["Vaccination Viewed Politically." Letter of F. W. Newman to Henry Pitman (The Vaccination Inquirer, June 1879).]

        You are fighting a battle not against Vaccination only, but against insidious medical tyranny, which is as conceited and fatuous as it is immoral. Nothing can justify Parliament in enacting a medical creed, or enforcing any special medical procedures. We all ought to be re-vaccinated periodically, according to the Lancet. Does Parliament dare to enact such a thing? It does not; else I might be taken by force and vaccinated to-morrow.

        One who carries disease with him is ostensibly dangerous. This and this only justifies legislation against him. But when a man or child is ostensibly healthy, no case is made out for legislation at all. To enact that a healthy person shall have a disease, is a form of despotism hard to parallel; and what is peculiarly disgraceful, it is directed against innocent infants alone, because they are helpless; it does not dare to attack us adults. This fact justly arouses parents to indignation.

        Let Parliament enact that every M.P. shall be at once vaccinated, and that it shall be done from arm to arm among them every four or five years, as the doctors may prefer—if they will enact such things concerning children. The law now says to a parent—"We are alarmed to see that your child has no disease. Cow-pox (for the public good) it must have, with the chance of hideous diseases. Submit, or else make yourself a criminal, have your hair cropped, and dress in prison garb."

        Such legislation implies that Parliament is a medical pope, and would justify no end of monstrous violations of sacred personal right. As a surgeon cannot be omniscient, he cannot know the diseases hidden in a particular child; he is not to blame for not knowing; but this is precisely the reason why Parliament ought much rather to forbid than to enforce the vaccinating of one child from another. It makes the enforcement so indefensible, that one is unwilling to affix the right epithet.

        But even if cows would kindly get cow-pox for our convenience, so that each child might have the disease direct from the cow, even so it would be blind tyranny for the law to say to a parent—"You shall not keep your child in perfect health; that is too dangerous a course." When to this the parent replies by defiance of the law, and is treated as a criminal, the lawmakers are (in my opinion) the real criminals before God and man. Parents who become martyrs by resisting the law, deserve a sympathy akin to those who are martyrs of religion.