Vaccination - a holy cow

Vaccination — a holy cow by Cornelis van Dalen

An historical introdution

“Fear not, critical reader, this is not an anti-vaccination treatise, for the writer is himself in the habit of vaccinating his patients, au besoin, and he believes that vaccination does protect, to a certain large extent, from smallpox, though the protection must necessarily cease as soon as the vaccinated person has slowly returned to his pristine state of pure health.”[1]

So writes J Compton Burnett, eminent Homoeopath of Wimpole Street, London, in 1897, the opening lines to his work Vaccinosis, of a diseased state induced by vaccinial virus.

It is an emotive subject, then and today. Countless words have been spoken and written on vaccination in the past 150 or more years, and this article is no different. But my desire is, in some small way, to alter the popular perception of vaccination. It is the mute acceptance of the practice by the majority of the people that perpetuates it. Fear controls, perpetuates, destroys. Sadly, the profession of carers is the greatest perpetrator of fear.

The topic of vaccination frequently takes front page of the tabloid and ‘respectable’ newspapers. Vaccination is a cornerstone in orthodox medical practice, seen as a great triumph of science by man, heroically overcoming the adversity of contagious disease. This view, however, is the greatest obstacle to reasoned, rational and indeed scientific discussion. Any contradictory information or argument cannot and will not be entered into. It is claimed that vaccination prevents diseases. The threat of excommunication and annihilation is ever present for one of the medical fold to speak against the practice. Ask Dr Wakefield, though in principle he is still a supporter of it, but in another form.

We have discussed in previous articles the speciousness of the germ theory of disease causation, as the principle upon which all disease is seen and treated by orthodox medicine. The germs and/or viruses are always sought. ‘Vaccine could wipe out deadly cervical cancer’ proclaims a typical headline in The (London) Times (02 Feb 05). No, it can’t and won’t, but nonetheless every female before the menarche (first menstruation) will, in the near future, be ‘jabbed’. Merck and GSK will make a mint. They have to, as their shares are ever in the decline because of a lack of new money-making drugs. The stock market gets jittery; never mind the future health of mankind. So we begin our story.

In the beginning, a long, long time ago—
In Constantinople, in fact, during 1717, one Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 — 1762), wife of the British consul, reported how Turkish women held smallpox parties at which they performed inoculations. The aim was to induce a mild dose of smallpox to confer lifelong immunity without pock-marking:

‘Apropos of distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that will make you wish yourself here. The smallpox, so fatal and so general among us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting, which is the term they give it. There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation every autumn in the month of September when the great heat has abated — the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of smallpox, and asks what veins you please to have open’d. She immediately rips open —and puts into the vein as much [smallpox] matter as can lie upon the head of her needle.’[2]

The ‘speckled monster’, as smallpox (also called variola) was at one time known, frequented Europe. Its virulence resulted in as many as one in ten deaths in the epidemics through the centuries; during bad epidemics 40 per cent of those stricken died. Lady Mary had her own young daughter inoculated in 1721, and hereafter it seems that experiments followed and the innovation won allies. Variolation spread to other countries.

While the mortality statistics look grim, (at worst one fourteenth of the inhabitants of London during the forty-year period before 1723), the question of the acceptance of inoculation was ‘that smallpox procured by inoculation’ is far less dangerous than the same Distemper has been for many years in the Natural Way’. This becomes important in our discussion later on.

Edward Jenner (1749 ñ 1823), however, performed his inoculations differently as a result of his experimentations based on what he had learned from the country folk in Gloucestershire — that cowpox, a cattle disease occasionally contracted by humans, particularly dairy-maids, conferred immunity against smallpox. So Jenner used cow pus and inoculated a small boy, who ‘developed a slight fever from which he soon recovered. Six weeks later Jenner inoculated him with smallpox ‘virus’: the inoculation did not ‘take’. [3]

State involvement came in 1802 when Parliament granted Jenner £10,000 to promote vaccination — ‘signs that the rulers were awakened to the view that health promotion was integral to a well-run state’. So comments Roy Porter.

Excuse my French
Immunisation is from the word to immunise — the deliberate procedure to offer an immunity, to protect against contagion. Inoculation is another word used to describe the process of seeking to protect against disease. Vaccine comes from the word vacca (French vache meaning cow), and the work of Dr Edward Jenner using cow pus. Thus to induce a state of immunity to variola or smallpox became known as vaccination.

The Frenchman, Louis Pasteur, who featured in the NP article on germs [4] , worked long and hard to seek to inoculate humans against rabies — and was of the firm conviction that his procedure would eventually eradicate rabies from dogs. This has not happened. Many after Pasteur have pursued this ideal of eradicating disease, to remove the pain of death from the brotherhood of man, the doctor’s high and only mission. It is indeed a laudable and honourable motive, excepting disease has purpose, as so often expressed in New Physis.

From acute to the chronic
To return to the opening quote from J. Compton Burnett, he found that this vaccination caused a disease state he termed vaccinosis. He observed that in seeking to offer healing prescriptions to his patients he first had to remove this disease state. This he found possible with Thuja occidentalis (after Boenninghausen had pointed to it) and this became a notable ‘vaccine’ remedy.

Without too much reasoned proof or notion of the consequences of vaccination, the compulsory inoculation of the population was mandated in the UK in1853. Burnett sets out in his treatise those very questions which are still not asked today, mainly: the mortality or the number of deaths; the morbidity or the quantity of ill-health (vaccinosis), of the living; and thirdly, the morbility (his coined word), the number who actually take a given disease.

This last question is now not even considered. In the days of the introduction of the smallpox vaccination there was a tragic rise in the mortality rate of those vaccinated — hence one reason the vaccine programme was so feared. Burnett observed that ‘vaccination does relatively and contingently protect from small-pox as a disease, but nevertheless, the mortality from smallpox remains in the aggregate the same, but in a greater percentage. That is fewer people probably get smallpox, but absolute numbers of deaths is not affected, or is greater’ [5]

The practical physician, as Burnett calls the Homoeopath, only has the necessary scope for making observations arising from vaccination. In judging the ill effects of vaccination, only the mortality is considered by the pro-vaccinists, hence we have this day an ever-widening programme. Through his clinical work he was able to treat many with chronic headaches which he found to be a symptom of smallpox vaccination. Many others had noted an increase in neuralgia of the face.

‘Close and minute observation, however, teaches me — for not a few persons date their ill health from a so-called unsuccessful vaccination. My own concept of the thing is this: The vaccinated person is poisoned by the vaccine virus; what is called the ‘taking’ is, in point of fact, the constitutional re-action whereby the organism frees itself more or less from the inserted virus. If the person does not ‘take’, and the virus has been absorbed, the ‘taking’ becomes a chronic process — paresis, neuralgia, cephalagiae, pimples, acnes, &c. The less a person ‘takes’, therefore (in such a case), the more he is likely to suffer from chronic vaccinosis, i.e. from the genuine vaccination disease in its chronic form, very frequently a neuralgia or paresis.’ [6] Neuralgia is severe nerve pain; Paresis is muscular weakness or partial or general paralysis.

‘Habitual Influenzas, General Ill-health and Headache, &’
However, as Burnett points out, the practical physician, the homoeopath, observed many consequences of small pox vaccination. JH Allen writes ‘I wish to say a few words about another mode of the entrance of the Sycotic [7] poison into the organism, and that is through the vicious method of vaccination, now in vogue’. Vaccination causes all the race to be Sycotic, and is the father of a multitude of skin diseases such as erysipelas, impetigo, psoriasis, morbelliform rashes, some forms of gangrene, erythemas, roseola, popular and pustular eruptions of different forms, urticaria, eczema, dermatitis herpetiformis, lupus vulgaris and many others that might be mentioned. All cry out ‘stop the death dealing process of vaccination or the whole race will soon become degenerated’. We believe the people should rise up as one man, and with one voice demand this thing to cease.’ [8]

Homoeoprophylaxis
Many have put forward the argument that vaccination is homoeopathy — meaning curing like with like. The curious aspect of small pox, a virus that only inhabits humans, is that once the disease is contracted life-long immunity is achieved. But as Burnett argued, homoeopathy is curing and vaccination is preventative in measure. ‘Giving a variolous patient vaccine pus, or lymph (vaccinium), wherewith to cure his smallpox, that is homoeopathy, and we have ample testimony that it will act if given in refracted dose, and thus acting, it can hardly be other than homoeopathic in such action.’ [9]

‘For vaccinating a person we are diseasing him; we communicate vaccinosis to him; if he, in addition to vaccinosis, now gets smallpox, he is more likely to die the worse he has the vaccinosis’. [10]

It is not that Allen disagreed with the idea of prophylaxis either — ‘but let us not be confined to one stereotyped remedy as is now being forced upon the public by unjust laws (the crude bovine virus) that leaves its trail of death and disease behind it’. [11]

The Medical Grail of the 21st Century
A grail is something that is eagerly sought after. Orthodox medicine eagerly seeks to cure and stop all diseases from occurring. It started with smallpox, for people had found a solution — immunity from contracting variola in the first instance and surviving, of course. But the early homoeopaths recognised that smallpox vaccination had severe problems. The matter now, with ten or more diseases being ‘inoculated’ against, and this number rising, has created a vaccinosis of immense proportion.

The great travesty of seeking to create immunity to disease in an individual, the procedure has tainted the individual, subliminally and often manifestly the ill health mankind. Vaccination has produced more complex and deeply rooted diseases. Vaccination has created in man a sycosis [2] of such immense proportions, as to perhaps have perverted the course of natural evolution. This observation is more than conjecture. The early founders of the Homoeopathic art of medicine observed this, when Jennerism took hold of the imaginations of the allopathic doctors. Ever since, many great and small practitioners of homoeopathy have treated for the ill effects of vaccination and sought restitution for the souls of men, women and children. Many spoke out against vaccination and to this day homoeopathic philosophy, the wisdom of healing brought to light by Samuel Hahnemann, is the only body of concrete knowledge based on observable evidence, which preaches the folly and dangers of vaccination.

Yet Homoeopathy also has within the Materia Medica, the remedies to restore health. Hahnemann also showed the way to homoeoprophylaxis using the law of similars. However, to the greatest regret, even within the branches of modern homoeopathy, there are practices used which contradict classical homoeopathic principles. This comment is offered because the more vocal schools of homoeopathic practice are the ones the public are most likely to encounter, as they offer so-called alternative to vaccinations using nosodes and attenuated doses of the allopathic vaccines. Monstrous. Yes, sycosis has affected them too!

May this short essay on how it all began offer some food for thought. Smallpox, per se, is no longer a threat, and will never be one again, not in its original form. The issues are now ever more complex with modern multi-vaccination programmes. The problem is compounded. Health is the only immunity and now all of us, by necessity, need to fight for health ñ enduring hardship patiently, as the laws of Nature have not in the past or presently been observed and understood.

© Cornelis van Dalen 2005, 2024

Endnotes:
1 J Compton Burnett, Vaccinosis and its cure by Thuja, reprint Jain Publishers New Delhi 1999
2 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, a medical history. HarperCollins UK 1997. P.275
3 ibid p.276
4 Cornelis van Dalen, Germs & Pestilence. New Physis Newsletter, Issue No 2 2004
5 Burnett op cit. p.102
6 Burnett op cit. p.21-22
7 See footnote re miasms in article on ‘Suppression’
8 JH Allen, Chronic Diseases, reprint Jain Publishers New Delhi 1998. Vol II p.119
9 Burnett op cit P96
10 Burnett op cit P111
11 JH Allen op cit Vol II p119
12 See note 7. Additionally, (miasms) represent everything that has been superimposed on his essential being, whether deriving from the environment or acquired by him is error. They also represent a false personality, that is a personality which does not correspond to his intimate essential nature, when man, the essential ego, succeeds in throwing off that adverse miasmatic sheath, he achieves this true expression. [Dr PS Ortego Notes on the Miasms, National Homoeopathic Pharmacy, New Delhi 1980. P.209]