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Historic Amherst

Inoculation Humor

      In the late 18th and early 19th century, N.H. newspapers regularly carried dunning notices, threatening debtors who didn’t pay up with law suits. Here’s one employing topical humor:  “All persons indebted to the Subscriber by Note or Book account, are requested to make speedy payment by innoculation; otherwise he shall be under the necessity of calling on them the natural way. Asa Bullard. Dec. 27.” (The Rising Sun, Keene, N.H., 10 Jan 1797.)

1799-1802:
Challenge Vaccine Experiments

      The new century brought a huge change. It’s a testament to the power and value of newspapers, as well as to professional exchanges between leading medical men in America and Europe, that the knowledge of the effective new inoculation method utilizing “vaccine” spread so quickly to America – and was adopted so quickly. Adopted … after America’s medical men made their own experiments regarding its efficacy and safety. No qualms about the ethics of challenge experiments!

      In August 1799, the Philadelphia Gazette, two newspapers of Boston, the N.H. Gazette, the Portland Gazette of Maine, and the City Gazette of Charleston, S.C., all reprinted from the Medical Repository of New York a published letter from one G.. Pearson of Leicester Square (presumably England) reporting on the results he and another, Dr. Woodville, had with vaccinations of upwards of 150 patients together and with medical experiments confirming Dr. Jenner’s:  “above 60” patients were inoculated first with the “vaccine disease” and subsequently with small-pox, and lo & behold, none of them caught the dread disease.

      Even before that news of corroborating experiments in old England, news began to spread in America of success with the new vaccine in New England. In May 1799, the Vergennes Gazette of Vermont reported (a bit sloppily) that “Mr. Waterhouse the ingenious professor of the theory and practice of Physic at Cambridge University [called Harvard, actually, but located in Cambridge, Mass.], near Boston, has discovered [actually Dr. W. confirmed what Dr. Jenner in England discovered, but why quibble] that cows are subject to kind of small-pox or variola vaccinae, the pustules appear on the teats of the cow.       This may be communicated to the human species by inoculation. When thus received is NEVER dangerous to life or health. When a person has once had this variola vaccinae, he can never take that species of the small-pox, which is common to the human race, and which often proves so alarming and fatal to a large part of mankind.”

      Benjamin Waterhouse (1754-1846) was a physician who had studied for seven years in London, Edinburgh and Leyden, and was co-founder in 1783 and subsequently professor of Harvard Medical School, and was the first doctor to test the cow-pox-based vaccine in the United States – on his own family. He immediately began promoting this method.

      In 1802, the Board of Health of Boston erected a hospital on Noddle’s Island to execute an experiment to prove the efficacy and safety of the cow-pox in preventing small-pox. On Aug 16, 19 boys were “inoculated with fresh, transparent cow-pox matter, taken from the arms of a number of patients then under this disease,” in an office. On Nov. 9, 12 of those 19 boys together with a boy who had

passed through the cow-pox two years earlier, were inoculated on Noddle’s Island “with matter taken from a small-pox patient in the most infectious stage of that disease.” Although the arms became inflamed at the incision sites, “the small-pox matter excited no general indisposition whatever, through the whole progress of the experiments,” even though the children took no medicines and “all were lodged promiscuously in one room.” [Here’s where it gets ugly.] “At the same time and place, in order to prove the activity of the small-pox matter which had been used, two lads, who had never had either the small-pox or cow-pox were inoculated from the same matter.” They both got severe cases of small pox. When their pustules were at the highest state of infection, the other 13 children were inoculated a second time, with “recent matter taken from the pustules” of the two sick boys, as were 7 other children absent at the first inoculation. They were all deliberately exposed to small-pox infection, most of them for 20 days, by being in the same room with the two sick boys. Each of the children was examined by panel of physicians, “who were individually convinced from the inspection of their arms, their perfect state of health, and exemption from every kind of eruption on their bodies, that the cow-pox prevented their taking the small-pox, and they do therefore consider the result of the experiment as satisfactory evidence, that the Cow-Pox is a complete security against the small-pox.” Signed by 11 physicians who witnessed the experiment, including Benjamin Waterhouse and Josiah Bartlett – but they neglected to say what happened to the two boys intentionally infected with small-pox. (Farmer’s Cabinet, 6 April 1803.)

      Dr. Waterhouse wrote in a letter from Cambridge on 4 Nov. 1802: “Dear Sir: Agreeably to your  request, I here enclose a small portion of vaccine matter. I cannot send more at this time, having just sent some to Philadelphia, where it is extinct. I have just received a similar request from New York where it is also extinct! And I have reason to think that there is none in Boston, my own cases excepted!! Neither, it seems, is there any in Portsmouth. . . . How can practitioners be so inattentive? I am obliged to hire children, and others, to be inoculated in Cambridge in order to keep up a continuity of matter. … Dr. Jenner has just sent me some in a silver box, inlaid with gold of exquisite workmanship, with a complimentary inscription.”  (The kine- or cow-pox was not a disease of American bovines, which is why in the early years, before the Americans figured out how to keep vaccine matter active, more had to be sent from England.) 

1802: Vaccine Courier from England to Massachusetts

      Into the picture now pops a fellow that students of Amherst history know quite well:  It was Matthias Spalding (1769-1865) who carried vaccine from Dr. Jenner to Dr. Waterhouse in a silver box inscribed: “From the Jenner of the Old World to the Jenner of the New.” Matthias, 9th son and 13th child of a farmer, had studied medicine at Harvard under Waterhouse. In 1801 Matthias went to London to attend medical lectures, where he got to know Dr. Jenner and his vaccination method personally, returning in 1802. Dr. Matthias Spalding then commenced the practice of medicine in his hometown of Chelmsford before moving to Amherst in 1806 where he married a daughter of Joshua Atherton the rehabilitated Tory,

and in 1809 bought the enlarged house at 19 Main Street where he carried on a medical practice. In Feb. 1812, he wrote: “I consider my stand here [Amherst, N.H.] as good as any in the county but it is too fatiguing for me. My rides are too long and the Society of physicians is not so good as could be wished.” Although Dr. Matthias Spalding contemplated leaving Amherst for a practice in Portsmouth, he stayed for the rest of his life, giving the people of Amherst the benefit of decades of excellent care, and being an active leader of the N.H. Medical Society.

1813-1822:  Federal Agent for Vaccination

      In 1813, newspapers across the country including Amherst’s Farmer’s Cabinet carried the following announcement of an extraordinary Congressional act:

      “Vaccine Matter. The undersigned having been appointed by the President of the United States, Agent for Vaccination, hereby gives notice that, the genuine Vaccine Matter will be furnished to any physician or citizen of the United States who may apply to him for it... by post, and the requisite fee, five dollars … When required, such directions, &c. how to use, will be furnished with the matter, as will enable any discreet person, who can read and write, to secure his own family from the small-pox with certainty, without any trouble, danger or expense. All letters on this subject, to or from the undersigned and not exceeding half an ounce in weight, are carried by United States’ mail free of any postage in conformity to a late act of Congress, entitled “An act to encourage Vaccination” JAMES SMITH. U.S. Agent for Vaccination, Baltimore, May 14, 1813.”

      James Smith (c.1771–1841) was a physician who had established a medical practice in Baltimore by 1797; had opened a vaccine clinic for the poor in that city in 1802 (having received a supply in the Spring of 1801 from Jenner about the same time as Dr. Waterhouse’s second supply); and had been Maryland’s vaccination agent since 1809. As the federal agent, Dr. Smith was responsible for the preservation of the vaccine supply and supervised about twenty agents nationwide, who inoculated around 100,000 people over the following decade, but the Congressional act allowed anyone to receive and use the vaccine.       A tragic error in 1822, whereby several persons in North Carolina died after being treated with specimens of small-pox they had received by mail rather than the intended cow-pox, resulted in Smith’s dismissal from the post and Congress’s hasty repeal of the vaccination act.

      Smith believed that the procedure was simple enough that average citizens ought to be allowed to perform vaccinations. Interestingly, in an 1817 debate in the U.S. House of Representatives opposing a bill for the encouragement of vaccination, Amherst’s own Charles H. Atherton, Esq. (1773-1853) had argued (unsuccessfully, one infers) that vaccination should be in the hands of skilled physicians and that a federal agent was not needed as states could appoint their own agents and enact pertinent regulations as needed. Atherton observed that in his state of New Hampshire, “physicians made a point to preserve the genuine vaccine matter and that they inoculated at little expense and even gratuitously.” Ahh, but Atherton was from Amherst where Dr. Matthias Spalding practiced!

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Katrina Holman welcomes comments to HistoricAmherstNH@juno.com

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APRIL 2021

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