measure has only to be one of such refinement, difficulty,
precision and costliness as to be quite beyond the resources of
private practice, to be ignored or angrily denounced as a fad.

TRADE UNIONISM AND SCIENCE

Here we have the explanation of the savage rancor that so amazes
people who imagine that the controversy concerning vaccination is
a scientific one. It has really nothing to do with science. The
medical profession, consisting for the most part of very poor men
struggling to keep up appearances beyond their means, find
themselves threatened with the extinction of a considerable part
of their incomes: a part, too, that is easily and regularly
earned, since it is independent of disease, and brings every
person born into the nation, healthy or not, to the doctors. To
boot, there is the occasional windfall of an epidemic, with its
panic and rush for revaccination. Under such circumstances,
vaccination would be defended desperately were it twice as dirty,
dangerous, and unscientific in method as it actually is. The note
of fury in the defence, the feeling that the anti-vaccinator is
doing a cruel, ruinous, inconsiderate thing in a mood of
indignant folly: all this, so puzzling to the observer who knows
nothing of the economic side of the question, and only sees that
the anti-vaccinator, having nothing whatever to gain and a good
deal to lose by placing himself in opposition to the law and to
the outcry that adds private persecution to legal penalties, can
have no interest in the matter except the interest of a reformer
in abolishing a corrupt and mischievous superstition, becomes
intelligible the moment the tragedy of medical poverty and the
lucrativeness of cheap vaccination is taken into account.