RIDGEON. Well, theres nothing like progress, is there?

SIR PATRICK. Dont misunderstand me, my boy. I'm not belittling
your discovery. Most discoveries are made regularly every fifteen
years; and it's fully a hundred and fifty since yours was made
last. Thats something to be proud of. But your discovery's not
new. It's only inoculation. My father practised inoculation until
it was made criminal in eighteen-forty. That broke the poor old
man's heart, Colly: he died of it. And now it turns out that my
father was right after all. Youve brought us back to inoculation.

RIDGEON. I know nothing about smallpox. My line is tuberculosis
and typhoid and plague. But of course the principle of all
vaccines is the same.

SIR PATRICK. Tuberculosis? M-m-m-m! Youve found out how to cure
consumption, eh?

RIDGEON. I believe so.

SIR PATRICK. Ah yes. It's very interesting. What is it the old
cardinal says in Browning's play? "I have known four and twenty
leaders of revolt." Well, Ive known over thirty men that found
out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it,
Colly? Devilment, I suppose. There was my father's old friend
George Boddington of Sutton Coldfield. He discovered the open-air
cure in eighteen-forty. He was ruined and driven out of his
practice for only opening the windows; and now we wont let a
consumptive patient have as much as a roof over his head. Oh,
it's very VERY interesting to an old man.