ds a year be half-a-crown. And, on the other hand, a hygienic
measure has only to be one of such refinement, difficulty, precision and
costliness as to be quite beyond the resources of private practice, to
be ignored or angrily denounced as a fad.

TRADE UNIONISM AND SCIENCE

Here we have the explanation of the savage rancor that so amazes people
who imagine that the controversy concerning vaccination is a scientific
one. It has really nothing to do with science. The medical profession,
consisting for the most part of very poor men struggling to keep up
appearances beyond their means, find themselves threatened with the
extinction of a considerable part of their incomes: a part, too, that
is easily and regularly earned, since it is independent of disease,
and brings every person born into the nation, healthy or not, to the
doctors. To boot, there is the occasional windfall of an epidemic,
with its panic and rush for revaccination. Under such circumstances,
vaccination would be defended desperately were it twice as dirty,
dangerous, and unscientific in method as it actually is. The note of
fury in the defence, the feeling that the anti-vaccinator is doing a
cruel, ruinous, inconsiderate thing in a mood of indignant folly: all
this, so puzzling to the observer who knows nothing of the economic side
of the question, and only sees that the anti-vaccinator, having
nothing whatever to gain and a good deal to lose by placing himself in
opposition to the law and to the outcry that adds private persecution to
legal penalties, can have no interest in the matter except the interest
of a reformer in abolishing a corrupt and mischievous superstition,
becomes intelligible the moment the tragedy of medical poverty and the
lucrativeness of cheap vaccination is taken into account.

In the face of such economic pressure as this, it is silly to expect
that medical teaching, any more than medical practice, can possibly
be scientific. The test to which all methods of treatment are finally
brought is whether they are lucrative to doctors or not. It would be
difficult to cite any proposition less obnoxious to science, than that
advanced by Hahnemann: to wit, that drugs which in large doses produce
certain symptoms, counteract them in very small doses, just as in more
modern practice it is found that a sufficiently small inoculation with
typhoid rallies our powers to resist the disease instead of prostrating
us with it. But Hahnemann and his