cheap magic charm to prevent, and a cheap pill or potion to cure,
all disease. It forces all such charms on the doctors.


THE VACCINATION CRAZE

Thus it was really the public and not the medical profession that
took up vaccination with irresistible faith, sweeping the
invention out of Jenner's hand and establishing it in a form
which he himself repudiated. Jenner was not a man of science; but
he was not a fool; and when he found that people who had suffered
from cowpox either by contagion in the milking shed or by
vaccination, were not, as he had supposed, immune from smallpox,
he ascribed the cases of immunity which had formerly misled him
to a disease of the horse, which, perhaps because we do not drink
its milk and eat its flesh, is kept at a greater distance in our
imagination than our foster mother the cow. At all events, the
public, which had been boundlessly credulous about the cow, would
not have the horse on any terms; and to this day the law which
prescribes Jennerian vaccination is carried out with an anti-
Jennerian inoculation because the public would have it so in
spite of Jenner. All the grossest lies and superstitions which
have disgraced the vaccination craze were taught to the doctors
by the public. It was not the doctors who first began to declare
that all our old men remember the time when almost every face
they saw in the street was horribly pitted with smallpox, and
that all this disfigurement has vanished since the introduction
of vaccination. Jenner himself alluded to this imaginary
phenomenon before the introduction of vaccination, and attributed
it to the older practice of smallpox inoculation, by which