results of dirt getting into cuts; but neither the doctor nor the
patient is quite satisfied unless the inoculation "takes"; that
is, unless it produces perceptible illness and disablement.
Sometimes both doctor and patient get more value in this
direction than they bargain for. The results of ordinary private-
practice-inoculation at their worst are bad enough to be
indistinguishable from those of the most discreditable and
dreaded disease known; and doctors, to save the credit of the
inoculation, have been driven to accuse their patient or their
patient's parents of having contracted this disease independently
of the inoculation, an excuse which naturally does not make the
family any more resigned, and leads to public recriminations in
which the doctors, forgetting everything but the immediate
quarrel, naively excuse themselves by admitting, and even
claiming as a point in their favor, that it is often impossible
to distinguish the disease produced by their inoculation and the
disease they have accused the patient of contracting. And both
parties assume that what is at issue is the scientific soundness
of the prophylaxis. It never occurs to them that the particular
pathogenic germ which they intended to introduce into the
patient's system may be quite innocent of the catastrophe, and
that the casual dirt introduced with it may be at fault. When, as
in the case of smallpox or cowpox, the germ has not yet been
detected, what you inoculate is simply undefined matter that has
been scraped off an anything but chemically clean calf suffering
from the disease in question. You take your chance of the germ
being in the scrapings, and, lest you should kill it, you take no
precautions against other germs being in it as well. Anything may
happen as the result of such an inoculation. Yet this is the only
stuff of the kind which is prepared and supplied even in State