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Beyond Vaccination:

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/intelitestud.14.2.0164

1524-8429

John A. Dern,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

But this here damned disease—even them who haven't got it can't think of anything else.—ALBERT CAMUS, THE PLAGUE In his introduction to The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of literature's most ancient texts, translator Andrew George discusses an observation by Assyriologist William L. Moran, who views Gilgamesh as “a document of ancient humanism” (qtd. in George xxxiii). Moran's interpretation notwithstanding, German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, according to George, sees Gilgamesh much more starkly: “For him the epic was first and foremost ‘das Epos der Todesfurcht,’ the epic about the fear of death” (George xiii). Essentially bringing the two interpretations together, George himself adds that “even for the ancients, the story of Gilgamesh was more about what it is to be a man than what it is to serve the gods” (xxxiii). Most significant, humans, unlike the gods, are mortal, and that fact is an overarching theme in Gilgamesh, as an immortal character, Uta-napishti, makes clear to the careworn title character near the end of the text: “Man is snapped off like a reed in a canebrake! / The comely young man, the pretty young woman— / all [too soon in] their [prime] Death abducts them!” (86).1 In this quote, the image of a reed snapping aptly combines with the idea of abduction to suggest human contingency, the lifelong struggle of mortals against the seemingly relentless and impersonal forces of nature.2 To endure, however briefly, humans must continually stand against powers that are often—but not always—beyond their control.In truth, the struggle to live is not itself without value. At the end of Gilgamesh, the title character's desperate quest for immortality fails, but the character still lives.3 The struggle to survive paradoxically hones humans physically and mentally, helping them to stand against the very forces responsible for their immolation. In fact, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine bears out this point. In the words of Wells's Time Traveller, “We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity” (39). For humans, death is a foe that inspires its enemy, causing humans to turn their mental and physical energy against nature itself, not necessarily in the belief that they could utterly subdue nature, as is the case in The Time Machine, but in simple defiance of its uncongenially mortal manifestations. In this respect, humans obtain more than keenness from “the grindstone of pain and necessity.” That grindstone frequently presents humans with their greatest opportunities to challenge and overcome at least a few of the impersonal forces that besiege mortal frames, forces such as diseases.In its literature, humanity has chronicled its thoughts on diseases. The distant future to which Wells's Time Traveller journeys, for instance, is a time of absolute human victory over disease organisms. As the Time Traveller observes, “Diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay” (37). In terms of the ongoing human struggle with disease organisms, Wells's novel presents an unreachable medical ideal, the stuff of fantasy. Nonetheless, some measure of victory over diseases is the stuff of history. To be sure, the idea of ridding the world of all harmful diseases would appeal to historians such as Thucydides, who writes of the futility with which doctors initially faced a plague on ancient Athens: “Doctors, not knowing what to do, were unable to cope with it at first, and no other human knowledge was any use either. The doctors themselves died fastest, as they came to the sick most often” (46–47). Thucydides adds that beseeching the divine for answers proved fruitless, leaving humanity to fend for itself against a ruthless foe, “too severe for human nature” (48).Like the ancient Athenians, Enkidu, Gilgamesh's beloved companion and adopted brother, faces death as the result of a “sickness.” Having had a portentous dream wherein the gods debated his fate, Enkidu (during a brief prose interlude) laments to Gilgamesh, “[Among] the dead I shall sit, the threshold of the dead [I shall cross,] never again [shall I set] eyes on my dear brother” (55). Almost immediately, Enkidu becomes fatally ill: “The day he had the dream [his strength] was exhausted, / Enkidu was cast down, he lay one day sick [and then a second.] / Enkidu [lay] on his bed, [his sickness worsened,] / a third day and a fourth day, [the sickness of Enkidu worsened]” (62). Significantly, Enkidu laments not only the fact of his approaching death, but also the manner, as he tells Gilgamesh: “[My god] has taken against me, my friend, …, / [I do not die] like one who [falls] in the midst of battle” (62). Enkidu's death, though god induced, is consistent with the wasting action of a disease organism. Where Enkidu errs is in not recognizing that his “sickness” does present an opportunity for battle. Earlier in the epic, Gilgamesh and Enkidu had worked together to slay the ogre Humbaba, and this type of confrontation clearly is what Enkidu has in mind when he complains about not falling “in the midst of battle.” Nonetheless, he is “in the midst of battle,” a battle he does not appreciate: the battle against contingency. As the poet Dylan Thomas puts it, “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (2417). The gods assault Enkidu in his humanity through the vehicle of “sickness.” In the face of this assault, Enkidu should assert that humanity. The same holds true whenever diseases offend the human frame.In his day, the nineteenth-century explorer Richard Burton remarked that smallpox “sweeps at times like a storm of death over the land” (qtd. in Smallpox). Another assessment of the disease is even bleaker: “Wherever it appeared, the legacy of smallpox was death, blindness, sterility and scarring” (Smallpox). Certainly smallpox represented as great a trial for human populations as any mythological chimera or ill-fated Grendel ever did. Moreover, these latter scourges provided opportunities for Bellerophon and Beowulf, respectively, to become heroes, to defy nature in its most uncongenial manifestations and claim a measure of victory for humanity. The same is true for smallpox. It, too, was a monster that had to be defeated, a monster that the physician Henry Barton Jacobs once called “the greatest of all human plagues” (qtd. in LeFanu xix). However, humans' victory over this scourge involved not a mythical hero, but a physician named Edward Jenner and “one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time” (Edward Jenner). The discovery was vaccination, and in its scientific elegance, as Jenner describes it in his publications on the subject, it speaks to a vehement refusal simply to submit to contingency.4In The Grand Design, authors Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow note that humanity once seemed to be at the mercy of capricious gods. These gods were responsible for both “good” things and “bad” things: “When the gods were pleased, mankind was treated to good weather, peace, and freedom from natural disaster and disease. When they were displeased, there came drought, war, pestilence, and epidemics” (17). (The death of Enkidu illustrates this latter point.) Interestingly, though, the opposite type of reality, where there are no gods, whimsical or otherwise, manifests itself with similar aloofness, at least as Richard Dawkins describes it in River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life: “In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice” (133). The primary difference between the two views, it seems, concerns the possibility of intentionality, which is lacking in the second. Otherwise, the potential for human suffering manifests itself rather similarly in both. However, the second description theoretically gives humans more leeway when it comes to defying their contingency with some success: “The idea arose that nature follows consistent principles that could be deciphered” (Hawking and Mlodinow 17).5If nature is decipherable rather than inscrutable, then the possibility of deciphering it becomes feasible. One way to decipher nature is through scientific hypotheses, and the more concisely explanatory a hypothesis is, the more “elegant” it is. According to Hawking and Mlodinow, elegance “is not something easily measured, but it is highly prized among scientists because laws of nature are meant to economically compress a number of particular cases into one simple formula” (52). In his preface to River out of Eden, Dawkins, for instance, describes Darwinism as having “superabundant power to explain,” and he claims it does so with an “economy” that has “a sinewy elegance” (xi). Elegance, in other words, describes the explanatory capacity of a scientific hypothesis or theory (law), and to explain is to decipher.6 This factor is crucial in the sense that the more clearly humans understand the forces at work on them, the more successfully they can defy those forces that prove themselves uncongenial. Enkidu lacks the means to understand these forces outside of an exclusively theological framework, thus ideologically limiting any defiance he could have mustered.Unlike Enkidu, Edward Jenner possesses a broader ideological framework, one infused with science. Moreover, as a scientific statement, his hypothesis regarding vaccination is clearly elegant. In “An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolæ Vaccinæ, or Cow-Pox,” Jenner proposes vaccination and reveals its benefits with neatness and concision: “What renders the cow-pox virus so extremely singular is that the person who has been thus affected is forever after secure from the infection of the smallpox; neither exposure to the variolous effluvia, nor the insertion of the matter into the skin, producing this distemper” (Vaccination 15).7 Jenner's actual application of this hypothesis, however, is broader than the hypothesis suggests. In the “Inquiry,” for instance, Jenner tests the possibility of propagating the vaccine “from one human subject to another” rather than from cow teat to person in order to see whether or not the vaccine would lose “its original properties” (Vaccination 29). Moreover, in his second publication on vaccination, “Further Observations on the Variolæ Vaccinæ, or Cow-Pox,” Jenner addresses those who have raised doubts about his hypothesis by commencing a discussion on genuine and “spurious” cowpox, asking, “Would it not be discreet for those engaged in this investigation to suspend controversy and cavil until they can ascertain with precision what is and what is not the cow-pox?” (Vaccination 42).8 (In fact, in discussing vaccination in a November 1799 letter to the physician Jean de Carro, Jenner states, “I never had a fear of its failure but from its being conducted by those who were incapable of making just discriminations” [Miller 10]). In short, Jenner tests his hypothesis from various angles in the “Inquiry,” but the hypothesis itself remains laconic, its elegance deriving from the fact that one can reduce Jenner's work to such a simple statement whose importance speaks for itself in a world ravaged by smallpox. Indeed, with this hypothesis, Jenner became “the founding father of immunology” (Edward Jenner). More important, immunology became a powerful weapon against contingency, specifically where smallpox was concerned. As Malcolm Beeson has said of Jenner's “Inquiry,” “It began the process by which one of the most feared diseases that mankind has had to endure was scientifically hunted down and destroyed” (qtd. in Edward Jenner).According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a scourge is a “cause of (usually, widespread) calamity.”9 What constitutes a “calamity” may be open to some interpretation; still, scourge in the sense of this definition suggests some amount of human suffering. The OED mentions “war” and “disease” as examples of scourges, but “monsters” such as Grendel in Beowulf certainly fit the definition as well. Consider the following description of Grendel's first raid on Herot, the Danish Lord Hrothgar's great hall: The monster'sThoughts were as quick as his greed or his claws:He slipped through the door and there in the silenceSnatched up thirty men, smashed themUnknowing in their beds and ran out with their bodies,The blood dripping behind him, backTo his lair, delighted with his night's slaughter. (119–25) Grendel's vicious attack on Hrothgar and his Danes doubtlessly constitutes a “calamity,” thus making Grendel a “scourge” insofar as the epic of Beowulf is concerned.However, one reason for Grendel's attack, as explained in the text, has philosophical implications vis-à-vis humans and contingency. Although it also echoes Hawking and Mlodinow's point about humans suffering as a result of aggrieved deities, the scourge that is Grendel, one may argue, has a human cause. According to the text, Grendel, who dwells in the marshes, “was spawned in that slime, / Conceived by a pair of those monsters born / Of Cain, murderous creatures banished / By God, punished forever for the crime / Of Abel's death” (104–8). Grendel's murderous strike at Hrothgar and his Danes, in other words, finds its origin in humanity's inhumanity. Grendel is a descendant of “murderous creatures,” the result of a curse brought on humanity by a human. Although humans certainly suffer from scourges of a purely natural derivation, they also suffer from calamities brought about by other people.As it happens, the film Mission: Impossible II provides an example of a potential artificial scourge that links myth and science. In that film, a rogue agent of the Impossible Mission Force (Dougray Scott) plots to unleash a lethal strain of influenza on the world, a virus that ironically came into being during a search for a panacea for influenza. The character Dr. Vladimir Nekhorvich (Radé Sherbedgia), a molecular biologist, explains that “every search for a hero must begin with something that every hero requires: a villain. Therefore, in a search for our hero, Bellerophon, we created a monster, chimera” (Mission: Impossible II). Interestingly, Nekhorvich's goal in the film—to free humanity from a viral scourge—is essentially the same as Jenner's goal of two centuries ago. Nekhorvich finds Bellerophon, but he also finds Bellerophon's deadly nemesis. In this instance, the fight against contingency paradoxically breeds an agent of contingency, revealing that human attempts to lessen hardship and stave off mortality may sometimes play a role in exacerbating suffering.Jenner found his vaccine, but in publishing and defending his work he also set off more than a century of controversy. The aforementioned “doubts” about Jenner's hypothesis began with a simple claim of vaccination's inefficacy, a claim for which Beowulf provides an illuminating interpretive analogy. In the poem, the title character resolutely determines to face Grendel in Herot, but the character Unferth tries to undermine Beowulf's reputation by calling him a “Boastful fool who fought a swimming / Match with Brecca” (507–8). Unferth claims Beowulf lost the match to Brecca, and then he adds, “You've been lucky in your battles, Beowulf, but I think / Your luck may change if you challenge Grendel, / Staying a whole night through in this hall, / Waiting where that fiercest of demons can find you” (525–28). Beowulf nonetheless resolves to face the “fiercest of demons,” whereas Jenner resolved to face what the physician Jacobs called “the greatest of all human plagues.” Jenner, however, was not without his “Unferth.” As Derrick Baxby puts it in Jenner's Smallpox Vaccine: The Riddle of Vaccinia Virus and Its Origin, “Perhaps the first hint of trouble in store came in October 1798 with a letter from Dr John Ingenhousz [sic]” (70). In “Further Observations,” Jenner, after briefly discussing some positive feedback regarding vaccination, summarizes a letter he received from Ingenhousz only months after the publication of the “Inquiry”: “I have lately also been favoured with a letter from a gentleman of great respectability (Dr. Ingenhousz), informing me that, on making an inquiry into the subject in the county of Wilts, he discovered that a farmer near Calne had been infected with the smallpox after having had the cow-pox, and that the disease in each instance was so strongly characterized as to render the facts incontrovertible. The cow-pox, it seems, from the doctor's information, was communicated to the farmer from his cows at the time that they gave out an offensive stench from their udders” (Vaccination 41).10 Tellingly, Jenner says no more on this point vis-à-vis Ingenhousz specifically. Still, he is basically countering Ingenhousz in the same way that Beowulf counters Unferth. To the latter, Beowulf says, “Ah! Unferth, my friend, your face / Is hot with ale, and your tongue has tried / To tell us about Brecca's doings. But the truth / Is simple: no man swims in the sea / As I can, no strength is a match for mine” (530–34). In short, Beowulf simply dismisses what Unferth has to say. Jenner does the same to Ingenhousz, but more subtly. Jenner's emphasized phrase “an offensive stench from their udders” economically informs the reader that no matter what the farmer had before he had smallpox it was not vaccine—and Ingenhousz did not realize this fact. Jenner never actually states this latter point. Rather, he simply allows the reported symptom to speak for itself. In sum, Beowulf has confidence in his abilities; Jenner has confidence in vaccination. Moreover, both receive vindication. Beowulf slays Grendel, and according to Paul Offit in Deadly Choices: How the Anti-vaccine Movement Threatens Us All, “Between 1810 and 1820 Jenner's vaccine halved the number of deaths from smallpox” (107).As time wore on, however, objections to vaccination became more trenchant. Was the variolæ vaccinæ no better than the scourge Jenner had hoped to combat? In Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver, Arthur Allen points out that “neither Jenner nor anyone else really understood what cowpox was” (52). He later adds, “Jenner's invention was ahead of its time. It came packaged in a corpus of untrustworthy medical knowledge” (52). Indeed, a lack of true insight into the nature of disease organisms sometimes led to devastating consequences for the newly vaccinated: “from time to time vaccination killed—because of contamination with streptococcal and staphylococcal bacteria, syphilis, tetanus, or tuberculosis. The pure virus itself could be enough to kill you if your immune system was weakened” (Allen 52). This potential for harm eventually turned vaccination, in the eyes of antivaccinists, into something arguably more threatening than smallpox itself. However, opposition to vaccination also took on a moral dimension: “Vaccination was ‘unchristian,’ a type of ‘devil worship’ that transformed a child into an ‘anti-Christ.’ In a pamphlet titled Jenner or Christ? the author described vaccination as the ‘most outrageous blasphemy against God [and] against Nature.’ Mary Hume-Rothery, a prominent anti-vaccine activist in the 1880s, argued that vaccination fulfilled the apocalyptic prophecy in Revelations 16:2 that warned, ‘Foul and evil sores came upon the men who bore the mark of the beast.’ To Hume-Rothery, vaccination scars were the mark of the devil” (Offit 121–22).As an offensive weapon against a deadly virus—itself a product of nature—vaccination spoke to some critics of humans' overconfidence in their own powers, the potentially dire consequences of which Wells illustrates in The Time Machine. In the distant future of the novel, human accomplishments, according to the Time Traveller, have resulted in the speciation of Homo sapiens into the terrestrial Eloi and the subterranean Morlock, and the relationship between these two descendants of humankind more than appalls the Time Traveller's Victorian sensibility: “Clearly, at some time in the Long-Ago of human decay the Morlocks' food had run short. Possibly they had lived on rats and such-like vermin. Even now man is far less discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was—far less than any monkey. His prejudice against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct. And so these inhuman sons of men—!” (75–76). Horrified, the Time Traveller cannot even bring himself to finish the last sentence of this passage. His account, though, suggests a lack of foresight in humans even when they are ostensibly acting for their own good. The Time Machine speaks of the utter perversion of humanity as a result of changes wrought through “advancements,” and such perversion is in essence what critics like Hume-Rothery see deriving from vaccination. Allen, perhaps, sums up the point: “Vaccination was unnatural. It was progress” (52).Intriguingly, Jenner himself had ideas about “progress” and its relation to smallpox. According to Jenner, humans were to blame for the scourge of smallpox. In fact, in a moment that very loosely suggests the plot of Mission: Impossible II, he begins the “Inquiry” by arguing that humans bear responsibility for the existence of diseases generally: “The deviation of man from the stage in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases. From the love of splendour, from the indulgences of luxury, and from his fondness for amusement he has familiarised himself with a great number of animals, which may not originally have been intended for his associates” (Vaccination 13). Humans' domestication of certain animals, in other words, has exposed people to diseases with which they otherwise would not have had contact. For Jenner, in fact, the domestication of the horse had disastrous consequences. Indeed, Jenner, who generally speculates that diseases may undergo some sort of evolutionary modification, believes that the smallpox virus arose from a horse disease: “May it not then be reasonably conjectured that the source of the smallpox is morbid matter of a peculiar kind, generated by a disease in the horse, and that accidental circumstances may have again and again arisen, still working new changes upon it until it has acquired the contagious and malignant form under which we now commonly see it making its devastations amongst us?” (Vaccination 32).11 The “devastations” of which Jenner speaks are the result of a “deviation” on the part of humanity, which, for its own purposes, brought the horse into its sphere. Interestingly, Jenner suggests that humans deviated from “nature” in some way. He never specifies what he means by “nature,” and he may or may not be alluding obliquely to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. That interpretation is not at all clear, for Jenner uses the passive voice when he alludes to an agent from whose plan or course humans deviated. He first tells of a “stage” in which people were “originally placed by nature,” locating the action passively in the vague noun nature, and he subsequently refers to animals that “may not originally have been intended for his associates.” Intended by whom? On this occasion, Jenner names no actor—perhaps because the result of human actions in this context, that is, the evolution of diseases, is a fait accompli.In actual fact, Jenner spends very little time in the “Inquiry” discussing humans' role in the provenance of diseases. In Beowulf, Grendel's relationship to Cain and human iniquity is relatively immaterial. Grendel must be stopped. A hero is needed. In Mission: Impossible II, the actual creation of chimera is almost irrelevant. Chimera exists. Someone must stop it from being unleashed. The same is certainly true for Jenner, who quickly abandons his speculation on the origins of diseases in favor of explaining how humanity can slay a pitiless monster. In other words, he reduces the problem of smallpox to one of immediacy, and not without reason. Of smallpox, Grace Hallock and C. E. Turner, in Health Heroes: Edward Jenner, ask, “What did people think of it in those faraway days when it caused 60,000,000 deaths in a single century?” (43). Of this same contagion, Colette Flight writes, “An estimated 300 million people died from smallpox in the 20th century alone.” This latter figure is all the more startling since vaccination had been available for one hundred years as the twentieth century began, and the virus was eradicated by the late 1970s. In short, as Beowulf and Mission: Impossible II reveal, the origins of such a scourge and debate over how one may have prevented it from occurring in the first place are of little moment in contrast to the scourge's immediacy. Humans' desire to serve themselves may occasionally go wrong and add to human woe, but that does not fundamentally change the nature of the human struggle against contingency—at least not as Jenner envisions that struggle.In Albert Camus's The Plague, it is not humans who domesticate animals and bring about a scourge. Rather, the scourge arises through the medium of animals that have “domesticated” humans. Camus essentially does away with any suggestion of human culpability by describing his eponymous plague as a force of nature brought against humanity through the agency of the vermin that make their homes in and about human society: “On the fourth day the rats began to come out and die in batches. From basements, cellars, and sewers they emerged in long wavering files into the light of day, swayed helplessly, then did a sort of pirouette and fell dead at the feet of horrified onlookers” (15). Camus later adds, “It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of its secreted humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails” (16). Unlike the chimera virus—or even smallpox, as Jenner understood its origin—Camus's plague derives from unfeeling nature, whose disease-carrying denizens insinuate themselves in the nooks and crannies of human constructions. For Camus, the earth is purging itself of infection at human expense.Still, whether humans find themselves suffering from diseases because of incensed deities or because of unfeeling nature, a simple truth remains: diseases can be deleterious to the mortal frame. More important, they can also undermine human resolve. In his novel, Camus describes the adverse psychological effect of his plague on those forced to realize that the sickness might not soon go away: “At such moments the collapse of their courage, willpower, and endurance was so abrupt that they felt they could never drag themselves out of the pit of despond into which they had fallen” (72). The historian Eusebius, too, recounts the anguish that accompanied yet another ancient epidemic: “Whole families were cut off very rapidly, so that two or three bodies of the dead were carried out from one house for burial at the same time. All places, therefore, byways, markets, streets, overflowed with tears, sorrow, and wailings; nor could aught be witnessed save the most piteous lamentations and weeping” (qtd. in Hallock and Turner 46). Likewise, Thucydides recognizes that people succumb to disease in more than a physical way, noting of the plague in his own time that “the greatest misery of all was the dejection of mind in those who found themselves beginning to be sick, for as soon as they made up their minds it was hopeless, they gave up and made much less resistance to the disease” (48).12 Mortal diseases that defeat people mentally defeat them utterly. Such defeat is the danger of Enkidu's perspective in regard to his “sickness.” Moreover, in The Plague, Camus points out how disease circumscribes the routine of life that gives people the impression of freedom as they go about their daily concerns: “They fancy themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences” (37). Pestilences, in other words, intrude on life's routine, making people suddenly aware of their contingency. More important, this sudden awareness can lead to hopelessness and despair, which undermine opposition. In ancient Athens, Thucydides witnessed such hopelessness among the newly ill: “they gave up and made much less resistance to the disease.” He also notes that this surrender, not the physical suffering, is “the greatest misery of all.” There is dignity in opposition, not submission. As Camus notes in The Myth of Sisyphus, “It is essential to die unreconciled and not of one's own free will” (55).Jenner makes reconciliation with smallpox pointless. At the end of “A Continuation of Facts and Observations Relative to the Variolæ Vaccinæ, or Cow-Pox,” his third publication on the subject of vaccination, Jenner makes his boldest statement regarding smallpox, seeing in vaccination “an antidote that is capable of extirpating from the earth a disease which is every hour devouring its victims; a disease that has ever been considered as the severest scourge of the human race!” (Vaccination 91). Jenner's use of the term devouring here is suggestive. In Beowulf, after the title character and his Geats have arrived in Denmark to deal with Grendel, the monster returns to Herot and feasts on one of Beowulf's men: “Grendel snatched at the first Geat / He came to, ripped him apart, cut / His body to bits with powerful jaws, / Drank the blood from his veins and bolted / Him down, hands and feet” (739–43). Like Grendel, smallpox, for Jenner, consumes its victims. There is, perhaps, no crueler reminder of one's contingency than being at the mercy of such a thoroughly merciless foe. In his third publication, Jenner realizes the full potential of vaccination, which, as Beowulf does for the Danes, will give people respite from contingency from at least one direction.Jenner's realization of the potential of vaccination goes some way in explaining his wholehearted defense of the procedure. In “Further Observations,” for instance, he reasons that even if the vaccine's efficacy were not universal, vaccination would still have value: “And here let me suppose, for argument's sake (not from conviction), that one person in an hundred after having had the cow-pox should be found susceptible of the smallpox, would this invalidate the utility of the practice?” (Vaccination 62). The struggle against contingency is one of such importance that people must grasp any opportunity that presents itself. For Jenner, even if vaccination were not to work in every instance, it would still be worth practicing because it would give humanity at least some chance of defending itself against a mortal foe. For this reason, Jenner seems to lack patience with his critics. In discussing Jenner's response to Ingenhousz, for instance, Baxby points out that Jenner made himself a magnet for criticism: “This episode was typical of the kind of hasty reaction by authoritative critics to which Jenner over-reacted, thus attracting further criticism to himself” (70–71). Not surprisingly, then, in “A Continuation,” his confidence high, Jenner offers his most pointed repudiation of those who would still reject vaccination, which, to his “satisfaction,” had spread “very widely” by the time he published that essay: “I have the pleasure, too, of seeing that the feeble efforts of a few individuals to depreciate the new practice are sinking fast into contempt beneath the immense mass of evidence which has arisen up in support of it” (Vaccination 74). Jenner's work with vaccination derives from his desire to end the reign of one of humanity's greatest foes. Thus, he exhibits impatience with objections that he perceives to be frivolous. As he notes late in “A Continuation,” “The scepticism that appeared, even among the most enlightened of medical men when my sentiments on the important subject of the cow-pox were first promulgated, was highly laudable” (Vaccination 91). However, Jenner makes clear that the time for skepticism has ended. As a result, he urges that the quest to eradicate smallpox and spare humanity its ravages begin.According to Baxby, “Writers have always found it difficult to be objective about Jenner” (195). Nonetheless, Jenner had a “vague idea,” and he “succeeded in transforming that vague idea into a permanent working principle in medicine” (Hallock and Turner 84–85). The historical effect of this “working principle” has been the eradication of one of nature's most deadly diseases, at least as far as humans are concerned. Indeed, in terms of the struggle against such uncongenial forces of nature, humans are concerned and have revealed that concern in their literature since ancient times. In Gilgamesh, the immortal Uta-napishti characterizes “Death” as a relentless foe: “No one at all sees Death, / no one at all sees the face [of Death,] / no one at all [hears] the voice of Death, / Death so savage, who hacks men down” (86). For Jenner, vaccination eliminates at least one of death's instruments: smallpox. In On the Origin of the Vaccine Inoculation, his fourth publication on vaccination, Jenner writes, “It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice” (8).