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IN resisting the law
compelling the vaccination of children, Keighley and its neighbourhood took
rank next to Leicester. I am not sure that at starting the Keighley
agitation was of local spontaneous generation; for an enthusiastic tailor
and clothier who had come from the south was, from the beginning, its most
ardent promoter. Whatever the history of its origin, there could be no
dispute about the fact that the opposition to compulsory vaccination took a
strong hold upon a large number of the inhabitants of the Keighley district.
Consequently opportunity was seized upon to elect members of the Board of
Guardians who were avowed anti-vaccinators. When such guardians found
themselves in a majority, compulsory vaccination ceased to be enforced. They
would neither allow their own children to be vaccinated nor subject others
to the obligations of a law which they denounced, and were doing their best
to nullify. This line of conduct brought them into collision with the State
authorities and courts of law, and then they preferred imprisonment as
rebels in York Castle to submission to injunctions to carry out compulsory
vaccination as their statutory duty. The rebel guardians had a popular
send-off as martyrs in a noble cause when they left Keighley to be
imprisoned in York Castle. When they came back they received a hearty "see
the conquering hero come" welcome home again. Later on smallpox broke out in
Keighley, and caused such a scare there that many former opponents of
Jenner's protective remedy resorted to it in a panic. As soon as the panic
subsided the agitation recovered much of its temporarily lost strength.
Putting aside the plea of
conscientious objection, which too often in the present day is a cloak for
some purpose that it is not convenient to avow, the most convinced upholders
of vaccination, among whom I number myself, had to confess that the
anti-vaccinators were not without some solid excuse for their agitation.
They firmly believed that the taint of several bad diseases was introduced
into the blood of healthy infants. In discussions with my medical friends,
who were all fervid advocates of vaccination, I found that they could not
deny that it was possible to transmit certain kinds of disease from one
child or one person to another, unless care was taken that the lymph came
from an untainted source. Medical practitioners had not all of them been
careful not to use inoculating matter which did not come from healthy cows,
the original source, or from patients that neither inherited nor acquired
the seeds of a class of transmissible diseases. The agitation took a violent
form in places like Leicester and Keighley, when a panic was created by a
few isolated facts which appeared to be conclusively proved. It led at once
to greater care in regard to the gathering of the inoculating matter from
cows and healthy patients.
So far the agitators did the
public a desirable service. But that partial success did not satisfy them.
They wanted to get rid of compulsory vaccination altogether. Finally they
got their plea of conscientious objection recognised, and on that plea
exemption for themselves. In the long wrangle arguments were used on both
sides which struck far down into the heart of fundamental principles. As for
the arguments the agitators tried to derive from the Bible, they were too
shadowy to impress even the ignorant. Their sounder contention was that
parents were the natural guardians of their children, and that while they
strove to do their best for their offspring, they should not be interfered
with by the State. Red-hot Radicals in this agitation spoke loudly and
angrily against grandmotherly legislation, and in support of the sacred
rights of parents and, unless in cases of gross neglect or incompetence, the
inviolability of the family institution, and they were applauded and hotly
supported by multitudes of those who held the most conservative views in
regard to all other questions of a public nature. Political and
ecclesiastical separation hedges were thrown down or jumped over for the
nonce.
The defenders of compulsory
vaccination were of a similarly mixed description. The medical men did not
much obtrude themselves on public notice during the heat of the controversy.
They left the defence of the law to the authorities and to the more
thoughtful majority of the nation; and those who spoke or wrote for that
majority relied upon the proved benefits of Jenrier's prophylactic, and,
perhaps with too little qualification, upon the maxim, Salus populi suprema
lex. Scarred and pitted faces among the older people, and undisfigured faces
of the younger generations that had been protected by vaccination, proved
beyond dispute the great change for the better which had been brought about
by the widespread voluntary adoption of vaccination of infants in the early
part of last century, which the compulsory law intended to make universal. |
