An History of Magic, Witchcraft, and Animal Magnetism, Vol. 1

into medical practice; or to highlight the days, not very long past, when the use of these remedies and preventives was characterized as murderous, criminal, and magical. It was no longer ago than the middle of the 18th century that the medical profession spoke this way of inoculation, and with the same spirit of hostility towards the inoculators as, more recently, in the case of the Magnetists—denouncing them as hangmen and impostors, and their patients as dupes and idiots. It is well known that the vaccine, upon its first introduction, was equally offensive to the profession. This last-mentioned discovery had been originally made, within the memory of living men, in a province of England at some distance from the capital; and the practice, like that of Magnetism, was placed in the category of dangerous superstitions and delusions, until JENNER, after its condemnation by the medical faculty, at length obtained a notable triumph over all prejudices by its general introduction into practice.*

• The following just and generous observations upon this subject occur in the biography of Jenner:

“Let no one hereafter diminish the honest zeal of useful pursuit because his ideas are chilled at first by a universal frigid sneer or by careless ridicule. Such has always been the fate of those who labor for the benefit of mankind: even the wisest among us oppose innumerable prejudices to the acknowledgment of a new truth; and happy are those who, like JENNER, survive to witness the triumph of their