VACCINATION.

Evening Star, Issue 2920, 28 June 1872, Page 3

VACCINATION.

To the Editor, Sir, —As you have opened the campaign, I take the liberty of offering a few remarks upon this subject, which is at present agitating the public mind not $ little. There can be no doubt, as you very justly remark, that “vaccination has been proved for more than one hundred years to be an antidote to small-pox ” —the few cases of exception only proving the rule ; but I am happy to say that my experience does not confirm the statement that “men claim the liberty to neglect or refuse to apply it,” but I have never met with a single instance during twenty years’ practice in New Zealand. The difficulty has been to obtain the lymph. Wherever there is a public vaccinator, the numbers flocking to him prevent private practitioners from keeping it up amongst their private patients ; and in order to meet the difficulty, it has become the practice to perform vaccination gratuitously in families who are well able to afford to pay for it. This is clearly a great injustice to the private practitioner, and moreover has a tendency to make him indifferent as to the quality of the lymph, and the careful watching of the case through its several stages. An opinion generally prevails in the profession that, under the new Act, any and every properly-qualified medical practitioner is a public vaccinator ; but it appears to me, on reading the Act, that it is a mistake, and that it only amounts to this, “that every legally-qualified medical practitioner shall be qualified to* be appointed,” etc. If the Government is really desirous of stamping out small pox, let them offer sufficient inducement to medical men to do so, by fixing a liberal scale of fees for vaccination and revaccination, and especially for the successful treatment of any small-pox patients, iti s a remarkable fact on reading the Act throughout there is no scale of fees mentioned ; and it would appear as if the fees to the public vaccinators are so low that the Government is ashamed to publish them, or that medical men are expected to perform most important professional acts without fee or reward. Can you inform me where lymph is to be obtained?— Yours, &c., Medicus. Dunedin, Juno 27.