This is another interesting piece of history, a review of vaccination from the time of Edward Jenner, and a discussion of the best places to get "vaccine lymph," or infectious material used for vaccination against smallpox.
Strangely, multiple people at the time (including a Mr. Badcock) had observed that infecting a cow with smallpox from a human, then using some of the lymph the cow produced from the infection to vaccinate humans, was remarkably effective and mild as a vaccine. From this, the author and his contemporaries conclude that smallpox and cowpox were identical. "This datum is irrefragible."
I'm not so sure, but I don't have a good explanation for this phenomenon. Attenuation, perhaps? I'll be on the lookout for an answer in future readings, and if anyone has any ideas, please comment or email about it.
The author explicitly recognized that vaccination was the lesser of two evils, the ideal situation being that no one would be exposed to either smallpox or the vaccine disease (an ideal fortunately realized in our time), but the latter was obviously preferable to the former.
Citation: Hingeston, J. A. Vaccine Lymph. Assoc Med J 1, 269–273 (1853).
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