacy. The verdict should have been that animal matter, purporting to be vac- cine virus, being used in a monstrously im- proper manner, had been the vehicle by which a most destructive and intense poi- son had been introduced into the circula- tion. I need say no more at present about the Westford cases. I now regret that I did not prepare a full report of them and of the evidence before the inquest, and I may yet do s®, for it is very important that the true nature of such be fully made public. For all purposes of answering Skcels, whatjT have said will suffice. I have said I knew nothing’of the other big stories that he narrates, but I do not doubt that they are ail susceptible of equal- ly perfect refutation so far as they appear 6 to be condemnatory of vaccination, prop- erly so called. One word more, however, of those Westford cases, and I have done. The virus used was humanized virus— from the vaccine disease induced by the use of virus thousands of removes from its original source in the cow—perpetua- ted by transmission from one to another individual ot a species different from that to which the disease (cow-pox) is na- tive and indigenous, and the effect, bad, good, or entirely negatiye of such virus, has nothing to do with the virus obtained by inoculating heifers from an original case of cow-pox and transmitting the dis- ease from one young and selected animal of the bovine species as a means and source of vaccine supply. This is the method inaugurated in France, in April, 1868, by Prof. Depaul, of the French Academy of Medicine, and introduced by myself, Sept. 21st, 1870, in America, with virus obtained by my special agent, sent to Paris for that purpose, from the hands of Prof. Depaul himself, from several ani- mals, vaccinated by the Professor and col- lected by him under the eye of my agent. Since the original case at Beaugency. the cow-pox has been carried through 591 heifers (260 by Prof. Depaul up to August, 1870, and 331 since that time by myself,) and manifests not the slightest indication of degeneration. It was with this virus that the Board of Health of Erie has been and is supplied, and will continue to be suppled so long as it seen fit to honor me me with its appro- val and orders. It is irom me also that has bten obtained all the supplies with which the thousand and one imitators with whom I am bothered have, with no previous preparation or knowledge, rushed into animal vaccination, fearing that I might, but for them, make too much money and too wide and brilliant a repu- tation. To one of these men I gave iu- structions and a duplicate set of pamph- lets and other publications on thi3 subject, and ample supplies of virus. I have been repaid by ingratitude and a persistent ef- fort on his part 1o rob me of the great honor of introducing this method of true animal vaccination in America. He, how- ever, despite my aid, vaccinates such poor and badly selected animals and so lew of even these and extracts such enormous quantities of “ virus” from each unfortu- nate creature, that almost all the virus of his production is worthless; a fact of which I believe your Board of Health have had an opportunity to appreciate the realitj'. I send you some papers from which you may glean some information in regard to the extent and perfection of my arrange- ments for the vaccination of animals, and the vaccination of our own species from them. On every week day after Thurs- day (13th) from 11 a. m. to 2 p. m. I shall be happy to see all inquirers how'ever sceptical—even Skeels. This hasty wri- ting must now come to a close. I regret that my constant occupation should pre- vent my always answering such letters as that of iSkeels. Such men are very apt to think that when their productions ie- main unanswered they are, therefore, un- answerable, but it may sometimes happen that the reason that such thing are not answered is that they are not thought worth the trouble. “A fool,” the old scholastic saw says, *' may ask more ques- tions than a sage can answer,” and even when a sceptic chooses to pour out a flood of assertions and aspersions it does not follow that they cannot all be disproved, because no one chooses to take the infi- nite trouble of disentangling and refuting them. Henry A. Martin, M. D., 27 Dudley St., Boston Highlands, Mass. January 12, 1873.