VACCINATION ‘TO SINK SILENTLY INTO OBLIVION’
BROWN, Thomas.
A Letter in Reply to the Report of the Surgeons of the Vaccine Institution, Edinburgh; with an appendix, containing a variety of interesting letters on the subject of vaccination, and including a correspondence with Dr Duncan, Dr Lee, and Mr Bryce …
Edinburgh, George Ramsay & Co for John Ballantyne, John Murray, and S. Highley, 1809.
8vo, pp. [4], 96, 28; with half-title; some browning and spotting, else a very good uncut copy in contemporary blue wrappers; a few small chips, spine wanting; upper wrapper inscribed ‘Brown’s Letter’ in blue pencil, a few marginal pencil marks.
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A Letter in Reply to the Report of the Surgeons of the Vaccine Institution, Edinburgh; with an appendix, containing a variety of interesting letters on the subject of vaccination, and including a correspondence with Dr Duncan, Dr Lee, and Mr Bryce …
Uncommon first edition of this early anti-vaccine tract, with an appendix comprising a printed exchange of letters between the author and his disputants.
The Musselburgh surgeon Thomas Brown presents a fervid attack on Jenner and his colleagues and argues against the efficacy of vaccination – inoculation with cowpox – in favour of variolation with smallpox. The more dangerous albeit more traditional process of variolation would be outlawed by the first Vaccination Act of 1840. The appendix of previous correspondence traces the increasingly terse dispute between Brown and doctors of the Public Dispensary and Vaccine Institution of Edinburgh, Andrew Duncan (1744−1828), John Lee (1799−1859), and James Bryce (1766−1826). One typically cynical letter from Brown, dated 14 July 1809, ends, ‘I must beg leave, however, frankly and sincerely to state, that I have now no doubt of the leading facts and opinions I have published, and I distinctly assert, that vaccination will be found, from daily experience, to be only a temporary expedient; that the practice will be allowed to sink silently into oblivion …’ (Appendix, p. 9).
Brown’s Letter in Reply provoked outcry from the medical world. Prior to publication, Lee, minister of Peebles as well as medic, took to the pulpit of St Andrew’s Church on Sunday 21 May 1809 ‘at the request of the Managers of the Public Dispensary and Vaccine Institution … forcibly to vindicate the efficacy of vaccine innoculation [sic]’, taking his text from Genesis XXI:16, ‘Let me not see the death of the child’ (The Scots Magazine 71 (1809), p. 525). Shortly after, Bryce, along with other surgeons of the Institution, published a response that lambasted Brown’s findings, writing ‘Mr Brown’s statements of his cases are as vague and superficial as his theories are flimsy and hypothetical’ (Report of the Surgeons of the Edinburgh Vaccine Institution (1809), p. 25).
Wellcome II, p. 250. OCLC records only three copies in the US, at the University of Minnesota, Johns Hopkins, and Yale.