VACCINATION SMALLPOX VACCINATION*

Abstract

IN 1796 Edward Jenner introduced the practice of vaccination. His first vaccination consisted in rubbing into a tiny scratch on the arm of an eight-year old boy a little cow-pox material, taken from a vesicle on the hand of a dairymaid who had contracted the disease in milking cows suffering from cow-pox. In the widespread use of vaccination which followed, several methods for obtaining supplies of vaccine were employed. The most popular, which continued in general use until practically the close of the nineteenth century, was to collect the vaccine from the arm of a previously vaccinated person at the time that the vesicle was well developed. To provide for emergency supplies, crusts from previous vaccination lesions were collected and stored. These methods of "arm to arm" vaccination, although efficient, were open to serious criticism. (Some of the common objections to vaccination as raised by anti-vaccinationists to-day are based on these old practices; these persons continue to reiterate the possibility of transmitting disease by vaccination, but such a danger existed only when the old methods were employed). Later, calves were used to propagate the virus and the vaccination of children in large numbers at one time was made possible in special stations provided for this purpose. In these stations the vaccinations were performed by the direct transfer of the vaccine from the vaccinated calf to the arms of the children. Negri in 1842, instead of inoculating cows with vaccine material collected from human beings, inoculated cows with natural cow-pox and transferred the vaccine from cow to cow in series. By 1865 vaccine was produced by animal vaccination in a number of countries but this method was not employed in England until 1881. Following the findings of English Royal Commission in 1896, "arm to arm" vaccination was replaced officially by the use of "bovine" vaccine. In addition to direct vaccination from the