“At one time it was believed and generally understood that after we had once had the disease we were for ever secure against it, but it is now proved that a second and even a third attack is by no means uncommon among persons of a peculiar habit of body, and whose lives are spent in opposition to all sanitary laws. This error led to that blind infatuation of being inoculated for the Small-pox which became so fashionable in the last century, and which, after much controversy, was adopted by the London College of Physicians, who considered it ‘highly beneficial to mankind’.”—William Job Collins, MD, twenty-five years public vaccinator, London, England, 1869[1]
“Millions of vaccinations are made every year, and nobody knows what they are made with. The whole process is a haphazard game with chance. Vaccination was accepted on the simple dictum of Jenner that it would stamp out smallpox. The medical profession of today buys its vaccinal virus of those who make merchandise of it on their simple dictum that it is the right thing to use … I compiled a list of upwards of a thousand instances of persons who had suffered permanent injury, or death [from vaccination] … Of these, nine have been personally known to me.”—George William Winterburn, PhD, MD, author of The Value of Vaccination: A Non-partisan Review of Its History and Results, 1886[2]
“Cow-pox was exceedingly virulent and fatal disease coming to fag end of its career in Jenner’s time. He found it difficult to get lymph from the cow, and therefore he resorted to the heels of horses; and the original lymph we use from the Royal Vaccine Institute has never been vaccine lymph at all; from the day it was introduced into London to the present time – it was derived from the arm of Jane King, who was inoculated from a horse with greasy heels.”—John Le Gay Brereton, Esq., MD, MRCS, LAC, 1881[3]
“This madness – first filtered through the brain of Jenner by the superstitious old women of Berkeley and its neighbourhood, who had long secretly practised vaccination upon children – was, after some few years of hard fighting, transmitted to Sir Gilbert Blane and a few of his class; and as these were the great ‘medicine men,’ whose wisdom excelled all others, the delusion was soon shared by the King. From the King it passed to the Court, from the Court to the Government, from the Government to the profession, and from the profession to all who readily move by example in high places. In this way, not England alone, but every part of the civilised world, more or less, went mad; and humanity is now reaping its reward – not in the extirpation of small-pox, as promised by these fanatics, but in the increase of diseases more frightful in their character, and in their general results more fatal.”— Dr. Skelton, Licentiate in Medicine and Surgery, London and Edinburgh[4]
In 1796, Edward Jenner tested a popular belief: that cowpox protected against smallpox. He obtained cowpox material from a milkmaid and used it to inoculate an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps, whom he then deliberately exposed to smallpox. Because the boy did not fall ill, Jenner concluded that the procedure – cowpoxing, later given the more scientific-sounding and mysterious name vaccination (from vacca, Latin for cow) – was effective and conferred lifelong protection. On 17 March 1802, he informed the House of Commons that vaccination was entirely safe, granted lifelong immunity and would rid the world of smallpox.[5]
From the outset, however, many regarded this new notion – built on eighty years of smallpox inoculation – as anything but safe or effective. Yet the idea took hold almost immediately. As Dr. William Rowley, MD, observed in 1805 – less than a decade since vaccination had started – “Whoever had not taken the oaths of supremacy and allegiance to vaccination, or who dared to doubt the infallibility of Cow-pox inoculation even in its infancy, even before any judgment could be formed, were ignominiously treated as traitors to the royal vaccinating state, as rebellious subjects to the Jennerian despotic power.”[6] Decades later, Dr. Charles Creighton likewise noted how firmly this idea had taken root: by 1801, he wrote, professors and others of his class “on the Continent as well as in England were already deeply committed“ and that “anyone who undertakes to answer for Jenner and his theories, must shatter his own reputation for scientific and historical knowledge.”[7]
What follows is not a history of vaccination’s triumphs but a record of its failures – drawn almost entirely from the testimony of physicians who witnessed them firsthand. The timeline that unfolds across the following decades chronicles smallpox vaccination’s inability to shield against the very disease it promised to conquer, together with the injuries and deaths that followed in its trail. The quotations assembled here, spanning 1799 to 1910, call into question the triumphant narrative so widely accepted about this medical intervention.
