Lady Morgan’s Memoirs
Edward Jenner to Thomas Charles Morgan, 11 July 1809
Berkeley,
11th
July, 1809.
My dear Sir,
You have some heavy accusations I know to bring against
me on the subject of my long silence. I have no other excuse to offer you than
that of pecuniary bankrupts, who have so many debts, that they discharge none.
However deficient I may have been in writing, I have not been so in thinking of
you and your kind attentions. If you have seen your neighbour
Blair lately, he must have told you so.
You supposed me at Cheltenham when you wrote last.
Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to quit this place, and have been
detained by a sad business, the still existing illness of my eldest son, the
young man who was so ill when I was in town. His appearance for some time past,
flattered me with a hope that he was convalescent, but to my great affliction
he was seized on Saturday last with haemorrhage from the lungs, which returned
yesterday and to-day exactly at the same hour, and almost at the same
minute—seven in the morning. This is a melancholy prospect for me, and I
scarcely know how to boar it. The decrees of Heaven, however harsh they may
seem, must be correct, and the grand lesson we have to learn is humility.
I wrote two long argumentative letters to Dr. Saunders soon after I received your hint,
on the sub-![]()
| DR. MORGAN AND DR. JENNER. | 379 |
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ject of the new institution; but from that time
he has dropped his correspondence with me. When next you fall in with the
doctor, pray sound him on this subject. Have you seen the last number of that
infamous publication, the Medical
Observer? There is the most impudent letter in it from the
editor to me that ever was penned. I think our friend
Harry would at once pronounce it grossly libellous.
The thing I am abused for, the effects of an epidemic small-pox at Cheltenham,
is as triumphant as any that has occurred in the annals of vaccination. A child
that had irregular pustules, and was on that account ordered by me to be
re-vaccinated, which order was never obeyed, caught the small-pox. This is the
whole of the matter, and on this foundation Moseley, Birch and Co.,
have heaped up a mountain of scurrility. Between 3,000 and 4,000 persons have
been vaccinated there and in the circumjacent villages, who
remained in the midst of the epidemic untouched. This trifling circumstance, these worthy gentlemen did not
think it worth their while to mention. Adieu, my dear Sir, I hope you are very
well and very happy.
Most truly yours,
John Birch (1745 c.-1815)
Surgeon at St Thomas's Hospital and surgeon to the Prince Regent; he published
Serious Reasons for Objecting to the Practice of Vaccination
(1806).
Edward Jenner (1749-1823)
After studying medicine with John Hunter (1728-1793) he developed the use of cowpox
vaccination against the small pox.
Benjamin Moseley (1742-1819)
Surgeon-general in Jamaica, and from 1788 a fashionable physician in London; he opposed
vaccination in his
Treatise on Sugar (1799).
William Saunders (1743-1817)
Scottish physician who was physician to Guy's Hospital in London and published
A Treatise on the Structure, Economy, and Diseases of the Liver
(1793).
