The Vaccine Watchman (1888)

By W. D. Stokes - 30 Q&As - Book Review and Summary

In 1882, a committee of fifteen working vaccinators met at the Council Chamber of Exeter Hall to examine their own trade. Two hundred and forty-two of them, almost all serving as public vaccinators under the Local Government Board, testified out of their own clinical experience to forty distinct diseases caused or intensified by vaccination, among them cancer, syphilis, tuberculosis, blindness, paralysis, meningitis, scrofula, and septicaemia. The list was published. The witnesses returned to their practice and continued to collect their parliamentary bonuses. W. D. Stokes’s The Vaccine Watchman, printed in 1888 from his Tunbridge Wells dispensary, places that catalogue alongside the Birmingham doctor Henry May’s 1874 published confession in the Medical Review of omitting vaccination from a death certificate to protect the trade, alongside the three London small-pox epidemics rising from 14,244 to 20,059 to 44,840 deaths under ever-tighter enforcement of the compulsory law, and alongside the German outbreak in which two hundred thousand of the triply and quadruply vaccinated died. These are not the findings of an enemy of the practice. They are the trade’s own admissions, read against itself.

Stokes was a medical herbalist who had been in practice for thirty years by the time he wrote the pamphlet, operating from 35 Calverley Road, Tunbridge Wells, Kent. He placed himself in the lineage of Samuel Thomson, Wooster Beach, and Albert Coffin, the American and Anglo-American medical botanic reformers who through the first half of the nineteenth century had challenged the displacement of plant medicine by mineral pharmacy. He had previously published a longer work, Truth versus Error: or the Fallacies of the Medical Faculty Exposed, and he stood behind his clinical record with documented testimonials naming patients, addresses, and the specific hospital physicians who had abandoned them as incurable before he restored them. He attached a standing personal forfeit of one hundred to five hundred pounds to any doctor who could disprove the claims in the pamphlet. He framed his work in scriptural terms, taking the figure of the watchman from Ezekiel 33 as his obligation to sound the trumpet against what he documented as commercial murder protected by parliament. The pamphlet does not present a peripheral voice. It presents a working practitioner with three decades of clinical observation and a financial bond on every statement.

The Compulsory Vaccination Act of 1853 had made infant vaccination a legal requirement throughout England and Wales. Section 5 of the 1867 Vaccination Act introduced the parliamentary bonuses paid to public vaccinators for thoroughness, and subsequent legislation tightened the penalties for refusal. By the time Stokes wrote in 1888, working men were being fined repeatedly, imprisoned, and reduced to the parish for declining to deliver up their children to the lancet. The Local Government Board had founded the Calf-Lymph Establishment at Lamb’s Conduit Street in 1881 to industrialise the production of bovine vaccine matter. Edward Jenner had been paid thirty thousand pounds by the English government nearly ninety years earlier for the cow-pox procedure, and the trade he founded had become, by Stokes’s accounting, a public expenditure of over two and a half million pounds by 1885. An organised resistance was active: the Anti-Vaccinating Society at 77 Atlantic Road, Brixton, offered legal protection to families for five shillings annually. The pamphlet entered this contest at the moment of the law’s greatest reach and the trade’s greatest income, the year before the Royal Commission would be appointed to examine the same questions in proceedings that ran until 1896.

Stokes does not work directly in the canonical terrain lineage of Béchamp or Bernard, and Shelton had not yet been born when the pamphlet was printed. His framework comes through the older medical botanic tradition rather than through microzyma observation. The conclusions converge nonetheless: disease as the body’s response to toxic burden, the symptomatic response as the intelligent clearing of that burden, heat as the principle that sustains the work, mineral suppression as the mechanism that drives the acute toward the chronic. The full piece traces the Tunbridge Wells doctor who vaccinated a healthy calf to manufacture lymph and watched the animal die some months later with nearly all the flesh fallen from its bones, then distributed the same matter into the arms of his human patients. It follows the itemised accounts of the Calf-Lymph Establishment, down to thirteen pounds for the cartage of manure in 1886. It walks through the consumption case of Mr. Wood, who passed through Victoria Park Hospital, Brompton, St. Thomas’s, St. Andrew’s at Clewer, and the Lambeth Infirmary, received ice on the chest, turpentine flannels that took the skin from his back, and morphia injections that produced a state like drunkenness, before being restored to his trade as a surgical instrument maker after four weeks on Stokes’s herbs. Jenner kept the thirty thousand pounds after his own confession that vaccination from the cow was of no use.

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30 Q&As

Question 1: What is the central claim about what vaccination actually does to the blood?

The act of vaccination is the introduction into pure blood of a corrupt humour that has passed through millions of diseased and filthy people. This stream of corruption carries with it the residue of every condition through which it has travelled: consumption, syphilis, leprosy, eczema, scrofula, and a long catalogue besides. The procedure is misnamed when it is called protection. It is poisoning. To take matter that has passed through millions and put it into clean blood under the pretence of preventing disease is an insult to common sense that no honest reasoning man could uphold.

The blood, once corrupted, lowers in vitality. The body has not the strength to throw off such a complication of diseases. It must reap what has been sown. Tens of thousands die outright. Millions more carry the seed within them and suffer the harvest twenty or thirty years afterwards from internal complaints they cannot trace. Their doctors do not know the cause of their suffering and death, for the diseases of the brute beast and of millions of filthy people are now mingled in the veins of those who were told they were being protected.

Question 2: How did Edward Jenner come to receive the £30,000 government grant, and what did he reportedly confess afterwards?

Jenner introduced cow-pox vaccination near ninety years before this pamphlet was written, and through friends in court and in parliament he obtained from the English government the sum of £30,000 for his discovery. Before he received the money, many doctors had already proved that vaccination from the cow gave no protection against small-pox. He had patrons, however, and the grant was secured.

He had scarcely received the £30,000 when he was obliged to confess to his medical brethren that vaccination from the cow was of no use. He did not return the money. He turned instead to matter taken from the greasy heel of the horse and declared this the true preventative, using it himself and supplying it to other doctors. Thus the foundation of the practice was laid by a man whose own confession ought to have ended it within a year, and yet the trade carried forward, growing every decade, because there were millions of pounds to be made.

Question 3: What is the relationship between cow-pox, the “grease” in horses’ heels, small-pox, and consumption?

Dr. Collins and many other physicians have shown that the horrible, stinking, filthy disease of grease in the horse’s heel is found only when the animal is consumptive. A great many doctors hold that cow-pox, small-pox, the grease, and consumption are all one kind of disease, manifesting in different bodies under different conditions. This is why so much small-pox panic has followed so much vaccination, and why so many of the vaccinated die in consumption afterwards.

The chain is plain enough to anyone who will look at it. Small-pox matter is inoculated into the cow, the cow becomes consumptive, the matter taken from the cow is put into the human, and the human develops, in season, both the disease that was supposed to be prevented and the consumption of the animal from which the lymph was drawn. Dr. Nittinger’s figures bear this out. Before vaccination, five to seven of every hundred small-pox patients died. After it, ten to twenty. The vaccinated body carries too heavy a load of foreign disease to throw off the small-pox when it comes.

Question 4: Why is vaccination described as “inoculation in disguise”?

Before vaccination there was inoculation. Under that law, made by the Royal College of Physicians and the Government, small-pox matter was put directly into the body in the belief that the inoculated disease would be milder than the natural and that those who survived would never take it again. The Government opened King’s College Hospital for the purpose. The inoculated then infected others, and thousands died both from the operation itself and from the disease they passed on. One in every fourteen of the population perished of small-pox under that arrangement.

When the law was at last repealed, the interested inoculators opposed the repeal, just as the interested vaccinators now oppose any check upon their own practice. If vaccination were not inoculation in disguise, small-pox could not have grown worse after the inoculation law was struck down. Yet the figures show it has. The first epidemic after the Compulsory Vaccination Act recorded 14,244 deaths. The second, 20,059. The third, 44,840. The mechanism is the same: introduction of corrupt matter through the skin, by puncture, into the blood. Only the name has been changed.

Question 5: What difference is drawn between small-pox taken naturally and small-pox introduced through vaccination?

Small-pox taken in a natural way, by infection through the air or by contact, cannot be so dangerous as small-pox introduced into the body by the lancet. The first must be fought by the whole body from the moment of exposure, and the body has its own defences in the perspiration, the bowels, the lungs, the kidneys, the skin. The second is delivered straight into the blood, bypassing every avenue by which the body would otherwise have cleared the corruption.

When this introduced corruption brings with it not only the small-pox but the train of complaints carried in the stream of matter that has passed through millions, the result is a complication of diseases fifty times worse than small-pox alone. The half-murdered victim has not the vitality to throw off such a load. This is why small-pox is more fatal in the vaccinated than in the unvaccinated, and why the figures from the London Small-pox Hospital show that over ninety per cent of those who die there had received the supposed protection.

Question 6: What happened in Germany, where vaccination was strictly enforced multiple times across the lifespan?

In Germany the vaccinating law is enforced as strictly as anywhere in Europe. The child is vaccinated in infancy. He is vaccinated again at school age. He is vaccinated again upon any epidemic or outbreak. The males are vaccinated again on joining the army. Three, four, even five vaccinations on the same body. Sir T. Chambers told the House of Commons in 1871 that Prussia was the best vaccinated country in Europe.

In one outbreak, with this flimsy barricade of double and triple and quadruple vaccination raised against it, one million Germans were struck with small-pox. Two hundred thousand of those so-called protected people died of it, after being vaccinated three, four, and some five times. In Berlin, three times as many died of small-pox as in London on one account, eight times as many on another. The Germans set out to prove that more vaccination meant less small-pox. They proved the contrary.

Question 7: What do the figures from London’s three small-pox epidemics show about the relationship between vaccination and the disease?

The three epidemics ran as follows. In 1857-58-59, 14,244 deaths from small-pox. In 1863-64-65, 20,059 deaths. In 1870-71-72, 44,840 deaths. Between the first and second epidemics, the population of England grew by seven per cent. The small-pox death rate grew by nearly fifty per cent. Between the second and third, population grew by ten per cent. Small-pox deaths grew by a hundred and twenty per cent. In the first decade after enforcement of compulsory vaccination, 33,515 dead. In the second decade, 70,458.

Before the Compulsory Vaccination Act was passed, one small-pox hospital was sufficient for the whole of London. After it, six were required. The return of the London small-pox hospitals shows that over ninety per cent of the patients there had been vaccinated. Any sensible man who can read these figures must see that vaccination, far from preventing the disease, has multiplied it. The trade is profitable, however, and so the law remains.

Question 8: What pattern emerges from the experience of fully vaccinated institutions such as the Army, the Navy, Mr. Muller’s Orphanage, and HMS Octavia?

At Mr. Muller’s Orphanage, where every child was vaccinated and ninety-five out of every hundred were vaccinated a second time, there were 293 cases of small-pox and 18 deaths. On Her Majesty’s Ship Octavia, where all were vaccinated and ninety-nine of every hundred had been vaccinated again, there were 175 cases, and the First Lieutenant himself perished along with many others. In the Army and the Navy, where every recruit is vaccinated on enlistment and ninety-five in every hundred re-vaccinated, the small-pox mortality is higher than among the civil population.

These are not poor and crowded districts where some excuse might be sought in lack of access to medical attention. These are institutions where the law of vaccination has been enforced with parade-ground completeness. Where vaccination is universal, small-pox is worse. The figures admit no other reading. The vaccinators say that more vaccination is required, and Dr. Playfair has proposed another parliamentary screw to drive it tighter. He cannot answer how Germany’s near-total enforcement has produced the worst outbreaks in Europe.

Question 9: How was the Royal Committee of Enquiry constituted, and what does that suggest about its findings?

When the Government appointed a committee to inquire into the effects of vaccination, the members were nearly all interested vaccinators. They were making a rich harvest from the practice they were called to assess. The report they submitted, that none need fear injury or the communication of disease through vaccination, was the report that those who profited from vaccination required. Dr. Playfair, their leader and their spokesman in parliament, admitted as much when he said that those who make gain by the practice are clamorous for its continued enforcement because they feel it could not maintain itself on the evidence of its efficiency.

This is the testimony of the publican on temperance, the brewer on total abstinence, the slave-master on emancipation. To inquire of the vaccinators whether vaccination is sound is to receive the answer their pockets require. The government took the answer at face value and continues to do so. Yet the same trade’s later admissions, drawn out under the pressure of evidence, list forty distinct diseases caused by the practice. The contradiction is on the public record. The law remains unaltered because millions of pounds depend upon its remaining so.

Question 10: What did the 1882 Exeter Hall committee of fifteen vaccinators inadvertently document?

In 1882 a committee of fifteen vaccinators met at the Council Chamber, Exeter Hall, to investigate certain features of their own trade. The third of the seven questions put to them concerned what diseases they had known to be caused or intensified by vaccination. Two hundred and forty-two medical witnesses, almost every one of them a working vaccinator, testified out of their own experience to the following: abdominal phthisis, angeiolencitis, blindness, boils, bronchitis, bullae, cancer, cellulitis, convulsions, diarrhoea, dyscrasia, eczema, erysipelas, erythema, gangrenosa, general debility, herpes, impetigo, inflammation, intensified ulceration, lichen, marasmus, meningitis, paralysis, phagedenic action, pityriasis, pneumonia, prurigo, pyaemia, pyrexia, rickets, syphilis, scald head, scarlatina, scrofula, septicaemia, skin diseases, struma, tuberculosis, and variolsid.

Forty conditions. From the mouths of the men paid to vaccinate. The list was too important to be suppressed, and it has not been answered. These are the consequences they themselves have observed in the bodies of their own patients. Yet the certificates they write, the reports they send to parliament, and the bonuses they collect from the Local Government Board proceed as though the list did not exist. He who upholds vaccination in parliament after this is no honest representative of his constituents. He is pleading for the men who make millions by poisoning the blood.

Question 11: How is public vaccination paid for, and how much had it cost the nation by 1885?

The cost falls upon four channels. First, vaccination fees and expenses paid out of the poor rate, which means out of the pockets of every ratepayer whether he believes in vaccination or not. Second, awards or bonuses voted by parliament for the excellence of work already paid for under the first head. Third, the salaries of the itinerant inspectors of the Local Government Board. Fourth, the Calf-Lymph Establishment at Lamb’s Conduit Street, where bovine virus is manufactured. By the public report of the Local Government Board, in 1886 the fees and expenses came to £93,475, the awards to £18,964, for some 498,039 vaccinations. Each vaccinated child cost the parish about four shillings and sixpence, with further expense to follow for the illness vaccination caused.

Taken in five-year intervals, the fees alone climbed from £104,718 for the five years ending Lady Day 1845 to £463,380 for the five years ending 1885. The total in fees over those forty-five years comes to £2,508,237. The awards from 1868 to 1885 add a further £211,314. The grand sum of public vaccination by 1885 is £2,719,551, and that takes no account of the enormous private fees paid by families, schools, and colleges, nor of the public expense of treating the diseases that vaccination created. This is what the working poor are taxed to support, and many a working man has been fined twenty or thirty times for refusing to deliver up his children to it.

Question 12: What was the Calf-Lymph Establishment in Lamb’s Conduit Street, and what did it cost annually to run?

The Calf-Lymph Establishment was founded in 1881 in Lamb’s Conduit Street for the manufacture of what the trade calls bovine virus, that is, vaccine matter passed through a calf. By 1882 it cost £2,100 annually. By 1886, £2,890. The itemised accounts list a director at £400, an assistant director rising from £150 to £300, a vaccination clerk, two attendants, two servants, the purchase of lymph and ivory points and tubes and apparatus, the supply of calves at £360, the keep of calves and incidental expenses at £800, and even £13 for the cartage of manure.

What I and many others have asked, and what no Member of Parliament has answered, is what becomes of the calves once the trade is finished with them. These animals have been inoculated with humours taken from human beings and passed through a current of corruption that has run through millions of filthy people. They are not given to the dogs, for most doctors love their dogs too well to poison them with such food. It is the opinion of many that these animals, when they appear to recover outwardly, are sold for human food. The meat, the butter, the cheese, and the milk that reach the family table thus carry the residue of every disease the lymph contained.

Question 13: What are the “awards” or bonuses paid to public vaccinators, and how do they function within the system?

The awards are voted annually by parliament under section five of the Vaccination Act of 1867. They are bonuses paid to public vaccinators in addition to the fees they have already received under the poor rate. The stated ground is the excellence of their work. The practical effect is that the more children a vaccinator pierces, the more he is paid, both in fees and again in bonuses. The first year of the scheme, 1868, the awards came to £2,753. By 1872, £6,187. By 1878, £11,994. By 1885, £17,687. The eighteen-year total to 1885 is £211,314.

Specific awards by union show what the trade is worth. The Birmingham vaccinator received £893 over and above his fees in the four years 1870-74, and Birmingham was declared the best vaccinated town in the kingdom, with 7,706 cases and 1,270 deaths over the same period. Manchester received £367, Salford £235, Blackburn £185 in 1875. Each was followed by a small-pox panic. The system rewards quantity. It does not reward outcome. It cannot, for the outcome contradicts the claim on which the system was raised.

Question 14: What are the forty diseases that 242 medical witnesses at Exeter Hall testified are caused or intensified by vaccination?

The list, given by the vaccinators themselves, is this: abdominal phthisis, angeiolencitis, blindness, boils, bronchitis, bullae, cancer, cellulitis, convulsions, diarrhoea, dyscrasia, eczema, erysipelas, erythema, gangrenosa, general debility, herpes, impetigo, inflammation, intensified ulceration, lichen, marasmus, meningitis, paralysis, phagedenic action, pityriasis, pneumonia, prurigo, pyaemia, pyrexia, rickets, syphilis, scald head, scarlatina, scrofula, septicaemia, skin diseases, struma, tuberculosis, and variolsid. There are others I can prove besides.

This is not a list compiled by enemies of the practice. It is the testimony of two hundred and forty-two of its practitioners, drawn from their own experience in their own patients. Cancer is on it. Syphilis is on it. Tuberculosis is on it. Blindness, paralysis, meningitis, and convulsions are on it. The diseases of childhood that have struck down millions of innocents trace, in case after case, to the puncture in the arm. And these men, having testified, returned to their practice and received their bonuses and continued to assure parents that the procedure was harmless.

Question 15: What happened to the 30,000 American soldiers who were vaccinated?

Thirty thousand American soldiers were vaccinated, and ten thousand of those thirty thousand died in a dreadful state through vaccination. Many others survived only because their arms were cut off to save their lives. Many more had their constitutions ruined for the remainder of their days. This is not a private statistic guarded behind hospital walls. It is a documented slaughter, and it ought by itself to have opened the eyes of the law-makers.

One man in three put under the vaccinator’s lancet was dead within weeks. Another large fraction maimed. The remainder weakened. No conventional treatment, even the worst, would be permitted to continue with such a result if the trade were not so profitable to those who carry it on. A railway company that killed a third of its passengers would be shut by the close of the week. A vaccinator who has killed a third of his patients receives his bonus on schedule and writes false certificates to conceal what he has done.

Question 16: What does Mr. Henry May’s published 1874 confession reveal about death certification?

Mr. Henry May, of the Royal College of Surgeons, Birmingham, published his confession in the Medical Review for the year 1874. His exact words: a death from vaccination occurred not long ago in my practice, and although I had not vaccinated the child, yet in my desire to preserve vaccination from reproach, I omitted all mention of it from my certificate of death. He did not vaccinate the child. Another man did. The child died from the operation. May, holding the pen, decided that the cause should not appear on the certificate because the practice itself must be shielded.

I could name a thousand more who have done the same. The Registrar-General reports two hundred and ninety deaths in a single year as due to official vaccination. The census papers, signed by responsible householders, report four hundred and thirty deaths and over two thousand injuries from the same cause. If every false certificate were corrected, the figure would be tens of thousands. The trade conceals its own mortality with the very pens it signs its bills with. This is the reason the official statistics show what they do, and the reason any honest investigation must begin with the certificates themselves.

Question 17: What happens to the cows and calves used to manufacture vaccine matter once they have been used?

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cows and calves have been vaccinated with humours taken from a current of corruption that has passed through millions of diseased and filthy people. Many die outright. Others appear to recover. The question that no Member of Parliament has been able to answer is what becomes of those that survive the trade. They are not given to the dogs, for most doctors prefer not to poison their own animals. They are not buried at the establishment’s expense.

It is the opinion of many physicians, and I share it, that these animals are sold for human food. The meat goes to the butchers. The butter, the cheese, the milk pass through the dairy and onto the breakfast tables of unsuspecting families. There is not a butcher, doctor, or analyst in the world who can tell what is in the flesh or blood of an animal that has been treated this way. The diseases of the forefathers break out in the third and fourth generation. The animal may appear healthy outwardly while carrying within it the residue of every condition the lymph contained.

Question 18: What is the case of the Tunbridge Wells doctor’s vaccinated calf, and what does it suggest about the safety of animal-sourced lymph?

A doctor in Tunbridge Wells vaccinated a healthy calf for the purpose of obtaining matter with which to vaccinate his patients, or, as I have noted in parentheses, to make patients. He put into that healthy animal a humour that had passed through millions of diseased and filthy people. The calf did not survive. Some months afterwards it died in a frightful state, with nearly all the flesh fallen from its bones. The complication of filthy diseases that destroyed the animal was the same complication that was then distributed by lancet into the arms of the doctor’s human patients.

If a current of corruption is capable of stripping the flesh from a calf within a few months, what is it doing in the bodies of the children into whom the same matter is then introduced? Many of them have died swiftly. Many more have died years afterwards, with internal complaints their doctors could not name. A false certificate of death is written to hide the murderous work. I will forfeit five hundred pounds if any doctor in the world will prove this statement false.

Question 19: How was mercury first introduced into medicine, and by whom?

In the year 1493, in Switzerland, arose Theophrastus Bombastes Paracelsus, the great prototype of all succeeding quacks. He overthrew the Galenic or botanic system, which had stood for fourteen hundred years, and put in its place the mineral or chemical system. He burnt the works of Galen before the audience to which he lectured. He boasted that there was more knowledge in his beard than in the whole of Galen. He declared, when he could not obtain his answers from God, that it was right to consult the Devil. He professed to have discovered the elixir of life. He died a miserable vagabond at the age of forty-eight.

Such was the man to whom the medical profession owes the introduction of mercury into its pharmacopoeia. The misery he set in motion is beyond computation. Fourteen hundred years of healing through herbs were displaced by a substance that destroys the teeth, the stomach, the liver, the nerves, and the constitution of every man, woman, and child it is given to. It was put into the mind of man, in the inventor’s own words, by the apostate spirit at war with God and mankind. That is the foundation upon which modern medicine has been built.

Question 20: Where is mercury hidden in everyday medical preparations given to old and young?

There is mercury in the teething powders given to infants. There is mercury in the worm powders given to children. There is mercury in the grey powders, which are nothing but quicksilver mixed with chalk. There is mercury in the antibilious pills, the liver pills, and the compound rhubarb pills given to adults. Nearly all the aperient medicines of the trade contain it. The patient swallows it without knowing he is swallowing it. The chemist who sells it to him does not always know he is selling it.

Millions lose their teeth from these preparations. Millions have their constitutions ruined. Millions suffer for the remainder of their lives with neuralgia and liver disease whose origin no one investigates. The tincture of iron and steel does the same work. To these are added chlorodyne, a deadly poison that has caused the death of many, and opium, which deadens pain and produces sleep, and for that reason is the active ingredient in the murderous preparation sold as soothing syrup. These are the quacks that murder millions, dispensed under the polite respectability of the consulting room.

Question 21: What other pharmaceutical products are identified as harmful, and what do they do?

Chlorodyne is a deadly poison whose use has caused many deaths. Opium produces sleep by deadening pain and is the active ingredient in the soothing syrup given to fretful infants. Morphia, injected into the veins of consumptive patients in the great hospitals, produces a state like drunkenness. Tincture of iron and tincture of steel destroy the teeth and weaken the digestion. The flannels saturated with turpentine and laid upon the chest in cases of inflammation strip the skin from back and stomach. The blisters raised by irritant poisons applied to the spine punish the body without reaching the internal disease they were meant to address.

The poisons of the cheap dispensary at one shilling a week are no different from the poisons of the consulting room at a guinea. Allopathic doctors use the minerals. Homoeopathic doctors use the minerals in diluted form. Both belong to the chemical system Paracelsus introduced. The supposed cheap treatment is very dear, for it costs the victim both his money and his life. The herbs God provided for the healing of mankind do not require chemistry. They require only knowledge of which herb to use, and that knowledge the trade has set aside in favour of more profitable preparations.

Question 22: What principle governs the treatment of inflammation and fever, and how does it diverge from hospital practice?

Heat is life. Cold is death. The body is an engine, and as an engine requires heat to drive steam through the pipes that work it, so the human frame requires heat to circulate the blood through the veins and remove the obstructions caused by cold. When inflammation has settled in the lungs, the blood in those vessels is congealed. The pain is the body’s protest. The remedy is to create great heat throughout the system, force the circulation through the obstructed part, and open every avenue of perspiration the body possesses.

The hospital does the opposite. The hospital lays bags of ice upon the chest of the patient whose lungs are already congested with congealed blood. The ice freezes what was already frozen. The disease is locked in place. The medical faculty either does not know that cold contracts and heat expands, or knows it and persists from habit. I and others before me, Coffin and Beach and Thomson among them, have devoted our lives to the study of the botanic medicines that work with this principle. The yarrow tea with ginger and cayenne, the hot bottle to the feet, the extra blankets, the perspiration sustained for one or two hours: this is the treatment that saves life where ice destroys it.

Question 23: Why is the use of ice on the chest in cases of inflamed lungs identified as the wrong treatment?

When the lungs are inflamed, the blood within the vessels of the lungs is congealed by the cold that has produced the inflammation. The pain the patient feels is the obstructed circulation pressing against tissue. The correct treatment is to disperse the obstruction by raising the heat of the body, restoring circulation through the part, and carrying the matter out through the skin in perspiration and through the bowels and kidneys.

To lay a bag of ice upon the same chest is to compound the obstruction. The cold congeals what was already congealed. The disease cannot move. The patient, instead of recovering, is held in place to deteriorate. I have seen this treatment given to consumptives at the Victoria Park Hospital, at St. Thomas’s, at Brompton, and at the Lambeth Infirmary. The men so treated came to me afterwards with their constitutions in ruin, and I restored them with hot poultices of linseed and mustard, four parts to one, applied to the chest, and the herbal remedies that promote perspiration. Common sense ought not to require defence in the nineteenth century, yet the hospitals continue to apply the wrong principle.

Question 24: What is the yarrow-based remedy for small-pox, and how is it prepared and administered?

When small-pox is first felt, or as soon as the patient knows what he is suffering from, he must keep clear of cold and draught. He should drink freely of a tea made as follows: take an ounce and a half of the herb yarrow, cut or broken short, and make one pint of tea. Strain and sweeten. Add as much ginger and cayenne pepper as will stand on a shilling. Drink freely, and keep up a perspiration with extra blankets and a bottle of hot water to the feet. This alone has cured a bad case.

In addition, take as much cream of tartar as will stand on a shilling, and as much Turkey rhubarb as will stand on a threepence, mixed in a little tepid water, three times a day. Less for a child. If the throat becomes severely affected, gargle seven or eight times a day with half a pint of fresh brewer’s yeast in three of water, swallowing a tablespoonful three or four times a day in addition. Omit the cayenne for a child, who is given a teaspoonful of the yeast and water well mixed. I have used this treatment for thirty years and have never known it to fail. Mr. Johnson of Carshalton came to me on a Saturday evening with all the symptoms of small-pox and a violent inflammation. By the following Monday, the eighth day, he had a new skin on his face, no sore left, and not one pit upon him. He returned to his office in the City of London.

Question 25: What can be done immediately after vaccination to render it harmless?

The murderous practice can be made harmless if any parent or victim will adopt the following plan. Suck out what the operator has placed into the wound, as soon after the operation as possible. Then apply a bread poultice, made with milk and water, or, better still, a bread poultice made with a strong tea of the herb wood sage. Some have carried such a poultice in the pocket, ready to apply directly the lancet has done its work.

I have a delicate stomach myself and am soon turned by any filthiness, but to save a life I would not hesitate to do what I advise others to do. Wash out the mouth with water afterwards, or with the wood sage tea if it is to hand. The principle is simple. The matter has not yet reached the deep circulation. It can be drawn out before it does. Some have followed this plan and saved themselves the train of consequences that would otherwise have followed them for thirty years.

Question 26: What lineage of medical practice does the herbal method belong to, and what predecessor system was displaced?

The herbal practice belongs to the Galenic or botanic system, which stood for fourteen hundred years before Paracelsus overthrew it in 1493 with the mineral or chemical system. The herbs were given by God for the service of man, as the 104th Psalm declares. The body, made by a wise Creator, was given a remedy for every condition it might encounter, and the wise practitioner has only to learn which herb answers to which complaint. The system worked. It produced cures. Its replacement has produced the cemeteries.

In my own time, the lineage has been carried forward by Coffin, by Beach, by Thomson, and by the other illustrious men who have devoted their lives to the study of botanic medicine. I have studied at the same school. I have for thirty years treated cases that the great hospitals and the private physicians have abandoned, and I have restored them with the essences and extracts and pure juices of harmless herbs that cost a hundred times more than mineral medicines but that do the work the minerals destroy. Every cure I have effected is a witness against the system Paracelsus founded and the faculty has perpetuated.

Question 27: What were the cases of Mr. Wood and Mr. Mannock, and what do they show about hospital treatment of consumption?

Mr. Wood, of Neate Street, Camberwell, age 36, had been ill five years. He was an in-patient twice at Victoria Park Hospital, where for seven months the doctors said he had bronchitis and consumption. Thirteen weeks at Brompton, where the doctors said it was liver disease and congestion of the lungs. Twelve weeks at St. Thomas’s, where they said he was in the second stage of consumption. Fifteen weeks at St. Andrew’s, Clewer, near Windsor, where the diagnosis was the same. He was also at the Lambeth Infirmary. The private doctors he saw afterwards, Walker at 57 Harley Street at one guinea each visit, Constable at St. George’s Road, told him to prepare for the worst. He had been given tobacco, malt, spirituous liquors, morphia injections, ice on the chest, and flannels saturated with turpentine that took the skin off his back. He raised a pint of phlegm in twelve hours and large quantities of blood. He improved on the first bottle of my medicine. After four weeks of treatment he returned to his trade as a surgical instrument maker.

Mr. Mannock, of Southampton Street, Camberwell, lay three months on his back unable to turn, unable to put a spoon to his mouth, unable to brush a fly from his face. His right side was swollen from the diseased liver. His lungs were ulcerated from top to bottom, back and front, and he spat away a quantity of putrefied phlegm every day. Through laying so long he had frightful sores upon his body. Dr. Parrott, Dr. Chabot, and Dr. Hague had attended him and given him up. With harmless herbs I restored him in a few months to such health that he went into the corn dealer’s shop opposite his own house, took up a half hundredweight in each hand, and carried them two hundred yards. The lesson of both cases is the same. The hospitals had every advantage of equipment, of physicians, of months of attention. They produced nothing but deterioration. The herbs produced the cure.

Question 28: What was the Stafford child case, and what does it reveal about the treatment of internal disease through external blistering?

The child of Mr. Stafford, of Aslam Place, Sumner Road, Peckham, was taken to Guy’s Hospital at fifteen months of age, suffering from consumption of the bowels, known to the trade as Tabes mesenterica. After some time under treatment he was pronounced incurable. Dr. Howell of Peckham would not undertake to prepare medicine for the child, declaring the case hopeless. Dr. Bloomfield, called in, took a small bottle from his pocket, broke the head off a match, fastened a piece of wadding to the stick, dipped it in the bottle, which contained a powerful irritant poison, and traced it all over the child’s back. The poison raised a great many blisters within minutes. The back was made very bad. A few days later Bloomfield ordered a large blister to be applied while the earlier sores had not healed. The child’s condition became dreadful.

The child was then taken to Brighton, then to a second doctor at Brighton, then to Dr. Edmonds, senior, of Southampton Street, Camberwell, who said the child had windy dropsy, enlargement of the brain, and consumption of the bowels and gave no hope of recovery. The mother brought the child to me in a dying state. I gave her one bottle of my harmless herbal medicine. Four days later she returned, and the little fellow was running by her side. Another bottle followed. The child has been well for over three years. The lesson is plain. Internal disease cannot be cured by burning the skin above the affected organ. The blister punishes the body and reaches no part of the cause. The herb works inwardly, where the disease is.

Question 29: How is the practice of vaccination framed in scriptural and theological terms?

The pamphlet opens with two epigraphs. The first, from the 104th Psalm: “The herb for the service of man.” The second, from the 33rd of Ezekiel, in which the blood of the people is laid upon the watchman’s head if he does not sound the trumpet when he sees the sword coming. I am that watchman. I have seen the sword. I must sound the trumpet whether the powers of this world wish to hear it or not.

The Almighty God, our wise Creator, has made His work perfect. Man cannot improve upon it by the introduction of corrupt matter into the blood. Vaccination is therefore a sin and an insult to the Creator. He has sent the herbs to cure disease. Many of the doctors do not know their business and despise the herbs along with the law of God. Mercury itself was put into the mind of man, in the inventor’s own words, by the apostate spirit at war with God and mankind. The wicked spirit is permitted to deceive nations because nations are in rebellion. Woe unto vile men that rob and murder millions. To injure innocent babes with the vile sins of filthy people is like touching the apple of His eye. Judgment will fall upon those who have upheld this law.

Question 30: How does the Compulsory Vaccination Act affect the working poor, and what legal provisions limit it?

Working men have deprived themselves of the common necessaries of life to pay twenty or thirty fines rather than deliver up their children to the vaccinator. When their wages were exhausted, some were cast into prison, their goods sold, and their wives and children turned out into the street and thrown upon the parish for support. One poor woman, made desperate by the same law, took her own life to put herself, as she thought, out of a miserable existence. This is not incidental hardship. It is the predictable cost of the system, borne by those least able to bear it.

The Act provides that no parent can be compelled to have his child vaccinated before the age of three months or after the age of fifteen months. Magistrates, when an order to vaccinate is applied for, may grant the order if they think fit, but are under no obligation to do so. The Anti-Vaccinating Society, at 77 Atlantic Road, Brixton, will protect children from the man-slayers for five shillings a year. What is required, beyond such defences, is the repeal of the Compulsory Vaccination Act and the passage of a prohibitory Act in its place. Without the prohibitory Act, the men who have made millions from poisoning the blood will persuade parents to continue the practice of their own accord. The law must protect the public from these impostors as it would protect them from any other class of murderer.

Analogy

Imagine a town that hires a fire brigade and pays it by the number of fires it attends. It awards bonuses for diligence. After a few years the brigade is found to be setting the fires itself, and the town appoints a commission to investigate. Every commissioner is a member of the brigade. The commission reports the brigade essential and the fires providential. The records, meanwhile, show fires doubling and trebling since the brigade was formed. Householders who refuse the brigade’s services are fined, imprisoned, and turned upon the parish for support. The brigade’s own members, when finally questioned in public, admit that the fires they have set have done forty distinct varieties of damage to the homes they were called to protect. The certificates of cause are signed by the firemen themselves, who quietly omit any mention of the brigade when a house has burnt to the ground. The bonuses continue. The town pays for everything and is told that the alternative is unthinkable. This is the structure Stokes documents. An institution that creates the very condition it is paid to remedy, supervised by its own members, financed by those it harms, and shielded by the documents only it controls.

The One-Minute Elevator Explanation

In 1888 a medical herbalist named W. D. Stokes published a small pamphlet from Tunbridge Wells in Kent. He had practised for thirty years. He had watched vaccination spread through England under a compulsory law. He had treated the people it injured. What he documented is this. Vaccination as the trade understood it was the introduction into the blood of corrupt matter that had passed through millions of diseased bodies. The procedure carried with it a long catalogue of conditions: consumption, syphilis, eczema, cancer, paralysis, blindness, and many more. The vaccinators’ own 1882 committee at Exeter Hall listed forty such diseases. The figures showed small-pox worsening, not improving, after compulsory vaccination. Berlin, in spite of triple vaccination, recorded eight times the London death rate. The cost to the public passed two and a half million pounds in fees alone by 1885. Doctors confessed in print to omitting vaccination from death certificates to protect the trade. Working families were fined and imprisoned for refusing to submit their children. Stokes treated small-pox with yarrow tea, cream of tartar, Turkey rhubarb, and brewer’s yeast, and reported a thirty-year record without a single death where he had treated the case from the first. He framed the entire industry as commercial murder protected by parliament.

[Elevator dings]

Research threads: the 1853 Compulsory Vaccination Act and its tightening in 1867 and 1871, the parliamentary career of Dr. Lyon Playfair and the contemporary debates around vaccination policy, and the broader nineteenth-century anti-vaccination movement including the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, William Tebb, William White, and the National Anti-Vaccination League.

12-Point Summary

1. The thesis: vaccination as blood poisoning. Vaccination is described not as protection but as the introduction of corrupt matter into pure blood. The lymph has passed through millions of diseased bodies and carries the residue of every condition through which it has travelled. The puncture delivers this composite of small-pox, consumption, syphilis, eczema, scrofula and a long list besides into the circulation, bypassing every natural avenue of elimination the body would otherwise have used.

2. Jenner’s £30,000 and immediate retraction. Edward Jenner secured £30,000 from the English government for the cow-pox vaccination near ninety years before publication. He had scarcely received it when he confessed to medical colleagues that vaccination from the cow was useless. He kept the money. He switched to matter taken from the greasy heel of the horse and supplied this to other doctors. The trade he founded thus rested from its earliest moment upon his own admission of fraud.

3. Inoculation in disguise. Before vaccination there was inoculation, under which one in every fourteen of the population died of small-pox. When that law was repealed, the interested inoculators opposed the repeal, just as the interested vaccinators now oppose any check upon their own practice. The mechanism is identical: corrupt matter introduced by puncture into the blood. Small-pox grew worse after the compulsory vaccination law was passed, the three London epidemics rising from 14,244 deaths to 20,059 to 44,840 even as the population grew only modestly.

4. The German failure. In Germany, where vaccination was enforced in infancy, again at school age, again on any outbreak, and again on entering the army, one million people were struck with small-pox in a single outbreak. Two hundred thousand of them died after being vaccinated three, four, and some five times. Berlin’s death rate ran three to eight times that of London. The most thorough enforcement of vaccination produced the worst results in Europe, and Sir T. Chambers had named Prussia the best vaccinated country in Europe to the House of Commons in 1871, only a few years before the disaster.

5. The Royal Committee’s conflict of interest. The Government appointed a committee of inquiry composed of interested vaccinators making their living from the practice they were asked to assess. They reported the practice safe. Dr. Playfair, their parliamentary spokesman, later admitted that those making gain by the practice are clamorous for its enforcement because they feel it could not maintain itself on the evidence of its efficiency. The official record was thus produced by men whose income depended on the result.

6. The Exeter Hall list of forty diseases. In 1882, fifteen vaccinators meeting at Exeter Hall produced through 242 medical witnesses, almost all working vaccinators, a list of forty conditions caused or intensified by vaccination in their own clinical experience. The catalogue includes cancer, syphilis, tuberculosis, blindness, paralysis, meningitis, convulsions, scrofula, eczema, and septicaemia. The witnesses returned to their practice afterwards and continued to vaccinate. Their bonuses continued.

7. The financial structure. Vaccination fees paid out of the poor rate totalled £2,508,237 between 1840 and 1885. Bonuses to vaccinators added a further £211,314. The Calf-Lymph Establishment at Lamb’s Conduit Street, founded 1881 for the manufacture of bovine virus, ran at £2,890 a year by 1886. The Local Government Board’s vaccination staff cost £9,767 annually. The total spent on public vaccination by 1885 was £2,719,551, taking no account of private fees or of the cost of treating vaccination’s casualties.

8. The calf-lymph industry and the human food chain. Hundreds of cows and calves were inoculated with humours carrying the residue of millions of diseased people. Many died. Those that survived, it is claimed, were sold for human food. Their meat, butter, cheese, and milk reached the family table carrying whatever the lymph had contained. A Tunbridge Wells doctor’s vaccinated calf died with the flesh fallen from its bones, and the same matter that destroyed the animal was distributed by lancet to human patients.

9. False death certificates. Mr. Henry May of Birmingham confessed in the Medical Review for 1874 that, although he had not vaccinated a child who died from vaccination, he omitted the cause from the death certificate in his desire to preserve vaccination from reproach. The Registrar-General records 290 official vaccination deaths in a single year. Census papers signed by householders record 430 deaths and over 2,000 injuries. The real figure, with honest certification, would run to tens of thousands. The trade conceals its own mortality with the pens it signs its bills with.

10. The Paracelsus origin of mercurial medicine. Mercury was introduced into medicine in 1493 by Theophrastus Bombastes Paracelsus, in Switzerland, who overthrew the fourteen-hundred-year-old Galenic botanic system by burning the works of Galen and declaring it right to consult the Devil when God would not impart medical knowledge. He died at forty-eight as a miserable vagabond. The mineral system he founded continues to the present day, with mercury concealed in teething powders, worm powders, grey powders, liver pills, antibilious pills, and compound rhubarb pills, alongside chlorodyne, opium in soothing syrup, and morphia injections.

11. The yarrow remedy and the heat principle. Small-pox is treated with a tea of one and a half ounces of yarrow, sweetened, with ginger and cayenne added, drunk freely under blankets to sustain perspiration. Cream of tartar and Turkey rhubarb are taken three times daily. Brewer’s yeast and water serve as gargle and internal remedy for severe throat involvement. The underlying principle is that heat is life and cold is death. Inflammation requires the dispersal of congealed blood by raising body heat, not its further congealment by ice on the chest as practised in the great hospitals.

12. The call for prohibition and the religious frame. The pamphlet calls not merely for the repeal of the Compulsory Vaccination Act but for a prohibitory Act preventing vaccination by consent as well, since without prohibition the trade will continue to persuade parents through commercial means. The whole argument is framed scripturally. The Psalm declares the herb made for the service of man. Ezekiel lays the blood of the people upon the watchman who does not sound the trumpet. The Almighty’s creation is perfect and not improvable through the introduction of corrupt matter. Mercury itself, in the inventor’s own words, was put into the mind of man by the apostate spirit at war with God and mankind.

The Golden Nugget

The single piece most worth lifting out is the documented origin of mercury in Western medicine. By the inventor’s own words, preserved in the closing pages of the pamphlet, Theophrastus Bombastes Paracelsus introduced mercury into the European pharmacopoeia in Switzerland in the year 1493. He did so by burning the books of Galen before the audiences he lectured to, by boasting that there was more knowledge in his beard than in the whole of Galen, by professing to have discovered an elixir of life that would prolong existence indefinitely, and by openly declaring that if God would not impart the secrets of medicine to him, it was right to consult the Devil. He died, some years later, as a miserable vagabond at the age of forty-eight. His chemical and mineral system displaced fourteen hundred years of botanic medicine and remains, with refinements, the foundation of pharmaceutical practice. Every grey powder given to a teething child, every antibilious pill, every modern compound that traces back through the apothecary’s history, descends in unbroken line from a man who explicitly named the apostate spirit as his source. This is not editorial framing. It is the inventor’s own confession, preserved in the historical record, reproduced by Stokes in 1888, and almost universally forgotten.