forgetting everything but the immediate quarrel, naively excuse themselves by admitting, and even claiming as a point in their favor, that it is often impossible to distinguish the disease produced by their inoculation and the disease they have accused the patient of contracting.  And both parties assume that what is at issue is the scientific soundness of the prophylaxis.  It never occurs to them that the particular pathogenic germ which they intended to introduce into the patient’s system may be quite innocent of the catastrophe, and that the casual dirt introduced with it may be at fault.  When, as in the case of smallpox or cowpox, the germ has not yet been detected, what you inoculate is simply undefined matter that has been scraped off an anything but chemically clean calf suffering from the disease in question.  You take your chance of the germ being in the scrapings, and, lest you should kill it, you take no precautions against other germs being in it as well.  Anything may happen as the result of such an inoculation.  Yet this is the only stuff of the kind which is prepared and supplied even in State establishments:  that is, in the only establishments free from the commercial temptation to adulterate materials and scamp precautionary processes.

Even if the germ were identified, complete precautions would hardly pay.  It is true that microbe farming is not expensive.  The cost of breeding and housing two head of cattle would provide for the breeding and housing of enough microbes to inoculate the entire population of the globe since human life first appeared on it.  But the precautions necessary to insure that the inoculation shall consist of nothing else but the required germ in the proper state of attenuation are a very different matter from the precautions necessary in the distribution and consumption of beefsteaks.  Yet people expect to find vaccines and antitoxins and the like retailed at “popular prices” in private enterprise shops just as they expect to find ounces of tobacco and papers of pins.

THE PERILS OF INOCULATION

The trouble does not end with the matter to be inoculated.  There is the question of the condition of the patient.  The discoveries of Sir Almroth Wright have shown that the appalling results which led to the hasty dropping in 1894 of Koch’s tuberculin were not accidents, but perfectly orderly and inevitable phenomena following the injection of dangerously strong “vaccines” at the wrong moment, and reinforcing the disease instead of stimulating the resistance to it.  To ascertain the right moment a laboratory and a staff of experts are needed.  The general practitioner, having no such laboratory and no such experience, has always chanced it, and insisted, when he was unlucky, that the results were not due to the inoculation, but to some other cause:  a favorite and not very tactful one being the drunkenness or licentiousness of the patient.  But though a few doctors have now learnt