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| Hpathy Ezine - March 2004 | ||||
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Sanitation Vs. Vaccination -- Walter S. Hadwen M.D. |
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In some of these tiny houses there were seven, nine, and even twelve cases of smallpox. A sixth part of the whole epidemic occurred in three streets. In one street the sewage entered the cellars of the houses, and the choked-up street sewer had to be opened up in the midst of the epidemic. Nearly half the houses in this street had smallpox cases. Then the epidemic caught on in two disgracefully unsanitary and overcrowded, ill-ventilated elementary schools. Forty-five children were struck down suddenly in one of them and 31 in the other. The patients were removed to what was called an isolation hospital. It was congregation, not isolation. A woman employed in the early part of the epidemic as solitary night nurse told me that the sight and screaming of these poor children at night as they ran about the wards in delirium so completely unnerved her that she was obliged to leave. They were allowed no water for their fevered skins, the baths were choked with dirty linen, and never used. The little ones were packed three, four, and even five in a bed; vermin was crawling everywhere; no oil was used for the faces, and the poor children scratched themselves till they bled. Of every two taken in to the Stroud Road Hospital one was carried out a corpse; when the mortuary became choked with dead bodies, the bathroom was utilized for this purpose. One child lay for two weeks and two days with her eyes scabbed and not a single drop of water was given to relieve her. When one hospital became full, another one was opened which had been used as a cholera hospital many years before. It was built on stakes in a rough, boggy field; it had no sewerage connections, nor any drainage whatever, and water had to be carried in water-carts over a quarter of a mile of bog to reach it. The panic became fearful, and a wild, despairing cry went up from the plague-stricken city as the destroying angel sped from house to house in these awful slums. And what was the answer the terror-stricken inhabitants received from the Guardians of Public Health? Still the same mad reply: "These be thy gods, O Israel!" as they pointed to the vaccine lancets, dripping with their filthy venom; in helplessness and fear they implored the people, in a unanimously signed medical manifesto, to bow down and worship at the shrine. At last the rain came. It washed the atmosphere, it flushed the sewers and drains; it filled the vacuoles of sewer gas in the sandy soil, and the epidemic died down. The councilors who put up at the next municipal contest were one and all indignantly swept away at the polls by the enraged voters, and anti-vaccinationists took their place; a new sewerage system was laid throughout the whole smallpox district at a cost of some £30,000; 20,000 sanitary defects in the houses were rectified, and no smallpox has occurred since, although nearly 90% of the population is unvaccinated. But even in that awful epidemic, smallpox picked out the vaccinated for attack; two-thirds of the sufferers had been "protected" by the filthy superstitious rite. |
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