Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [104]
Humanized virus worked. When properly collected and used, it took “with great regularity” and produced immunity for years. But there were problems. If the vaccinifier was not as healthy as she appeared, the virus could communicate other human diseases, including erysipelas (an acute skin infection) and syphilis. In Rivalta, Italy, in 1861, sixty-three children were vaccinated with material from the vaccinal sore of a single, seemingly healthy infant. Forty-six of the children fell ill with syphilis, several died, and some passed the disease to their mothers and nurses. The risks of arm-to-arm transfer inflamed antivaccination sentiment almost everywhere it was practiced. Herbert Spencer called it “wholesale syphilization.”37
A second disadvantage of humanized virus was the challenge, even in a densely populated community, of keeping a fresh supply on hand. For a small town or sparsely settled rural area, keeping up an arm-to-arm relay or a good stock of crusts might prove impossible. Moreover, some physicians believed that humanized virus became attenuated or compromised over time, with the ever increasing distance from the original bovine source. Humanized virus had one other major shortcoming, which only became fully apparent in retrospect. There was never much of a market in it.38
The idea of using cows, instead of people, to manufacture cowpox first took hold in Italy. Throughout the century, in Europe and America, some vaccine propagators practiced what came to be called “retrovaccination”: inoculating heifers with humanized virus, either to mystically restore some bovine quality to the vaccine or to simply make animals do the work. But the production of the stuff that came to be known as “true animal vaccine” or “bovine virus”—and that would launch a new industry and market—did not catch on in Europe until the 1860s. The idea was to inoculate a heifer with seed virus obtained from a naturally occurring case of cowpox (not with humanized virus) and to keep the strain running from calf to calf in a continuous relay, all the while harvesting vaccine for use in humans.39
Bovine vaccine had none of the problems that plagued humanized virus. As the Italian practice was adopted by France (1864), Belgium (1865), Japan (1874), and Germany (1884), government officials and private entrepreneurs greeted each newly discovered outbreak of cowpox as a wellspring of vaccine. One of the most famous cases of “spontaneous cowpox” came to light in 1866 in Beaugency, in France’s Loire Valley. Although vulnerable to contamination, bovine virus did not spread syphilis. A calf could produce vaccine in far greater quantity than an infant could (while raising fewer qualms). And as doctors, farmers, and druggists soon realized, there was money to be made in bovine vaccine.40
Dr. Henry A. Martin of Boston introduced bovine vaccine to the United States in 1870. Using seed lymph from the Beaugency strain, which by that time had already passed through 260 heifers in France, Martin established a vaccine farm in suburban Roxbury. Martin may also deserve credit for initiating the American vaccine makers’ practice of tarring rivals’ products. An early advertisement said Martin virus should not be “confounded with the feeble, uncertain, and generally quite worthless product of retrovaccination.” Martin’s family-run establishment operated continuously and with good reputation into the early twentieth century. Others quickly followed in Martin’s footsteps, most notably Dr. E. L. Griffin of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and Dr. Frank P. Foster of New York. By the mid-1870s, vaccine farms were sprouting up all over the country.41