On the State of Vaccination in 1810 (PDF)

In On the State of Vaccination in 1810, Dr. Charles Maclean critically examines the early outcomes of cowpox vaccination, highlighting numerous failures that, he argues, were ignored or suppressed by an overly enthusiastic medical community. Merely a decade after the vaccination craze began, Maclean meticulously documented 535 cases of smallpox that occurred despite cowpox inoculation, alongside 150 deaths from smallpox or adverse reactions following vaccination. He contends that these incidents were deliberately obscured, noting that “very few deaths from cowpox appear in the Bills of Mortality” due to efforts to conceal them. According to Maclean, some practitioners were “interested in not seeing” these failures, while others feared speaking out against the entrenched pro-vaccination stance. His work serves as an early critique of vaccination, raising concerns about both its efficacy and transparency within the medical field.