- Museum number
- 1868,0808.7039
- Title
- Object: Vaccination.
- Description
-
Perhaps a plate to a book. A monster symbolizes the new treatment. Its body, horns, hind-legs, and tail are cow-like. Its gaping jaws resemble those of a crocodile with tusks, its fore-feet are feline, its ears are serrated; its body is covered with running sores inscribed: 'Pestilence', 'Plague', 'Foetid Ulcers', 'Leprosy', 'Pandoras Box'. Three doctors (left), with horns and cows' tails are throwing the contents of baskets filled with tiny naked infants into the monster's avid jaws (left). From the pocket of the most prominent projects a document: '£10,00[0]', showing that he is Jenner, to whom (June 1802) a parliamentary grant of £10,000 was made. Other infants, who have acquired horns and tails, are being excreted; these a fourth horned doctor (right), one foot resting on a volume of 'Lectures on Botany', shovels into a dungcart. 1802?
Etching
- Production date
- 1802
- Dimensions
-
Height: 195 millimetres
-
Width: 244 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- (Description and comment from M.Dorothy George, 'Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum', VIII, 1947)
The anti-vaccination forces, five men armed with shields and swords, advance from the middle distance, having descended a mountain on which is the 'Temple of Fame'; on an adjacent obelisk their names are inscribed: 'Mosley', 'Squirrill', 'Rowley', 'Birch', 'Lipscomb'. Their swords are inscribed 'Truth'. On each shield is a letter, the foremost 'M', the others 'S', 'R', 'L', and 'B'.
The leader, Benjamin Mosely, M.D. (1742-1819), physician to the Royal Hospital at Chelsea, published many controversial tracts and letters on cow-pox, besides interpolating a long dissertation against vaccination in 'A Treatise on Sugar', 1799. Robert Squirrell wrote 'Observations . . . on the Cow-pox'. For the others see 'D.N.B.' The pro-vaccination doctor with the shovel must be William Woodville (1752-1805), botanist, and physician to the smallpox and inoculation hospital at St. Pancras (see BMSat 9924), an enthusiastic supporter of Jenner. There is no attempt at characterization. For the vaccination controversy see Crookshank, 'History and Pathology of Vaccination', 1889. See BMSats 9924, 11093.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 1868
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1868,0808.7039
