["F. W. Newman on the Vaccination Conference." The Vaccination Inquirer, February 1880.]

        PROFESSOR F. W. NEWMAN, in a letter addressed to Mr. Wm. Tebb, dated 28th Dec. 1879, says—

        With me the medical question and medical opinion is a pernicious impertinence. Medical men urged Parliament to a usurpation of power and in a secret hour carried it. To attack a perfectly healthy child under pretence of public health is a tyrannical usurpation which no medical theory can defend. I have no ability to contend with medical men on anything so superfluous to the controversy as their statistics. Even on the statistical question I believe they are wholly wrong, but I am not the man for that argument, and I will not enter it. Suffice it to say that the medical faculty, as such, has proclaimed its own folly by contending for twenty years together that vaccination (so-called) could not communicate blood diseases; they are now forced to admit that it can: therefore the present members of it ought rather to hide their faces with shame than expect to be listened to with deference. Also, it is a public fact that small-pox has been far more fatal since vaccination was compulsory. If medical men do not see that these facts confute them, I despair of their intellects. Certainly, all detailed statistics that contradict broad facts are simply contemptible. But, as I said at first, whatever statistics may suggest, the guilt remains inexcusable of poisoning healthy blood under pretence of public health, and forbidding infants to grow up with blood unpolluted. The guilt rests of every legislator who maintains the law, on every surgeon, and on every magistrate who executes it.