WCP3063

[1]

Cooma

Wimborne

June 25^th. 1900

Privileged

My dear Sir.

I have had the pleasure of meeting you more than once. but probably you will not call me to mind.

May I say I have been reading "The Wonderful Century" with unqualified pleasure: but I want to say one word on the Section Relating to Vaccinations.

The real advances in the Treatment of Disease have not been quite so great as often supposed. But the tempta[2]tion to rush into print to lay claim to discoveries is tremendous. So overstocked is the profession, so many the ambitious men eager for fame, position and money that wether[?] my recollection the sham advances I have known recorded would not be credited by any one not in the secret.

How and why Vaccination gained the credit it did I can not tell: it was a great madness[.]

But look at the position of a medical student to day. He enters a close, exclusive, intoler[3]ant college where he stays 5 years often 6 or 7 if he becomes a House Surgeon. He is told that Small Pox killed 3000 and ^maimed 3000 per 1.000.000. That Vaccination is one of the greatest triumphs of practical medicine as on a par with Chloroform. He hears of surgical advances, discoveries, inventions that have done wonders for the world. Criticism is not permitted. He must accept or go. He therefore accepts the most monstrous assertions, figures and pretensions: dissent is [1 word illeg.].

[4] When he starts in practice in a calling getting more and more overstocked, and in which not half will get a meagre living and very many only can at best a quarter to a third of their outlay, if he get the post of Public Vaccination somewhere he earns easily and certainly a good addition to his tiny professional income. In this country they are paid 9/4 per vaccination, one visel[?] only: for the second visel[?] is not paid. No work is easier better paid: no bad [5] debts, no night work but he gets his fees from the Guardians with absolute certainty.

Years ago I wrote a paper, a personal narrative The Case Against Compulsory Vaccination. The editor, Mr. Challo, prohibited all statistical tables and he refused to allow a paragraph to appear in which I dealt with the pecuniary interest of the profession.

He held that Vaccina[6]tion prevented or modified Small Pox and that the money question did not influence the doctors and that they would earn twofold as much where vaccinations abolished.

The article had to be popular and to avoid what I deemed a most important matter.

Of late my views have become stronger and I no more believe in Vaccination than you do.

Keep the article if you can to do so: only remember that I am pretty well known among the doctors, and were my views known they would publically persecute and torment me. Some of your own neighbours have never forgiven me for being a lifelong abstainer, and a greater believer in Prevention than Cure. Believe Me.

Yours Truly | Alfred J H. Crespi [signature] | Journal Editor of the Sanitary Review