The belief that people can become ‘immune’ to a disease after an exposure to that disease dates back many centuries. For example, the Greek historian Thucydides, who was a contemporary of Hippocrates, is reported to have claimed that people who survived the plague of Athens were not later re-infected by the same disease.
This early belief developed into the idea that a mild form of any disease provides ‘protection’ against a more serious ‘attack’ of the same disease; it also inspired the creation of different methods to induce the ‘mild’ form of the disease; one of these methods was the practice of ‘inoculation’, or variolation as it was also called.
Although credited as the originator of ‘vaccination’, Edward Jenner is not to be credited as the originator of inoculation, which was practised in various places around the world many centuries before he was born. Some sources credit the Chinese as the originators of the practice of variolation during the 10th century.
Inoculation, the precursor of vaccination, was introduced into England in the early 18th century, which was a period when illness was often interpreted by reference to local traditions or superstitions and invariably ‘treated’ with a wide variety of crude methods and toxic substances as discussed in the previous chapter.
The practice of inoculation involved taking some ‘matter’, in other words ‘pus’, from the pustules or sores of a person suffering from the disease and introducing that ‘matter’ into the bloodstream of a healthy person via a number of deliberately made cuts on their arms or legs. However, prior to inoculation, patients had to undergo other procedures, such as ‘dieting, purging and bleeding’, that were administered by physicians. At that period of time, inoculation was exclusively a custom of the middle and upper classes, as they were the only people who could afford the services of a physician.
The following extract is from the 1885 book entitled The Story of a Great Delusion by William White; it provides a revealing description of the state of ‘medicine’ in the early 18th century in England when inoculation was first introduced.
“Those who fancy there could be any wide or effective resistance to inoculation in 1721 misapprehend the conditions of the time. There was no scientific knowledge of the laws of health; diseases were generally regarded as mysterious dispensations of Providence over which the sufferers had little control; and a great part of medicine was a combination of absurdity with nastiness.”
The practice of vaccination continues to involve a combination of absurdity with nastiness, as can be demonstrated by the inclusion of particles of ‘germs’ and toxic chemicals as constituents of vaccines.