of the most
sensitive, veritable torment because of this bitter opposition, which
at one time, because his French colleagues also were sceptical of his
treatment, threatened to impair the usefulness of our greatest
discoverer in nineteenth century medicine and leave him without that
support which would enable him to go on with his precious
investigation.

The more recent furore against antitoxin is still in many persons'
minds. Physicians who used it, and in whose cases serious results took
place, not the consequence of the antitoxin, but the consequence of
factors of the disease over which they had no control, sometimes
suffered seriously in their practice. All forms of opposition were
aroused against it. Even at the present time one still hears of the
crime, as some do not hesitate to call it, of injecting the serum of a
diseased animal into the veins of the human being, and above all a
little child. There are men (intelligent men!) who do not stop short
of tracing all sorts of disease incidents that happen after such an
injection, even many years later, to the evil effects of the horse
serum employed. Such people are exercising that superstitious fanatic
faculty which at all times has caused the obstinately conservative to
seek and find the most serious objections to any new doctrine,
careless of the consequences that they might bring on the discoverer
or the benefit they might prevent for the mass of humanity.

Originally vaccination was opposed by certain clergymen on the grounds
of theological objection to its use. At the present time most of such
objection has ceased, {411} It is still clergymen, however, who are
the most prominent among the anti-vaccinationists, though now they
usually find biological and pathological, instead of theological
reasons. They proclaim it a crime against nature, from the biological
standpoint, that the disease of an animal should be conveyed to man,
even for protective purposes. At the present time one can find just as
bitter objections to vaccination in anti-vaccination journals as when
the subject was first brought under discussion. Men must find some
reason for their opposition, and they take the weapon that is handiest
and that they are able to use with best effect. In an era when
theological ideas were dominant, theology was ready at hand for this
purpose, but any other ology will do just as well, and the history of
science, even in the present day, will show that always some