accident might occur. It appears to be true that a few
accidents of this kind have occurred, just as a few arms have
become septic or had erysipelas develop in them. But when the
few such cases are compared with the millions and millions of
uncomplicated vaccinations, their importance becomes very
insignificant. Now that arm-to-arm vaccination is no longer
practiced, but fresh calf-lymph used for each child, these
accidental inoculations are a thing of the past. The ignorance
of cause and effect is responsible for a great deal of the most
childish objections to vaccination as to much else. One woman
lately told me that she could not have her child vaccinated
because a child in the same street was made a cripple for life
by being vaccinated. Could we have a better example of the
"post hoc sed non propter hoc."[7]

[7] Now and again, however, we have the sad spectacle of some
one really well educated but apparently either ignorant of
logic or desirous of wilfully misrepresenting facts. The Hon.
Stephen Coleridge has an article in the June (1914) number of
the Contemporary Review which is, to say the least of it,
highly immoral in ethics and statistics.

I shall examine only that part of it bearing on vaccination.
The statements are that in the last five recorded years, 58
persons died from smallpox vaccination (he means vaccination
against smallpox), whereas in the same five years, 85 persons
died from smallpox itself. The inference we are intended to
draw from these figures is that to be vaccinated is nearly as
fatal as to have smallpox itself.