“I have before told you how little was known correctly of the lungs, and the true causes of consumption; owing to this, a great many medicines and medical remedies are often used, that instead of curing, rapidly and surely incline to produce consumption.”
—Samuel Sheldon Fitch, MD, 1853
“Vaccination does not stay the spread of smallpox, nor ever modify it in those who contract that disease after vaccination; it introduces into the system and therefore causes the spread of consumption, cancer and even leprosy; it contributes to make more virulent the epidemics of smallpox and to make them more extensive; it does just what inoculation did—causes the spread of smallpox.”[1]
—Dr. Walter M. James, Philadelphia
“Five hundred thousand deaths occur annually in England alone, about one-half are occasioned by consumption, pneumonia, convulsions, atrophy, and other strumous diseases which are more or less in my opinion occasioned, or super-added by vaccination and other strumous diseases. Consumption, scrofula, and other blood diseases were comparatively unknown before Small-pox and Cow-pox inoculation were introduced.”[2]
—William Job Collins, MD, public vaccinator for 25 years, London, England
The Fear Campaign
Humans have a deep-rooted fear of the unknown, and few terrors have haunted us more persistently than the invisible menace of infectious disease. Measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, typhoid, and smallpox stand among history’s most infamous microscopic killers, their reputations forged by centuries of suffering and death. The dominant narrative insists these unseen threats have caused staggering mortality—and that medical interventions like antibiotics and vaccines are not only effective, but indispensable.
Public health officials and medical spokespeople frequently appeal to fear to promote their preferred solutions to these perceived enemies. Lately, the rhetoric has intensified. Added to the latest fear campaign is tuberculosis (TB), once one of history’s most prolific killers and now being cast as a looming threat once more.
A recent article with the alarmist title “Tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest disease, could be America’s next outbreak” warns:
“The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates nearly 13 million people in the U.S. have “latent TB infection.” Up to 10 percent will develop active TB if they aren’t treated… A vaccine for TB provides some protection for infants and children, but is less effective for adults and adolescents. Leaders of every Western nation should question their priorities when, after a century-and-a-half, we still don’t have a modern vaccine that can prevent infection from the world’s largest pathogenic killer.”[3]
The call is clear: a new, advanced vaccine must be developed to combat this “latent” killer. But what is the real history of tuberculosis? And what does the data actually reveal?
The White Plague: A Historical Shadow
Now known as tuberculosis, once called the “White Plague” or “consumption,” the disease earned its macabre nicknames from its gruesome effects: victims wasted away, their pallid, emaciated frames a stark testament to its slow, insidious destruction. A disfiguring form, known as “scrofula” (or the “King’s Evil”), targeted the lymph nodes, causing grotesque neck swellings and abscesses.
For centuries, TB was a dominant cause of death, particularly among the poor. In 1815, it claimed as many as one in four lives in Europe and America. By the mid-19th century, major cities in the eastern United States recorded TB mortality rates as high as 400 per 100,000 population. Between 1851 and 1910, tuberculosis caused an estimated four million deaths in England and Wales alone.[4]
A stark 1894 Journal of the American Medical Association editorial declared:
“...that most fatal of all disease, that scourge of humanity, tuberculosis, better known as consumption. This disease causes more deaths than all the epidemic diseases combined. Statistics show that one-sixth of all deaths throughout the civilized world are caused by consumption.”[5]
The Fall of Tuberculosis
Data from Massachusetts reveals a startling trend: TB deaths plummeted from 375 per 100,000 in 1874 to just 2.4 per 100,000 by 1970—a staggering 99.4% drop. Yet this decline began decades before the advent of modern medical interventions. From 1861 to 1899, tuberculosis killed 48 times more people than smallpox in the state—yet it was smallpox, with its vaccine, that dominated the public health narrative.
Epidemiologist Thomas McKeown demonstrated that an estimated 96.8% of TB’s decline occurred before the introduction of antibiotics (Streptomycin, 1947) or the BCG vaccine (1954). He noted that while these tools contributed modestly to the continuing decline, their overall impact was relatively limited.
“Chemotherapy [Streptomycin, 1947; BCG Vaccination, 1954] reduced the number of deaths [from tuberculosis] in the period since it was introduced (1948-1971) by 51 per cent; for the total period since cause of death was first recorded (1848–71) the reduction was 3.2 per cent.”[6]
The stark discrepancy in tuberculosis mortality compared to smallpox leaves little doubt that the White Plague was a true historical scourge. Nonetheless, despite the enormous toll it exacted during its peak, the dominant focus on smallpox and its associated vaccine relegated tuberculosis to the background of public discourse, allowing it to fade into relative historical obscurity. After all, smallpox had a vaccine to solve the smallpox problem—or so the public was led to believe.
Examining the charts, we see a dramatic decline (over 90%) in mortality well before the introduction of Streptomycin and the BCG vaccine. With the addition of a trend line, we can also observe that these interventions had little to no discernible impact on the overall decline in deaths. In other words, these celebrated medical interventions were largely unnecessary and did not contribute significantly to the observed improvement.
As we have seen through the various charts, deaths from all infectious diseases—including tuberculosis—declined dramatically from the 1870s through the 1880s and well into the mid-20th century, following a steady, downward trajectory that continued before, during, and after the widespread introduction of antibiotics and vaccines.
A myriad of societal changes over those many decades helped usher in an extraordinary modern life for millions, transforming existence from one of constant struggle and recurring plagues to a life of relative comfort and a marked reduction in the deadliest infectious diseases. The fundamental drivers of this transformation were not vaccines or antibiotics, but widespread improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and living conditions—as even a 19th-century editorial recognized:
“Few arguments can be brought to bear in disproof of the claim that fewer people are attacked by consumption and that more recover than in former years. The reasons for this amelioration are very simple. With the progress of civilization all classes of people live more hygienically. There is less bad water drunk, and drainage conditions have been improved in a manner that is wonderful. When it is remembered also that there is less crowding, less exposure to cold, and that men in general eat better food than formerly, there is little occasion for surprise that consumption of the lungs should decrease…”[7]
Yet this history has been largely forgotten, overshadowed, and rewritten by narratives celebrating medical interventions as the sole saviors. In truth, many flawed and even harmful medical theories of the time contributed to the very conditions that public health later sought to correct.
The Dark Side of Medical Intervention
From the outset, Edward Jenner’s cowpox-based (also based on horse grease, smallpox inoculated onto a cow, and many other formulations) vaccination was hailed as a miracle, yet it also coincided with the emergence of troubling post-vaccination complications, including cases of tuberculosis, oftentimes with fatal outcomes. The following testimonies, drawn from a variety of sources, stand as painful reminders of the unintended and sometimes devastating consequences of medical interventions. From children who developed tuberculosis, paralysis, and chronic skin disorders, to adults who suffered prolonged ulcers, systemic deterioration, and eventual death, these narratives underscore a critical truth: even well-meaning medical practices can yield unforeseen, and often tragic, results.
“There are three children in our neighborhood that will suffer always the result of it. One has tuberculosis of the glands, another boy is puny and has nasty sores come out on him, while the girl I refer to had paralysis of that side and a skin disease broke out. She is lame yet, and the parents say it is the last one they will have vaccinated, for they know it was due to vaccination, because they were perfectly healthy before.”[8]
“…a man, aged 39, in apparent good health, was vaccinated. The vaccination ran an irregular course, leaving an open ulcer, which did not heal for several months… before the ulcer healed, diarrhoea set in… He lived until the following December, and died of tuberculosis…”[9]
“Another girl after vaccination had boils break out all over her body, the doctors treated her, but she got worse, went into consumption and died.”[10]
“He passed through the disease [vaccination] very well, the doctor said; but I noticed that he seemed to lose his spirits. He was vaccinated in the summer; in the following September, he began to cough, which he never did before; the cough increased, and I called in a doctor, who told me that he had inflammation of the lungs, and that if it was not stopped he would go into a consumption. He leeched, blistered, and physicked my poor boy, and he gradually got worse; then his legs began to swell; the wound you now see has been in existence for nine months, gradually getting worse, and he is now unable to walk.”[11]
“The lady’s-maid, eighteen years of age, and possessing some considerable personal attractions, was the next I branded in the same way. She had been inoculated with Small-pox when a child, and had a few scars on her body. I saw her again on the eighth day after the operation, and found that she had passed through the incubating stage with little or no constitutional disturbance, and was successfully vaccinated, having six well-defined vaccine vesicles, three upon each arm. In the autumn of the same year she caught the Small-pox, had it very severely, and ultimately died of consumption.”[12]
Taken together, these accounts form a disturbing mosaic: vaccination, far from being universally benign, sometimes coincided with systemic health breakdowns, particularly in individuals previously described as healthy. Though these are anecdotal reports, their consistency—emergence of illness shortly after vaccination, chronic ulcers or skin eruptions, respiratory decline, and eventual tuberculosis—demands attention. In the 19th century, when germ theory was still emerging and immune system dynamics were poorly understood, these outcomes were often dismissed as coincidences or obscured by medical orthodoxy.
Today, they offer a sobering historical counter-narrative—one that urges caution in assuming that every intervention is inherently safe, and reminds us that early medical enthusiasm sometimes came at great cost to the very people it aimed to save.
Medical Skeptics Speak Out
Over time, while mainstream physicians and public health authorities continued to assert that vaccination was a safe and essential public good, a significant number of dissenting voices emerged—physicians and medical thinkers who challenged this dominant narrative. These individuals, often grounded in decades of clinical experience, observed troubling patterns and raised deeply considered concerns about vaccination’s unintended consequences. Though marginalized by official institutions, their collective testimony forms a consistent and sobering critique of vaccination as both unsafe and ineffective.
Numerous practitioners across decades repeated a strikingly similar message: that the smallpox vaccine, far from being an absolute success, may have contributed to a disturbing rise in a range of afflictions—tuberculosis, leprosy, paralysis, syphilis, cancer, and various skin and blood diseases. From their vantage point, the pursuit of artificial immunity may have sown the seeds of chronic suffering, immune dysfunction, and premature death.
The following is a small but compelling sample of such voices, all of whom specifically linked vaccination to tuberculosis—then the leading cause of death in the industrialized world.
“Closely allied to these, as causes of disease, are the poisonous drugs administered as medicines. And it must not be forgotten that syphilis, scrofula, and probably every kind of blood-poison can be taken by vaccination, which, so far from being a protection against small-pox, seems to have been one of the chief causes of the late epidemics.”[13]—Thomas Low Nichols, MD
“Vaccination is the infusion of a contaminating element into the system, and after such contamination you can never hope to regain the former purity of the body. This tainted the body is made liable to a host of ailments. Consumption follows in the footsteps of vaccination as certainly and as unequivocally as effect follows cause.”[14]—Alexander Wilder, MD, Professor of Physiology, United States Medical College, New York, editor of the N. Y. Medical Times
“In India, since the introduction of compulsory vaccination, leprosy has increased 25 per cent; and in this country consumption has increased 35 per cent. cancer 50 per cent. and skin diseases 270 per cent; What man wants to risk of having some loathsome and ineradicable disease germs introduced into his body, or into the body of his child, under the pretence that it will render them immune from an attack of small-pox?”[15]—Dr. Van V. Blighton
“Is there any wonder with such abominable fouling of the human body [vaccination], that consumption, scrofuls, [sic] syphilis, cancer, and the whole vile train of skin diseases, should start up, and rage on with maddening intensity, making life miserable, swelling, to a dreadful extent, the bills of mortality, and curtailing by many years, the length of human life?”[16]—Dr. Samuel Eadon, M. A. Gloucester, England
“Syphilis, Abdominal Phthisis, Scrofula, Cancer, Erysipelas, and almost all diseases of the skin, have been either conveyed, occasioned, or intensified by vaccination.”[17]—William Hitchman, MRCS, Consulting Surgeon to the Cancer Hospital, Leeds, formerly a public vaccinator, Liverpool, England
“But vaccination is a filthy thing, a useless thing, a harmful thing; and it is not creditable to us as a nation that we wish to force upon our unwilling citizens a thing against which so much can be said, and for which so little can be proved. Erysipelas, scrofula, syphilis, tuberculosis, typhoid, diphtheria, Bright’s disease, relapsing fever, septicemia and cancer, in exchange for smallpox, doesn’t seem like a very good bargain, especially as there appears to be a potent method of protecting from variola without risking any such exchange.”[18]—Henry G. Hanchett, MD
“Vaccination is a practice that causes a vast amount of disease and suffering. Its effects are far more terrible than the disease it is designed to prevent. No matter how pure the vaccine matter may appear to be, virus is left in the system, which will, sooner or later, be developed in scrofula or some other filthy disease. Were I to relate a few of the cases that have fallen under my observation of persons injured by this practice [vaccination], it would fill the mind with horror.”[19]—J. R. Newton, MD, Boston, Massachusetts
Being anxious not to do mischief to my fellow-creatures, and being, as regards my own family, liable to fine and imprisonment under the Compulsory Vaccination Act, I wrote to some MPs on the subject. I asked them to come here and see for themselves the dismal results of vaccination in cases of paralysis, blindness of both eyes, hip-joint disease, consumption, and frightful forms of skin diseases.[20]—William Forbes Laurie, MD, Edinburgh, Scotland
The quotes express a strong belief among 19th-century medical professionals that vaccination introduced harmful impurities into the body, leading to chronic and often fatal diseases such as tuberculosis, cancer, syphilis, leprosy, and various skin disorders. These practitioners claimed that vaccination disrupted the body’s natural purity and was responsible for a significant rise in serious illnesses. Their testimonies reflect a deep skepticism toward the safety and effectiveness of vaccination and associate it with widespread physical suffering and increased mortality.
Conclusion: Fear vs. Facts
It wasn’t a vaccine that solved the tuberculosis problem, and in fact, vaccination during that era was a significant contributing factor to TB as well as other devastating and disfiguring illnesses. Yet, those alarming and often tragic outcomes were widely ignored. As has so frequently been the pattern, we are presented with a frightening microbial threat and told that the only answer is yet another vaccine.
Articles of this nature, such as those published in The Hill, often fail to provide historical perspective or empirical evidence. Instead, they rely on fear-based messaging, declaring that we need a vaccine for the “world’s largest pathogenic killer” in order to keep the public anxious, compliant, and eager to accept the next experimental medical intervention.
[1] “Vaccination the Foul Invention of Hell,” Leaves of Healing, vol. XXXV, No. 14, January 2, 1915, p. 314.
[2] William Job Collins, MD, Have You Been Vaccinated, and what Protection is it Against the Small Pox? 1869, London, p. 20.
[3] Lyndon Haviland, “Tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest disease, could be America’s next outbreak,” The Hill, April 30, 2025, https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/5273454-tuberculosis-deaths-global-health
[4] Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 2005, Penguin Books, p. 183.
[5] Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 23, July 14, 1894, p. 88.
[6] Thomas McKeown, The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage, or Nemesis? 1979, Princeton University Press, p. 93.
[7] Dr. A. V. Meigs, “The Contagiousness of Consumption of the Lungs,” New York Medical Journal, June 24, 1911, pp. 1230–1232.
[8] “Vaccination Causes Disease,” The Columbus Medical Journal, June 1908, vol. XXXII, no. 6, pp. 303–304.
[9] The Value of Vaccination: A Non-partisan Review of Its History and Results, George William Winterburn, PhD, MD, 1886, F.E. Boericke, Philadelphia, p. 47.
[10] “The Horrible Results of Vaccination,” Physical Culture, vol. XXIII, No. 6, June, 1910, p. 618.
[11] William Job Collins, MD, Have You Been Vaccinated, and what Protection is it Against the Small Pox? 1869, London, p. 22.
[12] Ibid., p. 25.
[13] Thomas Low Nichols MD, Esoteric Anthropology (The Mysteries of Man), 1873, p. 186, 192.
[14] “Vaccination the Foul Invention of Hell,” Leaves of Healing, vol. XXXV, No. 14, January 2, 1915, p. 315.
[15] “Vile Vaccination,” The Vegetarian Magazine, November 1909, vol. XIII, no. 3, p. 15.
[16] “Medical Opinion on Vaccination,” Journal of Hygeio-therapy, vol. II, no. 2, February 1888, p. 34.
[17] J. M. Peebles, MD, MA, PhD, Vaccination a Curse and a Menace to Personal Liberty, Tenth Edition, 1913, p. 301.
[18] Henry G. Hanchett, M.D., “An Inquiry in Prophylaxis,” The New York Medical Times, vol. XVI, no. 10, January 1889, pp. 305–306.
[19] “Medical Opinion on Vaccination,” Journal of Hygeio-therapy, vol. II, no. 2, February 1888, p. 35.
[20] Ibid.
Before losing my job of over 20 years teaching chess in the Tribeca/Battery Park City section of New York City for refusing the toxic, deadly covid injections. My job randomly mandated that I start taking tuberculosis test to be able to teach after I had already worked there for 10 years having never taken a sick day. That was one of the steps on the slippery slope towards the dehumanizing covid injection mandates, the vaccine passports and the new biosecurity state.
Excellent article. Thank you.
I was surprised to read that syphilis was one of the diseases that vaccination caused. I'd thought it was purely a sexually transmitted disease. It had existed for centuries in Europe before vaccination was introduced, much less widespread. It appeared in Europe immediately after Columbus's voyages to the New World, at the end of the 1400s, and it is thought to have mutated into an even more destructive form than it had originally been, involving catastrophic nervous system destruction, leading to insanity, paralysis, tabes dorsalis, etc.,) in the late 1700s to early 1800s. The Napoleonic wars, a/k/a the French Revolutionary wars, in the early 1800s, spread the more virulent and destructive form of the disease far and wide throughout the entirety of Europe and beyond. It was a terrible scourge throughout the entire nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.
I wonder if vaccination wrecked people's immune systems to the point that those who had been able to mount an adequate defense against diseases like tuberculosis and syphilis fell prey to their devastating effects after being vaccinated. There must have been many people who were exposed to the syphilis spirochete (e.g. the wives of men who were known to have had syphilis but never fell sick from it.) Vaccination might have devastated people's immune systems in ways that made them unable to defend themselves again the microbes they'd previously been able to keep at bay. Clara Schumann , the wife of the great romantic composer Robert Schumann, who had syphilis, (and was treated for it with toxic mercury, the only treatment used for syphilis at the time) is an example. Clara never became sick with syphilis, nor did she ever show any symptoms of it, but she must have been exposed to it. If she had been vaccinated, perhaps she would have fallen victim to the infection which her body evidently competently defended itself against.