WCP3040

[1]

Address: Dr. Stamm, Baden-Baden.

Baden-Baden.

Maria-Victoriastr[asse]. 14

Jan[uary]. 23. 1885

I beg your pardon for the haste with which this letter has been written, I can't master any more the english language.

My dear Sir

Many thanks for your interesting book "Forty-five years of Registration Statistics". In Germany as well as with you in England most of Physicians know so very little of Epidemiology, that they are still in favour of spreading poisons and maintaining a disease by vaccination. Pasteur¹, the great inventor of the germ theory, who ^{unfortunately} knows nothing about the Aetiologie [sic] of diseases, rides his hobby-horse. Once he wanted to inoculate the milliards of chickens with the mitigated micrococci of chicken-cholera, to prevent the ^chickens from getting this disease.

What an incredible nonsense. I did not read up to this hour the works of Baron Colins² and of his disciple M[onsieur]. Agathon de Potter³.

As you are recommending in your kind letter from Dec[ember]. 21st his "Economie Sociale" [2] as soon as I am a little more at leisure, I shall trie[?] to get it.

At Berlin a new periodical will be published next month, with the title "Sociale Zeitfragen" and I am occupied to contribute an article on land-nationalisation and on groundcredit — and groundrent — nationalisation, in which of course I have to mention your noble efforts in this line.

Your postcard from Jan[uary]. 21. 1885 tells me, that your friend Miss Ant.[?] Zimmern to whom I beg to give my kind regards, wishes a copy of "Krankheiten-Vernichtung", I am sending one with this same post to your address. In "the Salvation of Suffering Humanity" from p. 245 to p. 324 there is a short kind of extract on the same subject. I dedicated my life to the study of the sources and the origin of epidemics and the sufferings of the human race, and of course as far as possible, to the inquiry into the means and ways [3]⁴ to prevent and cut off these sufferings. Twenty two years old, in the years 1844 & 45, I went to the east to study the plague ^{(pestis bubonaria)} and its origin and I discovered this origin. Thereafter I studied again at Heidelberg, Paris and several universities, but chiefly at Berlin.

In the year 1852 I wrote a book with the title "The Religion of Action" "Die Religion der That", and founding in Berlin an Alliance (Der Bund) for the promotion of these ideas, I went over to England to try to spread there there [sic] our Alliance. I enclose the english translation of our german programm [sic]. In London I cooperated with the Secularists. For a length of time I lived in the house of my friend John Chapman^{5 (the ice-bag Chapman)}, editor of the Westminster Review. Miss Evans (Elliot)⁶[sic], who thereafter united herself with the physiologist and editor of the life of Goethe[,] Prof[essor]. Lewis⁷ [sic], lived at the same house, where at a fixed day every fortnight the most celebrated authors of the day, amongst them Harriet Martineau⁸, W. W. Fox⁹, Francis William Newman[,]¹⁰ Spencer¹¹ etc. etc. used to unite. Frequently I went [4] to see dear F. Will. Newman, the eloquent members of the Par[?] and Unitarian W. W. Fox, Thomas Hodgkin M.D.¹² the philanthropist and friend of Montefiore¹³ etc. During the summer of 1854 I went to Liverpool, crossing over to the States and going there to visit the oldest American Medical School, founded by the English, the University of Pennsylvania. Again I absolved [sic] there a regular course of medical studies, went thereafter through all the examinations (understanding the english much better than today), wrote a pamphlet on the origin and prevention of the plague, went to Boston to see Theodor [sic] Parker¹⁴, Agassiz¹⁵, Longfellow¹⁶ [illeg.] At the end of 1855 a small pox [sic] epidemic breaking out at New York I left Boston for New York after having been vaccinated again by myself. Spite of this I got six weeks thereafter the small pox in a most desagreable [sic] form and complicated with pneumonia. From this time I studied more exactly the facts about Vaccination and you see the results in my "Krankheiten-Vernichtung". Thereafter I studied the geographical distribution of diseases and chiefly of yellow fever, typhus and typhoid fevers and epidemics all over Amerika [sic] (to the West, New Orleans, Vera Cruz, Mejico [sic] [,] Habana [sic], Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, La Plate, States, Uruguay, Brasils [sic] etc.). I landed at Southampton the 1 Oct[ober]. 1858. The rest of my doings you see in the preface of "Salvation"

Excuse my bad English and believe me yours very faithfully | A. Theod. Stamm [signature]