An Early Defense of Vaccination in an 1801 Letter to the Editor of the National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser

Two hundred twenty years ago, the world was much different from what we have today. Mass communication came in the form of books or periodicals, and printing them was costly. There were no electronics, no social media, and no way to know instantly what was happening on the other side of the world.

In 1796, Edward Jenner experimented on James Phipps by inoculating eight-year-old James first with cowpox and then with smallpox. The former being a mild disease, and the latter being often deadly. James was mildly ill from cowpox, but he did not have any symptoms from the smallpox inoculation. Like a good scientist, Jenner repeated his experiment and asked people who had contracted cowpox if they ever had contracted smallpox. Dr. Jenner wrote his findings and published them widely, earning him the title of “Father of Vaccination.”

Five years later, word of vaccination spread in Europe. Many of Dr. Jenner’s contemporaries tried this new procedure -- vaccination -- in their own practice. They reported similar results: the subjects would get a mild or no disease, and they would stay healthy through a smallpox epidemic in their towns. Not to be outdone, skeptics of the new procedure were quick to attack it. You may have seen this cartoon from the Anti-Vaccine Society, published in 1802:

There were, of course, public supporters of vaccination. Thomas Jefferson became a champion of vaccination after reading a copy of Jenner’s treatise on vaccination. , thanking him for his discovery. But what about the public? Who was out there defending the science and evidence of vaccination?

A Letter To The Editor

On April 20, 1801, appeared in the National Intelligencer & Washington Advertiser, . The letter began with a statement about the current attacks on vaccination science. It read:

“To the Editor of the National Intelligencer.

Sir, ERRONEOUS statements having appeared in some late newspapers respecting the Vaccine Inoculation, or CowPox, and such statements, whether published through ignorance or design, having a tendency to make impressions on the public mind unfavorable to this important discovery, it is hoped, for the fake of truth and humanity,that you will have the goodness to appropriate Column in your useful paper to the following extracts.”

The letter then mentions a statement signed by forty physicians and surgeons in defense of the smallpox vaccine, published in several medical journals and newspapers in Europe. This is a time when Germ Theory has not been developed, so scientists did not know what caused infectious disease. It was also just five years since Edward Jenner’s experiment on James Phipps. But the scientists and physicians of the time recognized that a mountain of evidence was piling that vaccination with cowpox was preferable to under the care of a physician, or to no intervention at all to stop the disease.

The author of the letter to the Editor of the Intelligencer also includes two letters seen in medical journals where the effects of the new vaccine are mentioned. The first letter is from one Dr. Marshall, . It reads in part:

“From the medical men here, we have met with the most liberal and polite attention and I am further happy to add, that all are equally convinced of the efficacy of the Cow-pox in resisting the Small-pox, and of the great reward due to our friend, Dr Jenner, for the benefit he has conferred upon society and the world at large, by his investigation of this so peculiarly mild and safe disease. In this warm, and in comparison with England, hot climate, we have not observed any dissimilarity of symptoms in the progress of the disease from what is usual in England. The Governor has applied to the court of Madrid, to obtain liberty for us to go there to inoculate ; and it is probable that upon our return to England, we may stop there a short time. Some of the matter we used for inoculation here, was what you obligingly furnished me with; and we find it perfectly efficacious, although no precaution had been used as to the preserving it more than putting it into a small vial.”

(Interestingly, the same November 1800 journal volume includes , possibly of horse origin.)

The second letter mentioned in the letter to the editor is from Dr. Duncan, professor of the Institute of Medicine in Edinburgh. It reads in part:

“..vaccine inoculation is making great progress at Edinburgh. The medical practitioners here have given the lead; the children of Dr. Gregory, Dr. Spens, Mr. Bennet, & co. having been inoculated with vaccine or Cow-pock matter.

Though many hundreds have now been inoculated at Edinburgh with vaccine matter, yet, among all these, not one cafe has occurred where the patient was even in the smallest danger, or had a symptom in any degree alarming. Not one instance has occurred where the patient, after the cow-pock inoculation, has taken the small-pox, though repeatedly inoculated with the matter of small-pox, and intentionally exposed to natural contagion.”

Just like in the early 1700s, when after an enslaved man (Onesimus) advised him on variolation, or when , physicians in Edinburgh vaccinated their own children to show the safety of the cowpox vaccine. This would be repeated several times.

The letter to the editor concludes:

“The above extracts, it is presumed, will completely satisfy every unprejudiced mind, that the genuine cow-pox, truly produced, renders the system perfectly secure from the baneful influence of the small-pox; And if failures and disappointments in introducing this on this side of the Atlantic, have, on some occasions, taken place, these disappointments have been owing either to the use of spurious matter, or perhaps more generally to the true cow-pox matter losing its virtue, in consequence of its being kept too long before it has been employed.”

The letter is signed by “A SUBSCRIBER” from Dumfries, Virginia.

[You can download the entire letter to the editor here, from the Library of Congress: ]

Two hundred twenty years after that letter to the editor was published, people in the United States still have the same conversations about current vaccines and vaccine policy, albeit in more media than just the editorial page of newspapers. We still have anti-vaccine groups and individuals exaggerating the risks of vaccination, or making spurious associations between vaccination and health events of the vaccination. We still have everyday people citing evidence from medical journals in defense of the science of vaccination.

, an orthopox virus . Like with smallpox, vaccinia confers immunity that is cross-protective against monkeypox in most people who get the vaccine.

What we do not have anymore is smallpox. It was declared eradicated in 1980 after an international effort to vaccinate every person who could be vaccinated, and to find every case and place them in isolation.

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