Mexborough and Swinton Times December 18, 1891
Lecture on Vaccination at Denaby Main.
At a meeting of the Denaby Main Improvement Society, last week. Dr. McCall read an excellent paper on Vaccination: a summary of which are appended as follows :—
“ When asked by our esteemed and respected friend, Mr. Chambers, to read a paper to you I did my not require to think twice for my subject. My professional work amongst you, although but recently begun, has enabled me to hear the nowt varied objections to vaccination, and it is with the object of dispelling those delusions that I have taken vaccination as the subject of my paper. There seems to be a wide spread ignorance us to what vaccination really is and I can do no better than begin by a simple definition or explanation of the word.
Vaccination is the artificial production of a disease originally obtained from the cow (cowpox) by bringing the matter of that disease in contact with the living human body. To Dr. Edmund Jenner we are indebted for the discovery of vaccination. He resided in Gloucestershire, and his attention was attracted by the common belief there existing amongst the country people that those who were infected from the sores in the udders of cows were secured from an attack of smallpox.
On the 14th May, 1796, he took some matter from a sore on a dairymaid’s hand, got from a sore in a crow’s udder and applied it by two incisions on a boy’s arm. At the seat of the incisions, pustules, like those of smallpox, formed and died away leaving scars. The boy complained of headache, and felt out of sorts, but they soon passed off, and he recovered without being confined to bed.
On 1 July he was inoculated with true smallpox matter but no disease followed, and this was repeated months later the same result.
Experiments similar to these were tried on all hands, and the fact that cowpox matter prevented the human body from been acted on by the infection smallpox, without exciting any more than slight constitutional disturbance, became an established fact. This discovery created a great stir in the intellectual world, just as Koch’s discovery has done this year, and I believe in time the latter will have as far reaching results.
It was found that smallpox inoculated into the cow produced cowpox, the cows seemed to deprive the smallpox virus of some of its noxious constituents and yet did not destroy any of its utility as regards the prevention of smallpox in man.
In the same way, I am confident that the day will come when Koch’s tuberculiu matter will be deprived of its noxious constituents and produced in such a form that it will have a specific action in all tubercular tissues, without all the constituent disturbances which follows its administration now.
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