But Everyone Does it...

Don't they?

There are certain things that we do that we just take for granted. Things like going to church every Sunday - doesn’t everyone? I used to think so when I was much younger. Things like having turkey and ham for Christmas dinner - doesn’t everyone? Not us, we are mainly vegetarians although I am partial to roast lamb. Things like getting vaccinated - doesn’t everyone? Not me! This article will be in two or three parts - such an interesting topic that I don’t know when I will get to the end, - so please bear with me.

The majority of people accept vaccination as something we just do - it is just one of those things isn’t it? Your baby is born and after a couple of weeks you take them along for all their jabs. (That is what happened to me when I was a baby; back then there were only three vaccines - Diptheria, Polio and Whooping Cough - and possibly Tetanus). Perhaps you decide to go on an exotic holiday or travel to the Far East and so you pop along to the GP for all the travel vaccines against malaria and perhaps dysentery and cholera (I don’t actually know, maybe it depends where you are going?) It’s just the norm, it’s just common sense, everyone does it. People do it without questioning even though, and especially in the last thirty years, there has been a huge amount of people who claim they have been harmed by these jabs or that their children have been harmed.

As for me, when my first child was born I was delighted that she was strong and healthy and to me, absolutely perfect. I wanted to do the best for her and ensure that she remained strong and healthy and so I did lots of research around vaccination. I was horrified to discover what was in these jabs and it was strange to me, that the different leaflets I picked up in my local health centre all quoted different statistics regarding safety. “Only 1 in 10,000 were adversely affected”; “Only 1 in 100,000 were adversely affected”; “Only 1 in 1,000 were adversely affected” - which was it? Which leaflet could I trust? As I agonised over the decision I received a letter from my husband’s aunt.

She wrote to suggest that I decide against vaccination. Her first child, Rachel, my husband’s first cousin, had been a normal healthy child, hitting all the developmental milestones on target. After the measles vaccine at the age of one, all development stopped and Rachel never recovered. Pauline knew it was the measles jab that had harmed her daughter, damaging her brain and she sued for damages and to highlight the dangers to other parents. She won her case - the first case against vaccine companies to win in England I believe - as this was just before Ronald Reagan gave immunity to the pharmaceutical companies who make vaccines.

She asked me to think deeply about vaccinating and pointed out that her son who was born afterwards, had never been vaccinated and had always remained healthy. And so I decided not to do it. It was not an easy decision, I just wanted my baby to be healthy and happy; I just wanted to do the right thing and I felt as if the Sword of Damacles was hanging over me. Since then I have occasionally delved into the world of vaccines and I always breathe a sigh of relief knowing that I made the right decision. It is EXTREMELY difficult to find any information online these days that is not biased towards these prophylactics.

As a herbalist with an interest in history I am aware that there was never a “Golden Age” when people lived disease free. We know this because there are thousands of years of empirical evidence regarding the efficacy of plant medicines for illness and injury. Throughout human history we have had our health challenges and we have looked for ways to deal with those challenges. Inoculation was one methodology that began approximately 1000 years ago - although there is no written evidence for this date, there is evidence that the Chinese were using inoculation from the 13th century and onwards.

Smallpox was a dreadful affliction with high mortality rates, (about one in three died) manifesting as a fever, pain, malaise and a skin rash which formed hard pustules which were full of fluid and then scabbed over before falling off and leaving a scar. Even if you survived the disease, you were very likely to be left severely scarred by the erupting pustules, possibly blind and possibly with damage to the skeleton. Inoculation in China was performed by collecting the dried scabs from a sick person, grinding them to a powder and blowing the powder into the nostrils of the patient who wished to be inoculated.

Another way of inoculating was to scratch a wound onto the surface of the skin and to then squeeze the fluid from a pustule into the scratch. This produced a localised infection which was much less severe than natural contraction of the disease and led to a milder, localised infection and permanent immunity. Those doctors in China realised though, that using fresh scabs and pustules was dangerous because of the virulence of the disease, so they then only took the scabs or pustules from those who had already been inoculated and had only had a localised infection. Then they would only take material from someone who had been inoculated with material from a previously inoculated person, in this way reducing the virulence of the inoculation material so that the response was a mild skin infection.

This methodology to stop infection arrived in the near east and was practised by Arabs, made its way to Turkey by the 18th century and became known to the English through Lady Mary Wortley Montague. It was an incredibly successful methodology and achieved life long immunity for those inoculated. It was something that anyone could do and indeed a farmer named Benjamin Jetsy from Dorset was the first person to vaccinate against smallpox using the pus from the udder of a cow with cowpox, which generated a much milder disease and then immunity to smallpox. You can read about him at the link below.

/dorset-ancestors.com/benjamin-jesty/

Most people think it was Dr. Jenner who invented vaccination but he was working more than twenty years after Benjamin Jetsy had arrived at the realisation that milk maids who milked cows with cowpox rarely if ever, suffered with smallpox and indeed were known to nurse family members with smallpox and remain immune. It is interesting to read of this history of vaccination, usually presented as a medical breakthrough when it is only a development of an already existing practice. Next time, I will review Dr. Jenner’s contribution to world health through the very interesting lens of homeopathy. I hope you have enjoyed reading so far and I look forward to any comments or questions. (Not that I am in any way an expert and am merely sharing my own research as a historian and my own opinions.)