The lay objectors--the professed anti-vaccinators--are with us
yet in spite of some very serious lessons which have been
taught them. We may pass by the objectors of the class who
believe that vaccinated persons cough like cows and bellow like
bulls; these objections go into the limbo of old wives' fables
or into the category of wilful misrepresentation. Unfortunately
there is a large class of persons who can believe the absurdest
nonsense about any subject which is particularly distasteful to
them.[6] Another class of objection is the sentimental
repugnance to the idea of being given one of the diseases of
"the lower animals." Now the fact is that already we share a
great many diseases with the lower animals, a few of them being
tuberculosis, anthrax, rabies, tetanus, cancer,
pleuro-pneumonia, certain insect-borne diseases, some parasitic
worm diseases and some skin diseases like favus. As the
knowledge of the lowly origin of many of our diseases is more
widespread, this sort of objection will die out.

[6] Antivaccinators constantly allude to calf-lymph as "filth";
if lymph is filth, then I am able to assure them that each one
of them has about three liters of it in his own body.



An objection which is worthy of more consideration is that in
being vaccinated a child is apt to contract some infectious
disease such as tuberculosis or syphilis which are the two most
dreaded. Now so long as arm-to-arm vaccination was the routine
practice, there was a remote probability that this sort of