In the eighteenth century people deliberately caught smallpox from mild cases. It was a dangerous practice, for there was far from a certainty that a severe case would not result.

Then Edward Jenner in the last years of the eighteenth century investigated the belief, popular in the English countryside that an attack of cowpox protected from smallpox. He took matter from the hand of a dairy maid with cowpox and inoculated a small boy. Two months later he took matter from a smallpox pustule and put it into the same boy, who did not get the disease, thus demonstrating his immunity. Innumerable observations have proven to all logical minds that vaccination is an almost certain preventative of smallpox.

In my youth on Cape Cod pock-marked faces were not uncommon. A good-looking girl in my high-school class went to Boston and there got smallpox. She was no longer good looking. But today there is not much smallpox around and vaccination is going out of fashion. The immunity will drop way down in the population and some day smallpox, which has been building up its strength, may sneak up on us. We will be smart if we do not give up the habit of being vaccinated against smallpox.

Today we are finding that the heathen, dwelling in far parts of the earth where there is little hygiene and many infections, are doing better than we fortunate ones as regards poliomyelitis. It is now believed that it may be a common infection. We who keep fairly free of infection do not develop much immunity to it. The heathen are not much bothered with it for they have all had enough attacks to produce an immunity; but when we get an attack, we may be seriously stricken. Our extreme susceptibility makes a polio vaccine a dangerous thing.

The difficulties with the Salk vaccine rather parallel what occurred with Jenner’s smallpox vaccine about 1800. The best physicians were slow to accept vaccination until it had given evidence of its worth.  It took some time for them to learn just how to handle it and there were a good many bad side results, such as septicemia and syphilis. Such great changes in medicine should be handled slowly and carefully. The first Salk vaccine caused deaths in California and Idaho because the government tests had not been perfected enough to make sure that there was no live virus in the first vaccine. This is no criticism of the ultimate worth of the vaccine but of the hurried way in which it was introduced.

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GENERAL HEALTH