Smallpox and Vaccination

It’s no controversy that English has been strongly influenced by French, and in particular it’s known that many medical terms, such as “surgeon," “remedy," and “anatomy" came into English through French following the Norman Invasion, after which French was the first language of the upper class in England. That the more educated upper class spoke French is responsible for technical terminology in many domains being imported from French, such as terminology in law and fashion, but also in medicine. We shouldn’t be surprised that the word “smallpox" came into English, from the French petit vérole, being a part-by-part translation (known as a calque in linguistics). Petit is French for “small," and vérole is the French equivalent of “pox." The French word vérole is believed to have possibly come from the Latin adjective varius, meaning, among other things, “spotted."¹

We also shouldn’t be surprised that this ultimately French terminology largely displaced the older English term for skin diseases, which had previously been the word “leprosy." It’s not that leprosy as a disease died out, but that it was reclassified under other names^2,3. In fact, the first recorded use of the word “smallpox" in English (orginially spelled “small pockes") was in 1577, referring to the fourteenth century Black Plague. This has led many to acknowledge that medical terminology has a tendency to drift over the course of centuries: Over long enough timescales, the same word may refer to different conditions and the same condition will be called by different names. For this reason, we should obviously be a bit suspicious about cases and numbers being recorded over long periods of time. And the deeper into the past we look, the less certain we should be that words mean what we think they mean.

Here, we’ll follow the history as presented by the great nineteenth century Scottish physician Charles Creighton. Creighton was so distinguished that he was actually asked to write on the topic of smallpox vaccination for the Encyclopædia Britannica in the years 1885 and 1888. Not wanting to spout just whatever had become popular by that time, Creighton actually looked into the history of the matter and found that the true history was significantly different from the one he’d been taught. Following this realization, he wrote extensively on the history of medicine.

Captain John Graunt began keeping records for London in the year 1629, so it will make sense to focus on the period of time between now and then and pay relatively little attention to the things that came before. Medical history effectively began that year. Very interestingly, Creighton points out that, “for several years after [John Graunt began keeping records], the deaths from smallpox were a mere trifle, except during the not very severe epidemic outbursts which came at intervals. It is not until 1667 that the total deaths from smallpox in London becomes a large one every year." Interestingly this means that smallpox became problematic in the very depths of the Little Ice Age.

Contrary to modern myths, smallpox did not affect everyone equally. Its victims were typically infants and poor people, especially those living in very crowded conditions—conditions which would have been extremely filthy before sewage systems were widely available. There were victims of different ages and incomes, but not at the same rate. In Charles Creighton’s article for a 1888 volume of Encyclopædia Britannica, he went as far as to say,

Tenement houses and ill-ventilated courts or alleys have been the natural harbourage of smallpox; in proportion as these have been demolished the disease has disappeared or been circumscribed in its area.

In the early eighteenth century, there was speculation that smallpox was a kind of healing “crisis." Specifically Richard Holland wrote about the disease in 1728, saying,

In a genuine and complete eruption, the matter of the disease is entirely evacuated, and therefore there is no possibility of a return. But in an imperfect crisis, part of the original cause may remain.

In particular, note his use of the word “crisis." Here we have a description of smallpox that is more congruent with what we will later call terrain theory. There is something in the body that should not be there, at least as conceived of by Richard Holland, and what we call “disease" is thought to be an act of healing that purges or expels the body of that material that shouldn’t be there. Moreover, many have echoed this sentiment throughout the ages and even up to today.

Having introduced the disease, it’s time to introduce the treatment. Inoculation, which would later be modified and renamed “vaccination" under the influence of Edward Jenner and then Louis Pasteur, was a medical procedure imported to Europe from Turkey. Inoculation against smallpox was originally performed by making a deep incision in a person’s arm and putting material from a diseased person in it.

The book Princes and Peasants records that,

Inoculation had been introduced to Constantinople around 1672, apparently having arrived overland from China or Persia via the Circassians. Europeans living in Constantinople learned of inoculation during an outbreak there in 1706. In December 1713, Dr. Emanuele Timoni, an Italian physician, sent an account of inoculation in Constantinople to Dr. Woodward in London, who read it to the Royal Society in May 1714.

If the practice was introduced to Turkey through China, it’s been suggested that it was introduced to China by a Buddhist nun in the eleventh century who learned about it from a Tibetan monk who had previously learned about it in India. Alternatively, if the practice was introduced to Turkey through Persia, then it probably also had its origins in India. This is because the oldest records of the practice can be found in India. The previously mentioned book, Princes and Peasants, records that an Indian text called the Artharva Veda, written in the last millennium B.C., tells of how the Brahmin caste were India’s inoculators, “travel[ing] the countryside in the spring, the smallpox season, reciting prayers to the goddess of smallpox and inoculating susceptible persons—the world’s first mobile inoculation teams."

The sixteenth century Indian text, the Bhava-prakasa, gave a description of the disease in terms Ayurvedic medicine⁴. It offered two causes for smallpox. On the one hand, it was believed to be caused by lifestyle factors such as diet, but on the other hand it was also believed to be caused by the wrath of deities. In the former cases, lifestyle changes were recommended, but in the latter cases, it was recommended to worship Shitala, the Hindu goddess of smallpox and one of the forms of Shiva’s wife. In Buddhism, she has also been regarded as the mother of Gautama Buddha⁵.

Anyway, returning to Western Europe, it appeared that this original form of inoculation was disease-inducing itself. Creighton says, “The severity of the engrafted disease was a serious bar to the general adoption of this Turkish and beauty-saving artifice; and in a few years it fell into considerable disrepute." But in the mid-eighteenth century, a new method of inoculation was taken by the French physician Angelo Gatti from elderly Muslim women in the Levant. “Instead of making a large incision, and laying the matter therein upon a thread, he made a small oblique puncture with a lancet point⁶ and inserted the minutest quantity of matter. Moreover, he took the matter from as early a stage of the natural smallpox as any fluid could be got at all, and from the mildest case; and, improving upon that, he at length transferred matter from the early vesicle of one inoculated arm to another person’s arm, and so on through a series of cases from arm to arm."

It might seem very strange to modern readers that matter would be taken directly from one inoculated person’s arm in order to inoculate the next person, but this is how it was done back then. Moreover, it shouldn’t seem so strange that inoculation should have proceeded this way (i.e. harvesting material from a inoculated person), since any succession of inoculations would have had to begin by harvesting material from a sick person in the first place. And how could inoculation by fluids from a healthy person be as disgusting as inoculation by fluids from a diseased person? It was already part of the process that bodily fluids were being moved from one person to another.

Gatti gained fame and fortune within France for as long as he could convince people that his preventative measure actually worked. Inoculation even came to be advocated by Voltaire in France. This façade couldn’t last though, since an epidemic of smallpox broke out in the area, with very many people who were supposed to be immune getting sick, and a good portion of them dying of it. Having been thoroughly discredited within France, the practice of smallpox inoculation was actually made illegal in Paris.

Despite being discredited in France and outlawed in Paris, the practice moved to England, where it was reintroduced by Daniel Sutton in 1764. Medical professionals clung to the doctrine of inoculation harder there, despite that there were cracks beginning to show. Even those who supported the practice were on the lookout for something more effective. In particular, in 1796, the physician William Woodville, published a book History of the Inoculation of the Smallpox in Great Britain, in which he noted that Sutton’s method would “in certain cases, not only fail of success, but evidently produce the disease in an aggravated state." Quite the prophylactic. As a result, Woodville anticipated that new research would be done to improve on the contemporary methods of inoculation. Something new had to be around the corner.

Because the history of smallpox and inoculation is from here on intertwined with cowpox, we must familiarize ourselves with the disease that was cowpox. According to the description of the contemporary physician Clayton of Gloucester, cowpox was a seasonal disease, “being rarely seen except in spring and summer." It seemed to begin as “white specks" on the udder of a cow, specks which over time would become ulcers, “giving the cow excruciating pain."

It was noticed that milkers who milked cows that had this affliction would themselves acquire sores and ulcers on their hands and painful swollen glands in their armpits. Cowpox therefore came to be the name, not only of the condition in cows, but also of the condition in humans. Some (including Creighton) speculated that this was really the same disease as syphilis, since in humans the symptoms were extremely similar. There also happened to be a rumor going around in the late eighteenth century about how milkers who caught cowpox would be immune to smallpox. This rumor probably came about just because they both had the word “pox" in the name⁷. A few physicians even thought the rumor was intruiging, anticipating that someone might study the possible connection, although most of them found it competely unbelievable.

It was a man named Edward Jenner who capitalized on the rumor, a man who had become a member of the Royal Society for his discoveries that cuckoos would lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, and that the cuckoo hatchling would then throw the other eggs out of the nest upon hatching, so that the cuckoo hatchling could be raised by other birds parasitically⁸. Jenner would become the single most important figure in the history of smallpox, and one of the most important figures in the history of medicine, as a result of his becoming extremely infatuated with the rumor connecting cowpox and smallpox. He imagined that inoculation with cowpox could prevent smallpox more effectively than inoculation by smallpox, and therefore Jenner seemed to fulfill Woodville’s forecast that further research would bring about improvements in the prevention of the disease.

But in 1797, when Jenner presented a paper to the Royal Society on the relationship between cowpox and smallpox, promoting the idea that cowpox could be used to protect against smallpox, they rejected it. Jenner’s friend and biographer, John Baron, wrote⁹ of Jenner taking part in a different scientific society, saying,

Dr. Jenner frequently told me that, at the meetings of this society [the Convivio-Medical, which met at the Ship at Alveston in the southern division of the county, and was attended, among others, by Fewster, the chief authority on cowpox], he was accustomed to bring forward the reported prophylactic virtues of cowpox, and earnestly to recommend his medical friends to prosecute the inquiry. All his efforts were, however, ineffectual; his brethren were acquainted with the rumor, but they looked upon it as one of those vague notions from which no accurate or valuable information could be gathered, especially as most of them had met with cases in which those who were supposed to have had cowpox had subsequently been affected with smallpox.

Of this, Creighton wrote,

Fewster and the rest knew that there was nothing in it; and in course of time, they came to regard Jenner as a bore, when he persisted in taking the protective virtues of cowpox seriously, against their own abundant experience to the contrary.

Moreover, because Jenner would not stop going on about what they knew to be false, they even threatened to eject him from this society.

So a great part of the reason that Jenner’s paper had been rejected was probably because the experience of so many physicians was so starkly in contrast to what Jenner was asserting: It was in direct contradiction with the facts. People who came down with cowpox did catch smallpox. Moreover, because it’s very hard to prove something that’s false, the evidence that Jenner gathered was probably of very low quality, which probably contributed to the rejection of his paper by the Royal Society. While the original paper has been lost to time, it probably contained a list of cases in which people got cowpox after milking a cow, and in which those people did not get smallpox at some later point, which would have been epidemiological research of very low quality.

Following the rejection of his paper, he began to hypothesize that cowpox in cows was the result of horse-grease. “The grease" was a disease that would occasionally affect horses, making their heels swell up and ooze a fluid that came to be called grease. For some reason, Jenner began thinking that this grease from a horse’s heel would cause cowpox in cows, and that cowpox in cows could cause cowpox in humans, humans which he then thought would be protected against smallpox. It was therefore reasoned that horse-grease itself might, somehow, be used to prevent smallpox. At this stage, it must be admitted that Jenner was already operating on more than one level of speculation. It had not been established that horse grease would result in cowpox in cows, and it had not been established that cowpox in humans protected against attacks of smallpox—in fact, the second of these propositions was almost certainly false.

But even if the last link in this chain of causality were true, there were good reasons to be skeptical of the first link. For example, the seasonality of the diseases didn’t line up. Veterinarians were aware that horses tended to come down with “the grease" in the winter, a time when cowpox was usually rare if not absent. Moreover, dairy farms could become affected by cowpox even if there were no horses on the farm, which doesn’t make sense if horse-grease was the cause of cowpox.

Nevertheless, Jenner took his rejected paper and expanded upon it by including his dubious hypothesis about horse grease. He published it in a 1798 book with the rather lengthy title: An inquiry into the causes and effects of the Variolae vaccinae, a disease discovered in some of the western counties of England, particularly Gloucestershire, and known by the name of the cow pox. This work is usually referred to as the Inquiry for brevity’s sake. And even though a previous version of this text had been rejected by the Royal Society, Jenner was still able to use his status as a member of the Royal Society to his advantage in winning over the trust of the medical profession. And as we have already shown, by the work of Ancel Keys and Robert Kehoe, it’s obviously not impossible to trick the vast majority of the medical profession.

With tremendous rapidity, Jenner’s Inquiry had spread to Germany, France, and Italy. In light of the facts to be shown below, it’s actually stunning that the Inquiry could have been so influential, let alone being so influential so fast. There is a perhaps speculative reason that might be able to explain Jenner’s unnatural success, but this point will have to wait until near the end of Chapter 9 to be stated.

Jenner actually already had epidemiological data on men who had “horse-sores" from coming in contact with horse-grease: He knew of three men who had these sores and, out of these three men, two of them went on to come down with smallpox at a later date. Anyone could look at these cases and conclude that horse-grease has no protective effects against smallpox whatsoever. Most (two out of three) of his recorded cases went against his hypothesis. This should have been the end of that line of inquiry as he thoroughly disproved his hypothesis.

But even though Jenner proved that horse-grease would not protect against smallpox, he decided to perform a human experiment anyway on a five-year-old boy named John Baker. Concerning Jenner’s decision to perform such an experiment after already having data indicating his hypothesis was wrong, Creighton wrote,

An experimental trial after such an experience could only mean that he was dissatisfied with the experience, that he meant to circumvent the plain teaching of it if he could, and to tie knots upon the common-sense issues, by a resort to so-called scientific method. As it turned out, his experimental inoculation of the horse-grease virus upon a child resulted in rather more than he found it expedient to disclose.

Jenner inoculated the boy with horse-grease, intending to give the boy a smallpox inoculation at a later date to see if the horse-grease would provide any protection against smallpox (despite the fact that Jenner already knew that it wouldn’t and despite the fact that this was a misuse of smallpox inoculation—more on that later). According to Jenner’s claims, the boy was a bit sick six days after being inoculated with horse-grease, but on the eighth day, the boy was “free from indisposition." Well at the site that the boy was inoculated with horse-grease, the boy got an ulcer that persisted beyond the eighth day. Jenner never mentioned this ulcer in his published writings despite knowing about it, and it was only ever discovered that the boy had an ulcer (and that Jenner knew about the ulcer) when Jenner’s biographer went through Jenner’s papers decades after the fact and ended up writing about the ulcer. In other words, Jenner was knowingly lying when he said the boy was “free from indisposition."

Jenner never actually completed this little experiment on John Baker. Given the boy’s allegedly good health health, being allegedly “free from indisposition" (which, thanks to Jenner’s biographer, we know was a lie), it’s very strange then that Jenner didn’t actually complete the experiment by exposing the boy to smallpox (or at least, it would be strange to anyone who didn’t know that Jenner had already been dishonest in more than one way about this experiment). Jenner gave an excuse that, “the boy was rendered unfit for inoculation from having felt the effects of a contagious fever in a workhouse soon after the experiment was made." This was quite the understatement of what actually happened. It was only a year later that Jenner admitted that the boy had died. The reason he couldn’t continue on with the experiment was because, to use Creighton’s wording, little John Baker had “unhappily becom[e] a corpse," very possibly because of this useless experiment. So the only experiment involving horse-grease that ended up in the Inquiry was an unfinished experiment in which Jenner possibly murdered a five-year-old boy, and this incomplete experiment was conducted after Jenner already knew that horse grease didn’t protect against smallpox.

Jenner’s other experiments involved inoculating people, including many more children, with materials taken from a cowpox ulcer on a milkmaid named Sarah Newlme, and with materials from other people who had been inoculated. In the same way that smallpox inoculations would sometimes be given from arm to arm, cowpox inoculations would also be given from arm to arm. So all because Jenner was infatuated with an old wives’ tale about one disease giving protection against another, Jenner ended up taking fluids from a diseased cow and putting it in another five-year-old’s body, this time a five-year-old named William Summers (who was actually inoculated on the same day as poor little John Baker). Jenner then took bodily fluids from that boy and used it to inoculate others, then fluids from those people to inoculate more, and so on. To anyone who knew that cowpox and smallpox were unrelated, this would seem like quite the strange ritual.

Moreover, it should be noted that Jenner didn’t actually wait very long before publishing his results, and this is actually very important because of some of the claims he made. His paper was rejected by the Royal Society in either late 1796 or early 1797, and it was only in the months leading up to the publication of his Inquiry that he was performing these human experiments with cowpox. It was March and April of 1798 that he was performing these experiments, and he would publish the Inquiry by the end of June that year. In other words, he didn’t exactly wait long enough to be able to know that his subjects were actually perfectly immune from smallpox for life, as he claimed.

If Jenner wanted to claim immunity from smallpox for years, then he would have had to follow his subjects for years; if he wanted to claim immunity from smallpox for decades, then he would have had to follow his subjects for decades; and if he wanted to claim lifelong immunity (which is what he did claim) then he would have had to follow his subjects for the rest of their lives. This simply has to be true. With only a few months of experimental data to go by, it was extremely dishonest for Jenner to be claiming lifelong immunity. He was claiming something that he couldn’t possibly have known, and in order to sell protection from smallpox. In other words, he was a veritable quack.

The reader might be wondering, “If Jenner only waited a few months to claim that his subjects were immune, what could possibly have been the basis for that claim?" Well the method Jenner used to test for the immunity from smallpox made so little sense that the reader will probably be astounded. As noted before in the case of John Baker, the intent was to inoculate the boy with horse-grease and then at a later point inoculate him with smallpox; his experiments with cowpox were similar to this unfinished experiment on John Baker, in that he inoculated his subjects with cowpox and then at a later date inoculated them with smallpox. His methodology actually involved using the method of Gatti and Sutton for smallpox inoculation, but not as a prophylactic as they’d used it, but rather as a “test" of his work. If a person inoculated with smallpox did not come down with smallpox following the smallpox inoculation, then this was considered evidence that the cowpox inoculation worked and that the person was immune to smallpox because of the cowpox inoculation.

But look at the very sharp change in the logic of Sutton’s inoculation before and after Jenner’s Inquiry. Before 1798, a person given Sutton’s inoculation wasn’t expected to come down with smallpox. But then in Jenner’s Inquiry, not coming down with smallpox following Sutton’s inoculation was used as evidence that the cowpox inoculation worked. In other words, something that was already known to be likely to happen anyway (i.e. not coming down with smallpox), even in the absence of the cowpox inoculation, was used as evidence of the efficacy of the cowpox inoculation. For some reason, this utterly fallacious argument was not detected by contemporary medical professionals, and from 1798 onward, Sutton’s inoculation became used as a “test" to verify the efficacy of Jenner’s cowpox inoculation, becoming known as the “variolous test." This nonsense “test" was what Jenner used to claim lifelong immunity. Charles Creighton, commented on the incompetence of Jenner and his colleagues for being unable to detect the fallacious reasoning of the “variolous test," stating, “I do not know any uglier incident in the history of medicine than that astounding volte-face."

Moreover, remember that the smallpox inoculation was not thought to be neutral with respect to smallpox. Even if inoculating someone with cowpox and then smallpox prevented the development of future smallpox (which wasn’t demonstrated), one couldn’t really tell whether it was the cowpox inoculation or the smallpox inoculation that might have actually been protecting against smallpox. An experiment would need multiple arms, including control groups that receive one inoculation, the other inoculation, or neither inoculation, so that their disease incidence could be compared across all groups. Only then would one be able to say whether the “immunity" came from one inoculation or the other, or if there even was any difference in “immunity" at all. But these kind of controls, which would be necessary for knowing the efficacy of the cowpox inoculation, couldn’t have been performed, since they would have involved waiting an extended period of time after the inoculation, as already argued. Subjects would need to be followed for years, decades, or lifetimes. Jenner needed the smallpox inoculation to be a test—something that it obviously wasn’t—in order to justify his fantastic claims.

In summary, the method used to verify the efficacy of the cowpox inoculation made no sense whatsoever and could not be used to tell whether the person inoculated with cowpox would indeed be protected from smallpox. This problem would go uncorrected throughout the history of the smallpox vaccination.

There is also a lesson in economic thinking here: For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Jenner’s treatment actually prevented against smallpox. Even then, it would not necessarily follow that Jenner’s preventative was beneficial for health. It would only beneficial for health if it was better than the alternatives, i.e. if the cowpox inoculation was both less harmful than the ordinary smallpox inoculation and less harmful than coming down with smallpox. Only if it is safer than both of these, and if the subject is sufficiently risk-averse, would the cowpox inoculation actually make sense for that particular person.

What’s interesting is that this was not as obvious a decision as many people make it out to be. The cowpox inoculation would often leave painful ulcers on the arms of the people inoculated (often called “bad arm"), and it wasn’t obvious that this was less painful than just getting the ordinary smallpox inoculation or even just getting smallpox itself¹⁰. It was not a harmless procedure. And this was all assuming that there was adequate evidence that the inoculation works—knowing that there wasn’t such evidence, the inoculation effectively just gave people ulcers on their arms with no proven benefit to them.

Also note the slight of hand that Jenner has performed already in the title of this work: In the title of his book, he has given cowpox the Latin name Variolae vaccinae. The word Variolae was the Latin word used to refer to smallpox at the time, but vaccinae was a Latin adjective meaning something like “having to do with cows." It’s related to the Latin word vacca, meaning “cow." Already in the title, Jenner decided to give cowpox a Latin name that basically meant “smallpox of the cow." As a result, any subsequent researchers tricked into using this language might therefore be fooled into prematurely accepting the existence of a connection between these two diseases, cowpox and smallpox. And none of this was explicitly mentioned in the Inquiry, but all swept under the rug.

Because Jenner had given cowpox the Latin name Variolae vaccinae, the practice of inoculating a person with cowpox as a preventative measure against smallpox came to be called “vaccination." The pus from a cow with cowpox or the pus from a person inoculated with cowpox came to be called “vaccine." And even though smallpox and cowpox are diseases people don’t think about today, this terminology has stuck with us¹¹. Moreover, inoculated people whose bodily fluids were used to inoculate others with cowpox became known as “vaccinifers," a term which has fallen out of use because the practice of arm-to-arm vaccination is no longer employed.

After the publication of Jenner’s Inquiry, vaccination was generally welcomed unsuspectingly, especially since some physicians were skeptical of Gatti and Sutton’s method, expecting some new smallpox prophylactic to come onto the scene. Of the small number of physicians who had problems with Jenner’s doctrine, most of them were bullied by Jenner into submission. We might say that Jenner was like Ancel Keys; but since Jenner came first, it would probably be more appropriate to say that the likeness goes in the other direction.

On the topic of Jenner bullying his skeptics, Charles Creighton recounts the story of John Sims, who made the mistake of thinking that Jenner might be interested in evidence against the vaccine doctrine, naïvely thinking that Jenner was interested in seeking the Truth no matter what it was. Sims wrote a report about a man who had caught cowpox twice in early life and then caught smallpox twice in later life. This alone shatters the myth that cowpox is a preventative of smallpox (and the myth that cowpox would prevent against cowpox, and the myth that smallpox would prevent against smallpox). Despite this being damning evidence that Jenner’s entire doctrine was certainly false, Jenner managed to bully Sims to the point that, within a year of reporting on that evidence falsifying the vaccine doctrine, Sims even went on to recommend being vaccinated for smallpox.

Special attention deserves to be called to the absurdity of the Jennerian doctrine in light of this case that John Sims found: Obviously cowpox didn’t protect against future attacks of cowpox, and obviously smallpox didn’t protect against future attacks of smallpox, but for some reason we are supposed to believe that cowpox will protect against future attacks of smallpox, because they have the same cause. Well given that neither cowpox nor smallpox protect against future attacks of these respective diseases, even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that these diseases have a common cause, it still wouldn’t follow that cowpoxing would protect against smallpox. It makes absolutely no sense at all. If cowpox protects against smallpox because cowpox and smallpox are the same thing, then shouldn’t cowpox also protect against cowpox? Why doesn’t it? Since it doesn’t protect against future cowpox, then doesn’t that imply that, even if both diseases had the same cause, cowpox doesn’t protect against future smallpox?

So Jenner would have us believe that cowpox, a disease that doesn’t protect against future attacks of cowpox, is capable of protecting against future smallpox, a disease that doesn’t protect against future attacks of smallpox, and it’s capable of doing this because, in some esoteric way known only to Jenner, cowpox is some kind of smallpox, even though smallpox doesn’t protect against future attacks of smallpox. Yes, this makes a lot of sense! Truly the most incredible part of this episode of medical history is that anyone at all fell for Jenner’s nonsense.

And this finding wasn’t isolated to the case found by John Sims. Milkers who got cowpox would catch cowpox over and over again on their hands. They simply weren’t “immune." People who caught smallpox would catch smallpox again. They weren’t “immune." Alfred Russell Wallace, often considered next to Charles Darwin as one of the “founding fathers" of modern biology (and who will be important later on in the history of smallpox), compared getting severe smallpox with being caught in a shipwreck: Both are relatively rare occurences, so someone who is involved with one of them is unlikely to be involved with it again later in life. Even if a person who was caught in a shipwreck never gets caught in a shipwreck again for the rest of his life, we still wouldn’t say he was “immune to shipwrecks." Really, the whole doctrine of immunity needs to be questioned. The process of science needs to happen.

Jenner’s doctrine might have been redeemable despite all of the inconsistencies and fallacies if only his cowpox inoculation actually gave protection against smallpox, but, as the reader can probably guess, the reality was that this was not at all the case, as the people who were vaccinated against smallpox continued to catch smallpox. Later on in this section, we’ll go more into the epidemiology of smallpox and Jenner’s vaccination, provided by Alfred Russell Wallace, but for now we’ll rely only on the fact that physicians understood that cowpox didn’t protect against smallpox and that there were hundreds of cases documented in which people got smallpox after being vaccinated. And so Jenner was on the defensive: What epicycles could he invent to keep his failing theory alive?

Among Jenner’s critics was John Ingen-housz, the discoverer of photosynthesis, and a person who had been in the practice of inoculating against smallpox long before Jenner, albeit using smallpox instead of cowpox. Ingen-housz could see that there was no connection between smallpox and cowpox and that there was no protection against smallpox offered by cowpox. He therefore tried bringing to Jenner’s attention clear cases of people coming down with smallpox sometime following vaccination. It was in discussing these matters with Ingen-housz that Jenner came up with an ingenious way of protecting his theory from the evidence.

According to Jenner, by definition, genuine cowpox would always protect against genuine smallpox. His solution was therefore to make up new diseases identical to cowpox and smallpox, which were not true cowpox or smallpox. He called these “spurious" cowpox and “spurious" smallpox. Ingen-housz’s concerns were then easily batted away as being cases of “spurious" smallpox. Those people couldn’t have suffered from genuine smallpox following inoculation—it must have been “spurious" smallpox by definition. This allowed Jenner to claim that his treatment really was effective in spite of the mounting evidence against it. Ingen-housz remained unconvinced of Jenner’s charade, but died soon after their discourse at the age of 68.

In the exchange with Ingen-housz, Jenner used “spurious" smallpox to protect his theory, but it was soon after that he switched to primarily using “spurious" cowpox as his main excuse. This was strategic, as it could cover more of his failures: If a bunch of people all become arm-to-arm vaccinated together, and then a lot of them got smallpox, for Jenner to blame each and every case on “spurious" smallpox would basically be an admission that his vaccine couldn’t prevent disease. But if he could convince them that they’d been vaccinated, not with “true" cowpox, but with “spurious" cowpox, and therefore have no immunity to smallpox, then Jenner would be let off the hook since his failures would seem to be due to no fault of his own. After all, how was Jenner to tell the difference between “genuine" cowpox and “spurious" cowpox while vaccinating people? Because of this, even if one became vaccinated, time was the real test of vaccination: If someone got smallpox after vaccination, then he must not have really been cowpoxxed in the first place, but instead must have been inoculated with “spurious" cowpox. Therefore a person couldn’t even be sure he was vaccinated immediately after vaccination. This is obviously a bit ridiculous.

Moreover, Jenner spoke of a “putrefactive" process by which matter that would have caused “genuine" cowpox instead would tend to produce “spurious" cowpox instead. Either horse-grease having gone through this putrefactive process or pus from someone’s vaccination site having gone through this putrefactive process might not result in an inoculation with “genuine" cowpox, and therefore there would be no protection against smallpox. This alleged “putrefactive" hypothesis would later be of inspiration to another researcher in the history of medicine.

The doctrine of “spurious" disease, whether applied to smallpox or cowpox, was obviously intended to protect Jenner’s hypothesis from falsification. “spurious" cowpox and the alleged putrefactive process existed only to deflect away criticism—there was no way of testing them, because Jenner redefined the terms in such a way that they were beyond testing¹².

But at least when Jenner first introduced the doctrine of “spurious" disease to the public, it wasn’t unfalsifiable. In spring of 1799, Jenner published a follow-up work to his Inquiry, titled Further Observations, in which he introduced his new “spurious" doctrine. Originally, at least in this book, “spurious" cowpox was meant to refer to any cowpox that didn’t have its origin in horse-grease, but this was dropped in his subsequent works, the connection between the horse-grease doctrine and the spuriousness doctrine being intentionally severed¹³. Creighton was actually suspicious that Jenner introduced horse-grease specifically so that later on he could introduce the concept of “spurious" disease before ditching horse-grease altogether¹⁴. Creighton said that after introducing the doctrine of “spuriousness," the notion of “spurious" disease “was soon able to run on its own two legs without any support from pathology or anything else." It became completely untethered to horse-grease, which had been forgotten.

From the perspective that Jenner was trying to protect his hypothesis from falsification at all costs and that he knew he could do this by performing a horse-grease experiment, it makes sense why he might experiment on a human child knowing that horse-grease was unrelated to cowpox: He desparately needed this connection to be made so that he could distinguish between “genuine" and “spurious" cowpox later on. After making this connection, he would be free to drop the nonsense about horse-grease. Of course, Jenner was hoping that little John Baker would survive, as this would have helped him make his case that cowpox actually was connected to horse-grease, but the child’s life was only a secondary concern to him—the primary concern being convincing the world of his very strange ideas about smallpox, and the child’s survival would have been strictly instrumental to that end. Nothing should have been allowed to get in his way. His later works, Continuation of Facts and Observations (1799) and On the Origin of Vaccine Inoculation (1801) don’t even mention horse-grease, but the doctrine of “spuriousness" had already been firmly established.

And so when the ties between horse-grease and “spuriousness" were cut, the doctrine of “spuriousness" was made pretty much unfalsifiable. All possible failures of Jenner’s vaccine could be explained away by simply asserting—without evidence—that either the cowpox innoculation must have been performed with “spurious" cowpox or the smallpox that followed must have been “spurious" smallpox. No matter what happened, Jenner had the authority to twist language so that his theory would always come out on top. This means that, at least for all those people who still want to equate “the scientific method" with naïve falsificationism, Jenner’s dogma was not scientific. (And although falsification is not the end-all and be-all of science, it must be admitted that this is piling up to look like a complete scam.) Nevertheless, the medical profession ate it up. And of course, knowing that there would be skeptics, some of the vaccinationists pretended to be able to tell the difference between “genuine" and “spurious" cowpox. Medical journals defended the dogma by parroting “spurious" just as Jenner had trained them to.

As this was in the time before color photography, in those days artists were tasked with coming up with accurate drawings of the different kinds of cowpox. Creighton quoted from the editor of the Medical and Physical Journal, who treated Jenner like a messiah, saying,

We cannot help regretting on this occasion that Dr. Jenner’s engagements prevent him from giving to the public those very accurate and beautifully colored [pictures] which he is now preparing to accompany the next edition of this works. Those [pictures] would indeed be a rudder and a compass by which the practitioner might steer with safety.

One can very obviously see that scientism has crept in. This was very clearly not a scientific operation, but a religious one. Jenner was not being viewed as a fallible human, but as an infallible prophet speaking on behalf of a god named “the Science." Moreover, those “very accurate and beautiful" drawings of cowpox pustules never ended up being published (if they ever even existed at all).

And because any ordinary person could see that something wasn’t right about Jenner’s doctrine, his followers openly discouraged science. This is perhaps most obvious in the writing of Dr. Huggan, one of the most vocal proponents of Jennerian medicine. Huggan claimed that,

People are weak who believe [getting smallpox after being vaccinated] probable, or even possible. Such cases may impose upon the credulous, may perplex the minds of those who still have their doubts, and may afford a malicious and short-lived triumph to the ungenerous part of the profession, but can never influence the liberal and the enlightened.

What an astounding inversion of a scientific attitude! Here Huggan ridicules curiosity and skepticism. Someone is “weak" if he entertains unpopular views or if he questions dogmas. Apparently to Huggan, being enlightened means putting blind faith in the religion being preached by Jenner.

Then in July of 1800, a group of 36 physicians and surgeons issued the following adverisement in the Morning Herald:

Many unfounded reports have been circulated, which have a tendency to prejudice the mind of the public against the inoculation of the cowpox, we, the undersigned physicians and surgeons, think it our duty to declare our opinion—that those persons who have had the cowpox are perfectly secure from the infection of the smallpox.

Within a year, another thirty signed the statement. Could this be considered anything but propaganda? To those reading this in the years just after 2020, this must sound extremely familiar. Remember that an appeal to authority is always fallacious, so slapping 66 appeals to authority together is only 66 times as fallacious. All arguments must stand on their own and not rest on the authority of whoever’s making them.

One piece of propaganda, written in 1800 by Mr. Creaser, even claimed that, “It is extraordinary how exactly Jenner has been confirmed." Even Jenner would see this as an overstatement though, because Creaser’s praise was also showered on Jenner’s horse-grease doctrine, from which by that point Jenner was already trying to distance himself!

In the years that followed, medical men began to recommend cowpox as a cure-all. It was claimed to be able to protect against plague in Turkey; it was thought to be able to ameliorate if not prevent scarlet fever; it was even suggested that vaccinating dogs would make them better behaved. All of these are examples of a kind of naïve empiricism that attempts to deduce causation from weak correlations with complete disregard as to whether there’s a plausible causal mechanism behind the alleged correlations. They’re also examples of the fact there are many members of the medical profession who aren’t above just scamming people. Their interests always need to be kept in mind.

And speaking of interests, on March 17^th, 1802, Jenner petitioned Parliament for a reward for his discovery. Parliament appointed a committee to scrutinize the discovery and determine how much the reward should be, if it should be given at all. Their investigation uncovered that the practice of cowpoxing to prevent smallpox had not actually begun with Jenner, and was actually already performed years before Jenner by a farmer named Benjamin Jesty, who also believed the rumor about coxpox protecting against smallpox. Of course, a farmer using coxpox to try to prevent smallpox is not actually proof that cowpox really does prevent smallpox. Unfortunately, the existence of such a farmer only seemed to confirm the committee’s bias that Jenner’s doctrine was true. Instead of focusing suspicion on whether or not the prophylactic was of any use, it was diverted to the question of whether Jenner was first to come up with it. And many of Jenner’s disciples testified before the committee about the efficacy of the prophylactic, while the opposition was barred from making their case¹⁵, and at no point in time was the doctrine of horse-grease mentioned to the committee. And since Jesty hadn’t written a treatise on the matter in order to influence the opinions of physicians, it was determined by the committee that Jenner was deserving of reward for his discovery.

Jenner was granted £10,000. Especially given that money can buy things today that it couldn’t back then (e.g., phones, cars, air-conditioners, laser printers, etc.), and that no price-inflation calculator can take this effect into account, we should be cautious not to just say that the amount granted to Jenner was equivalent to any modern amount of money. Having made this important point about the purchasing power of money, if we decide to use a price-inflation calculator just to try to get an idea of how large this sum of money was for the time (understanding the limitations of such a number), this would be like £1 million in 2023-money, just to give an idea.

The years 1804 and 1805 saw the first real test of Jenner’s prophylactic, since an epidemic of smallpox swept through Britain. Although hundreds of cases of smallpox following vaccination had been recorded, controversy raged when a man named Mr. Goldson published a report of six cases at Portsmouth and advertised it in the Medical Journal. Jenner called this work a “murderous harbinger," later claiming that “Goldson’s book has sent many a victim to a premature grave." Of course, Jenner had already received an enormous amount of money for his invention, so he couldn’t just change his mind at this point. Science was not something that Jenner could afford to tolerate happening. (And remember what negative emotions like fear do to the process of science: Making people afraid to look into alternative ideas, for fear that doing so might bring about death or disease, is a way to stop science from happening, which is precisely why Jenner was saying that questioning vaccination was killing people. He was saying that being scientifically minded could result in the death and should therefore be seen as equivalent to murder.)

As a result of the epidemic, the people largely realized that belief in vaccination was mere superstition. It was the people and a handful of dissenting physicians up against a power-hungry medical establishment. Jenner’s biographer wrote that the walls of London were filled with “lies." Of course, these were only “lies" from the perspective of an apologist for the Jennerian religion. Creighton tells,

The columns of the Independent Whig contained long letters by anti-vaccinists; a debate on the question was protracted for several nights at the Westminster Forum; and a new journal, called the Cowpox Chronicle, or Medical Reporter, was started, and distributed through the post.

In other words, the people were actively participating in science, despite efforts on the part of the medical establishment to crush science. Alternatives popped up offering the free and open debate that the people were craving and which just wasn’t happening in the mainstream media.

Despite the unpopularity of vaccination among the people, the same act of Parliament that granted Jenner that huge sum of money was ammended so that he would receive an additional £20,000 (something like £2 million in 2023-money if we use the naïve price-inflation calculator).

And in June of 1808 the National Vaccine Establishment was founded, with an annual budget of £3,000 per year (something like £300,000 per year in 2023-money). It was to be operated by the College of Physicians and the College of Surgeons and its purpose was to vaccinate the public and spread Jenner’s gospel. And so instead of just letting the people who wanted to be vaccinated pay to get vaccinated, vaccination was subsidized by the government, helping to only further establish a special interest group hell-bent on vaccinating everyone.

Creighton described the National Vaccine Establishment as “never anything but an instrument of thorough-going vaccination apologetics." This was useful for the pus-peddling physicians when the smallpox epidemic of 1811 struck and everyone was again completely disillusioned with vaccination. According to Creighton,

Although vaccination had now a powerful corporation interest behind it, its public credit was much impaired, and it received no very hearty support from the profession outside the circle of officials.

He went on to give evidence that prominent physicians who had originally been some of the first champions of vaccination ended up distancing themselves from it. For example, there was Pearson; Jenner wrote that he had been “insinuat[ing] that vaccination is good for nothing." There was also William Woodville, who had anticipated Jenner’s discovery of vaccination and been a strong advocate of it in the early years, but who stopped speaking about vaccination altogether and began practicing the old-fashioned smallpox inoculation again in the years leading up to his death.

(It’s a little known fact that the philosophy of medicine known as homeopathy began just two years before Jenner’s experiments, and that its founder, Christian Samuel Hahnemann, was in favor of Jenner’s vaccine because it fit into his idea that certain diseases could protect against certain other diseases. Jenner’s vaccine was the topic of aphorisms 36 and 46 in his 1810 book The Organon of Medicine. In the sixth edition of this book, it was also the topic of aphorism 56. And it’s not really disputable how well vaccination conforms to the principles of homeopathy; William Osler, on the topic of Jenner’s vaccine, once wrote, “a slight attack of one disease would protect the body from disease of a similar character." That’s the homeopathic law of similars as stated by a mainstream physician. Without knowing that this came from the most famous physician of the twentieth century, one might be tempted to guess that it was penned by a homeopath or even Sam Hahnemann himself. Today it might be the case that homeopathic medicine and the anti-vaccinist movement act as allies to each other, but historically homeopathy was allied to vaccinism. It was only after both were pushed to the fringes that there was any chance of an alliance. This also explains how Émil Grubbé could have been trained in homeopathy at Hahnemann Hospital in Chicago, while at the same time being the public vaccinator for the Mosley and South Division High Schools in Chicago.)

With so many people preferring smallpox inoculation to cowpox inoculation, the vaccine apologists even began demanding that smallpox inoculation be legally prohibited to prevent it from competing against vaccination¹⁶. It wouldn’t be until much later that any kind of legislation of this kind could find public favor though.

Creighton went on to share that:

Another severe epidemic of smallpox in 1817, 1818, and 1819, extending to many places in England and Scotland as well as on the Continent, made the Jennerian cause to look more hopeless than ever. This was the first occasion on which medical opinion abroad showed signs of wavering. In Scotland, according to Dr. John Thomson, more of the vaccinated than of the unvaccinated were attacked by the epidemic; but that circumstance, unpromising though it looked, was made to serve the glory of vaccination.

It was thereafter claimed that, while vaccination doesn’t prevent smallpox, at the very least it makes it milder. What evidence was used to make this assertion? None—it was simply pulled out of the air because the vaccinists just needed an excuse to continue selling pus, an epicycle to keep the theory on life support.

When the vaccinists were no longer claiming that vaccination stopped a person from getting smallpox, William Cobbett’s book Advice to Young Men made fun of this attempt by the vaccinists to wriggle out of the false prophecies they’d given:

Now, here are instances enough; but, every reader has heard of, if not seen, scores of others. Young Mr. Codd caught the small-pox at a school; and if I recollect rightly, there were several other ‘vaccinated’ youths who did the same, at the same time. Quackery, however, has always a shuffle left. Now that the cow-pox has been proved to be no guarantee against the small-pox, it makes it ‘milder’ when it comes! A pretty shuffle, indeed, this! You are to be all your life in fear of it, having as your sole consolation, that when it comes (and it may overtake you in a camp, or on the seas), it will be ‘milder!’

It was this epidemic of 1817 through 1819 that shook the faith of pretty much everyone (except for parties with special interests in vaccination), and Jenner’s reputation fell as he was revealed to be a con artist. On top of the failures of the Jennerian dogma, those in the profession had become familiar with Jenner’s personality over the previous two decades, and Jenner the man was known by most physicians to be an arrogant bully. But alas, with the help of the state-sponsored National Vaccine Establishment, the vaccinists had the benefit of institutional inertia and a perverted recognition mechanism that tipped the scales in favor of their position. Had the dogma not had these powerful forces to back it up, Creighton contends that there would have probably been an about-face in the medical profession about the year 1818.

Because of the consistent and laughable failures of vaccination, and because so many people could see right through their ingenuous excuses, anti-vaccinists spoke openly throughout the 1820s. Regardless of whatever reason the “experts" remained so fooled, the general public knew the Truth, and so when Jenner died in 1823, he was not nearly as well celebrated as he had been 25 years earlier. He died seen as a disgrace.

It was 1829 that the vaccinists first proposed re-vaccination—an admission that Jenner’s claims about lifelong immunity were blatantly false. Unfortunately the powerful institutional forces ended up causing anti-vaccinist movement to fizzle out as the 1830s went on. As the craziness of the early nineteenth century faded in memory, a new generation was raised knowing nothing other than what the National Vaccine Establishment was touting. Then in 1838, Baron published his book The Life of Edward Jenner, a biography from the point of view of a devout Jennerian, which greatly influenced public opinion back in favor of Edward Jenner. It would be as though a propagandistic biography of Ancel Keys had been written to celebrate the success of replacing animal fats by seed oils, leading to a renewed interest in consumption of seed oils.

There was a smallpox epidemic in 1838 to 1839, which allowed the vaccinist establishment to blame the epidemic on a lack of vaccination and on the returning popularity of the old-fashioned smallpox inoculation from prior centuries. The vaccinists claimed again that the disease would die out entirely if only vaccination were revived and smallpox inoculation were outlawed. Their wish was granted in the Vaccination Act of 1840, which made smallpox inoculation illegal.

Then from about 1840 onward, as memories faded and contemporaries died, the mythical Jenner of Baron’s biography replaced the Jenner that everyone had actually known, and anti-vaccinists were again forced underground. From around 1840 on, anti-vaccinist articles generally didn’t appear in medical journals in the English language.

Next came compulsion. Despite outlawing smallpox inoculation and subsidizing vaccination, and contrary to all of the prophecies of the vaccinists, the epidemics continued—and so the vaccinists doubled down on their failed human experiment: The problem couldn’t have been that the vaccine didn’t work, they claimed, but that not enough people were being vaccinated. For some reason, one person’s vaccine won’t work if other people don’t get vaccinated too! It must be the non-vaccinated spreading the disease!

Obviously this was an implicit admission that the vaccine doesn’t work at all: If a non-vaccinated person can give a vaccinated person the disease, then the vaccine plainly doesn’t protect against disease as advertised; and as long as a vaccinated person is just as susceptible to the disease as anyone, why can’t he also contract the disease from a fellow vaccinated person? These points allow every thinking person to see right through the vaccinist fraud. The vaccines didn’t work, but the medical establishment hungered to force its product onto as many people as possible—and against their will if necessary. And so it came to pass that the British government enforced vaccinations from 1853 on in an act called the Vaccination Extension Bill¹⁷. Everyone was to be vaccinated.

Did this stop smallpox epidemics? The reader can probably guess the answer. If the “medical authorities" had only been using their illusion of authority to sell vaccines to the ignorant, many probably wouldn’t have cared very much. But since the Vaccination Extension Bill forced vaccinations onto people who could see through the lies, there was naturally opposition, and this bill making vaccination compulsory is what sparked yet another wave of anti-vaccinism.

The reader might rightly be thinking, “What if anti-vaccinists just made this whole story up? What if people like Creighton were telling lies about Jenner and the National Vaccine Establishment because of their bias against vaccination?" It’s good to have such a suspicion. Nevertheless, even when we consult the hard data, it can be seen that vaccination didn’t do anything to help.

The following chart plots data taken from Creighton’s 1888 article for the Encyclopædia Britannica, documenting deaths from smallpox from 1847 to 1884 in England and Wales. It should be noted that Creighton took this data from his book A History of Epidemics in Britain, which was first published in 1884. Note that Creighton only became an anti-vaccinist while doing the research for his 1888 article on vaccination for the encyclopedia, so the first volume of Creighton’s book A History of Epidemics in Britain was published before he became an anti-vaccinist. His knowledge of medical history, as demonstrated in this book, was actually why he was invited to write the article for Encyclopædia Britannica in the first place. Moreover, that book is still cited by smallpox researchers, even over a hundred years later, and even in mainstream journals. So because these data were gathered before Creighton was an anti-vaccinist, and because this data is still cited even in pro-vaccinist journals, if there’s been any manipulation of the data to favor one side or the other, we should really expect the bias to fall on the side of vaccination, against the anti-vaccinists¹⁸. So there can hardly be a reason not to trust the following data.

It’s not at all clear from this chart that the enforced vaccination starting in 1853 did anything at all, much less extirpate the disease. If the vaccine really worked, we should have seen a sharp decrease in the years 1853 and 1854, with smallpox never being higher than the previous levels. (In fact, if the vaccinists had been right in their predictions, smallpox should have vanished after the year 1840 due to the Vaccination Act of 1840.) Instead, waves of smallpox continued as if nothing special happened in the year 1853, the year vaccination was made mandatory. If the year of the vaccine mandate hadn’t been marked on the chart, even vaccinists would be completely incapable of saying when the mandate happened, since there really doesn’t seem to be any special year where smallpox just disappeared. In fact, the epidemic of 1871-1872, known as the great epidemic, which happened after the mandate, was one of the worst smallpox epidemics ever to strike Europe despite the vast majority of people being vaccinated.

Epidemiology is often criticized because it can’t be reliably used to discover causal relationships. Its weakness is that there’s no way of accessing the counterfactual. Because correlation doesn’t imply causation, we can’t usually just look at a chart of epidemiological data and say what caused a certain effect. But while correlation doesn’t imply causation, causation should imply correlation. Therefore, if the vaccine actually worked, we should have seen a drop in smallpox deaths, but that disappearance of smallpox never materialized. Therefore, we can actually say from this epidemiological data that vaccination doesn’t cause a person to be “immune" to smallpox. This chart alone completely refutes the Jennerian position—but that won’t stop us from examining more evidence that refutes the Jennerian position.

For the great epidemic, the numbers for Bavaria are very striking: In 1871, of the 30,742 cases, 29,429 of them were vaccinated, or 95.7 percent—leaving just 4.3 percent of the cases being non-vaccinated. Prussia, the best re-vaccinated nation in all of Europe, had the most casualties during the great epidemic at 124,948. Creighton points out that, in the British army and navy, where there were no people left non-vaccinated, the proportion of smallpox cases that affected vaccinated people was (obviously) 100 percent. By any metric the vaccine was totally useless against smallpox. Obviously the medical “authorities" were simply lying about the efficacy of the vaccine because it was in their interest to do so.

Creighton also compared how the mortality of smallpox had changed since the introduction of the vaccine and its involuntary imposition onto the public: In the eighteenth century, mortality was 18.8 percent; in the years between 1870 and the time of his writing, mortality was 18.5 percent, so apparently not much had changed. So it would seem that vaccination did absolutely nothing to make the disease more mild, despite all claims to the contrary. But it’s actually much worse than that: The 18.5 percent mortality was the average mortality of the general population, but the general population was a mix of both a supermajority of vaccinated people and a small minority of non-vaccinated people; by disaggregating this data, the mortality can be compared in the vaccinated and the non-vaccinated. But the mortality for non-vaccinated was only 6.6 percent. So the vaccinated were dying at the same rate as people were dying back in the eighteenth century, and the non-vaccinated were dying at a fraction of that rate. In other words, by this metric, the vaccine was less than useless. People who were vaccinated died more often.

There are probably those readers who are stubborn and therefore still aren’t on board with the Truth about Jenner’s cow-pus panacea. Those readers who have visited his Wikipedia page might have seen Creighton slandered for his beliefs about vaccination. Well fortunately for those readers who can’t let go of the undeniable fact that science is anarchic—those readers who desparately want to put blind faith in “authorities"—there is an example of an “authority" with an impressive résumé who also wrote about the scandal that was Jennerism.

As previously mentioned, Alfred Russell Wallace is often considered to be one of the “founding fathers" of modern biology right beside Charles Darwin. The two of them independently came up with the theory of descent with modification by natural selection, but Darwin beat Wallace to publishing and Wallace later on had skepticism concerning whether humans could have evolved, so while everyone knows Darwin’s name, comparatively fewer people know Wallace’s name. But this doesn’t mean he was any less of an “authority" on matters of biology (to the extent that there could be such a thing as a “scientific authority," which is really an oxymoron).

In the year 1899, Wallace published a book titled The Wonderful Century, documenting many of the things that happened throughout the nineteenth century. This book contained 21 chapters in it and ran a bit over 400 pages, but by far the longest chapter in this book was Chapter 18, which spanned 112 pages—fully a quarter of the entire book. This chapter was titled: Vaccination A Delusion—Its Penal Enforcement A Crime, and in it, Wallace recounted many of the exact statistics given by Creighton, many of which I’ve already included in this subsection¹⁹. So Wallace, one of the “founding fathers" of modern biology, was a staunch anti-vaccinist. The vaccinists might try to hide this inconvenient fact, they might try to pretend that it doesn’t exist, but the fact remains.

For the rest of this subsection, we’ll mostly cover the contents of this chapter in Wallace’s book that aren’t found in either Creighton’s article on vaccination for Encyclopædia Britannica or Creighton’s book Jenner and Vaccination. There were a few more “natural experiments" that Wallace includes in this chapter of his that are worth covering. Moreover, Wallace includes evidence that the medical establishment was even lying about smallpox deaths.

First of all, Wallace makes the amazing point (an economic point that’s incredibly easy to overlook) that physicians are not qualified to judge the effectiveness of a medicine or surgical procedure:

One [misconception] is that, as vaccination is a surgical operation to guard against a special disease, medical men alone can judge of its value. But the fact is the very reverse, for several reasons. In the first place, they are interested parties, not merely in a pecuniary sense, but as affecting the prestige of the whole profession. In no other case should we allow interested persons to decide an important matter. Whether iron ships are safer than wooden ones is not decided by ironmasters or by shipbuilders, but by the experience of sailors and by the statistics of loss. In the administration of medicine or any other remedy for a disease, the conditions are different. The doctor applies the remedy and watches the result, and if he has a large practice he thereby obtains knowledge and experience which no other persons possess. But in the case of vaccination, and especially in the case of public vaccination, the doctor does not see the result except by accident. Those who get small-pox go to the hospitals, or are treated by other medical men, or may have left the district; and the relation between the vaccination and the attack of small-pox can only be discovered by the accurate registration of all the cases and deaths, with the facts as to vaccination or revaccination. When these facts are accurately registered, to determine what they teach is not the business of a doctor but of a statistician, and there is much evidence to show that doctors are bad statisticians, and have a special faculty for misstating figures.

Wallace then went on to trace how the number of smallpox cases in the past has been periodically upwardly revised. And if the past numbers are overstated, then it can give the appearance of a fictitious decline in smallpox that never really happened.

In 1812 and 1818, the National Vaccine Establishment was claiming that there were about 2,000 deaths anually in the London Bills of Mortality prior to the invention of vaccination. Then in 1826 and 1834, their report claimed that the number of deaths prior to the invention of vaccination was 4,000 annually in the London Bills of Mortality—a doubling. So even if the number of smallpox deaths didn’t change at all after the introduction of vaccination, by editing the past, they would be able to report a 50 percent decrease! And it gets worse: In 1836, the number was upwardly revised even further to 5,000 deaths annually. This allowed the National Vaccine Establishment to claim in 1838 that “4000 lives are saved every year in London since vaccination so largely superseded variolation." Note that in the entire eighteenth century, there was never even a year that as many as 4,000 people died of smallpox in London (the highest was in 1772 when 3992 people died of it), so how the vaccine could have possibly managed to save that many people would be very hard to believe.

Another example that Wallace gives of a figure that’s either wrecklessly or dishonestly calculated is Lettsom’s calculation of the annual number of smallpox deaths in Britain and Ireland together. He estimated that, since there were about 3,000 annual deaths in the London Bills of Mortality (a number which was already about 50 percent too high), and since the population of Britain and Ireland together was about 12 times as large as the population of London, he just multiplied the (exaggerated) London figure by a factor of 12 to arrive at 36,000 annual deaths from smallpox. In the words of Wallace, “[Lettsom] first takes a number which is much too high, and then assumes that the mortality in the town, village, and country populations was the same as in overcrowded, filthy London!" This was despite the fact that, in the country, one could go years or decades without ever experiencing a smallpox epidemic. Wallace complained that these obviously false figures had been repeated up to the day he was writing (i.e. 1899) as if they were fact, and that these figures are probably many multiples greater than whatever the true figures actually had been. This just goes to show that, the further an epidemic happened in the past, the less one should just believe the quantitative figures given by any so-called “experts." People could easily just be parroting false figures.

Wallace then went on quoting more obviously false statements made in defense of vaccination, but the point has probably already been made abundantly clear, especially in light of the history of vaccination. Whether these are honest mistakes or calculated lies to make Jenner’s vaccine seem effective would depend on knowning the motives of the people making those claims. Either way, the precedent is set that these people are, to use Wallace’s phrasing, “utterly untrustworthy." They care more about pushing vaccines onto people than they care about Truth, and so he argues that “The facts and figures of the medical profession, and of Government officials, in regard to the question of vaccination, must never be accepted without verification." [Wallace’s emphasis]

But moreover, even if physicians weren’t so careless about misquoting figures, many physicians, clinging to the dogma that vaccinated people couldn’t get “genuine" smallpox, reclassified both people and diseases in order to get the data to conform to their beliefs about what should have been possible. Thus, when a vaccinated person came down with smallpox, for the purpose of statistics, he would sometimes be counted as non-vaccinated, or counted as a case of chickenpox instead of smallpox.

With respect to reclassifying a vaccinated person as non-vaccinated, Wallace wrote,

In “Notes on the Small-pox Epidemic at Birkenhead," 1877 (p.9), Dr. F. Vacher says: “Those entered as not vaccinated were admittedly unvaccinated, or without the faintest mark. The mere assertions of patients or their friends that they were vaccinated counted for nothing." Another medical official justifies this method of making statistics, as follows: “I have always classed those as ‘unvaccinated,’ when no scar, presumably arising from vaccination, could be discovered. Individuals are constantly seen who state that they have been vaccinated, but upon whom no [scars] can be traced. In a prognostic and a statistic point of view, it is better, and, I think, necessary, to class them as unvaccinated" (Dr. Gayton’s Report for the Homerton Hospital for 1871-72-73).

The result of this method, which is certainly very general though not universal, is such a falsification of the real facts as to render them worthless for statistical purposes. It is stated by so high an authority as Sir James Paget, in his lectures on Surgical Pathology, that “[scars] may in time wear out"; while the Vaccination Committee of the Epidemiological Society, in its Report for 1885-86, admitted that “not every [scar] will permanently exist." Even more important is the fact that in confluent small-pox the [scars] are hidden, and large numbers of admissions to the hospitals are in later stages of the disease. Dr. Russell, in his Glasgow Report (1871-72, p.25), observes, “Sometimes persons were said to be vaccinated, but no marks could be seen, very frequently because of the abundance of the eruption. In some of those cases which recovered, an inspection before dismission discovered vaccine marks, sometimes very good."²⁰

Now reflect on the fact that the non-vaccinated were dying at far lower rates despite this little reclassification game to rig the numbers in favor of vaccination.

In a footnote of his book Jenner and Vaccination, Creighton even tells of a story in which, during the great epidemic of 1871, he himself was misdiagnosed. He said that he,

had an attack of illness in Vienna, caught while attending the smallpox wards of the Allgemeine Krankenhaus. The late Professor Skoda, who made the diagnosis during the eruptive fever and when the eruption was appearing, used the puzzling term “varicella," which, to an English student, had no other meaning than chickenpox. The eruption developed into the ordinary pustules of smallpox and ran the ordinary course. The diagnosis was so made, doubtless, on account of the existence of an obvious vaccinal mark on the arm.

This shift in terminology started during the epidemic of 1818 in Scotland and immediately found favor in Vienna. So in the same way that leprosy was virtually completely eradicated, but almost entirely due to a change in terminology (i.e. renaming a large number of its cases as “smallpox"), smallpox could also be defeated by a shift in terminology (i.e. by renaming it “chickenpox").

In more direct language, we might say that these doctors were lying, whether about vaccination or about the diagnosed disease. We can do all the statistics we want, but it’s really a case of “garbage in, garbage out." If we include in our statistics data that are very obviously lies, the output will also be a lie. So even though there’s abundant evidence that vaccination did nothing to curb smallpox during the nineteenth century, whatever evidence might be found to support the premise must be viewed with suspicion. When this fact is combined with physicians’ tendency to misquote figures, one can really put little trust, if any at all, in their claims. For this reason, the second section of Wallace’s chapter on vaccination in The Wonderful Century is boldly titled, “Much of the evidence adduced for vaccination is worthless."

Because vaccination was adopted so quickly, there is an astounding lack of epidemiological evidence capable of comparing a vaccinated population with a non-vaccinated population. If all of the nations with records of smallpox deaths enforce vaccination, then there really isn’t anything to compare a vaccinated population against. Moreover, since the data has been tampered with by reclassifying people as non-vaccinated or by reclassifying smallpox as chickenpox whenever it’s convenient, there’s little data capable of comparing a largely vaccinated population against a largely non-vaccinated population. Fortunately, Wallace had found such a population: His home city of Leicester.

The residents of Leicester were justifiably skeptical of Jenner’s cow-pus panacea, and so they used their local government to protect themselves from the whims of London²¹. As a result, Leicester was one of the very few places in Britain where vaccination was not compulsory, and as a result, almost everyone in Leicester was non-vaccinated. The statistics for Leicester then only needs to be compared against a similar group.

Wallace then compared Leicester to Birmingham. During the great epidemic of 1871-72, Leicester was not yet free from the orders handed down from London, and so they had a high vaccination rate. But then in the epidemic of 1891-94, their vaccination rate had plummeted to just 7 people vaccinated per 10,000 of the population—a bit less than 0.1 percent. The expectation would be that, if vaccination had any value, Leicester should have been comparably worse off than it was in the previous epidemic. But was this the case? The statistics for these two places are contained in the following chart, which is copied from Wallace’s book:

So during the great epidemic, they were pretty similar, with the same number of deaths, but with Leicester actually being hit harder in terms of non-fatal cases. But then with respect to the epidemic of 1891-94, Wallace wrote,

Here we see, that Leicester had less than one-third the cases of small-pox, and less than one-fourth the deaths in proportion to population than well-vaccinated Birmingham; so that both the alleged protection from attacks of the disease, and mitigation of its severity when it does attack, are shown, not only to be absolutely untrue, but apply, in this case, to the absence of vaccination!

He then went on to compare Leicester to Warrington, a town which fared even worse, despite its high vaccination rate, and he hones in on the years 1892-93. The following chart is also taken from his book:

Wallace was sure to point out that the vaccinated town had more than six times as many cases per capita and more than eight times as many deaths per capita. Now of course, this is epidemiological data, and so we should think through how correlation and causation work: Just because a correlation between variables exists, that doesn’t mean that they are causally linked one way or the other—but if one thing does cause another, then there should be an observable correlation. The fact that vaccination doesn’t correlate with reduced death is certainly suggestive of the fact that vaccination didn’t cause people to be “immune" to smallpox. Moreover, this conclusion is congruent with everything else that’s known of Jenner’s vaccine.

Of course, this whole excercise in the epidemiology of Leicester and other towns only had to be resorted to because of an astounding lack of experimental data. Wallace cuts devastatingly right to the heart of the problem, stating:

[N]o careful tests were ever made by inoculating at the same time, and in exactly the same way, two groups of persons of similar age, constitution, and health, the one group having been vaccinated, the other not, and none of them having had small-pox, and then having the resulting effects carefully described and compared by independent experts. Such “control" experiments would not be required in any case of such importance as this; but it was never done in the early days of vaccination, and it appears never to have been done to this day.

It might be contested why Wallace believed that controls would not be required in important circumstances²², but he is absolutely right in pointing out that we must wrestle with counterfactuals, and in an empirical discipline such as medicine, adequate controls groups are necessary to this end. Without comparing intervention results to counterfactuals, which controls are supposed to approximate, the whole discipline is just a gigantic exercise in nothing more than mere fantasy²³. Given that no such experiment has ever been performed (and given that all evidence cuts against the Jennerian position), it is either ignorant or dishonest for anyone to say with certainty that smallpox vaccinations were actually effective.

While initially we might find it hard to believe that the entire medical profession could be led so far astray by mistakes as sophomoric as not having adequate controls, after learning about how they also got things like saturated fat, seed oils, sunlight, and fluoride, not just wrong, but exactly backwards, it must be admitted that it would be immensely foolish to think that it can’t happen. It can happen, and it does happen. In fact, it’s increasingly looking like this is the rule rather than the exception.

But anyway, to sum up some of the points from this subsection into a single paragraph: Smallpox inoculations were likely imported from the Turkey and the Middle East, but ultimately from India, where they were traditional medicine and part of Hinduism. Cowpox inoculations came from an old wives’ tale near dairy farms that physicians knew to be false at the very beginning. After a few months of experiments though, Jenner claimed things that he could not have possibly known (one cannot possibly know that someone has lifelong and perfect “immunity" after experiments lasting only a few months). Moreover, Jenner claimed to know these things based on a “test" that made no sense. There was never actually a carefully controlled experiment done to check the efficacy of his vaccine; nevertheless, over the decades, there was pretty good evidence indicating that the vaccine did not actually protect against smallpox to any degree whatever (especially since smallpox didn’t completely evaporate following the vaccine mandate and because Leicester was not plagued by smallpox upon nullifying the vaccine mandate). Jenner did his best to make his theory true by definition by inventing the concept of “spurious" disease, thus making his theory unfalsifiable (“spurious" smallpox would later be reclassified as “chickenpox"). Vaccine apologists, whether they were knowingly lying, unthinkingly careless, or simply parroting the claims of others in an effort to conform, had a tendency to lie about statistics, but always in a way that favored Jenner’s vaccine. Moreover, they would dishonestly classify vaccinated people as “unvaccinated" just to make the vaccine seem more effective than it really was. It must be concluded that Jenner was one of the greatest frauds in the entire history of mankind and that he started a real albeit covert religion centered around a certain surgical procedure. With the help of scientism, Jenner made people into true believers of the vaccine, even to the point that people came up with purity laws, forcing others to undergo the Hindu ritual against their will or pay a fine. Of course, the works of Charles Creighton and Alfred Russell Wallace can be summarized, but if the reader is interested, plenty more evidence than was presented here can be found in their works.

Even Louis Pasteur, a follower of Jenner who will be the protagonist of the next subsection, criticized Jenner’s vaccination, saying that there was never any proof given that the causative agent of cowpox was in any way related to the causative agent of smallpox.

But with the issue of Jenner’s vaccine laid to rest, we might consider: What was really going on? What was causing smallpox? And, if it wasn’t because of the vaccine, why was there a decline in smallpox from the early ninteenth century to the mid-twentieth century? At the beginning of Chapter 18 of The Wonderful Century, Wallace shares some of his thoughts about the real causes: Smallpox was just one of many “filth diseases," among which he included plague, whooping-cough, yellow fever, typhus and enteric fevers, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and cholera. He said of these “filth diseases":

The most terrible and fatal of these—the plague—prevails only where people live under the very worst sanitary conditions as regards ventilation, water supply, and general cleanliness. Till about 250 years ago it was as common in England as small-pox has been during the present century, but a very partial and limited advance in healthy conditions of life entirely abolished it, its place being to some extent taken by small-pox, cholera, and fevers. ... Not only are many persons apparently insusceptible through life to some of these diseases, but all the evidence goes to show that, if the whole population of a country lived under thoroughly healthy conditions as regards pure air, pure water, and wholesome food, none of them could ever obtain a footing, and they would die out as completely as the plague and leprosy have died out, though both were once so prevalent in England.

In addition to the concerns raised by Wallace about nutrition and hygiene, we might also note that, at the time he was writing about the decline in disease, the world was coming out of the Little Ice Age. As noted in the previous subsection, the plague is known to have popped up during cold periods such as the Dark Ages and the Little Ice Age, basically disappearing in warm periods, such as the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Warm Period, and the Modern Warm Period. While it’s impossible to say how much of the disappearance of various diseases is due to nutrition and hygiene and how much of it might be due to climate, we might not know for a long while—perhaps the next phase of the climate cycle, if it comes. It could even be that all these factors must come together to play a role in producing some of these diseases.

This subsection is concluded with a statement from page 232 of Wallace’s The Wonderful Century:

And when we consider that these misstatements, and concealments, and denials of injury, have been going on throughout the whole of the century; that penal legislation has been founded on them; that homes of the poor have been broken up; that thousands have been harried by police and magistrates, have been imprisoned and treated in every way as felons; and that, at the rate now officially admitted, a thousand children have now been certainly killed by vaccination during the last twenty years, and an unknown but probably much larger number injured for life, we are driven to the conclusion that those responsible for these reckless misstatements and their terrible results have, thoughtlessly and ignorantly but none the less certainly, been guilty of a crime against liberty, against health, against humanity, which will, before many years have passed, be universally held to be one of the foulest blots on the civilization of the nineteenth century.