AN "ACADEMIC PROLETARIAT."

AN "ACADEMIC PROLETARIAT."-VACCINIA AND VARIOLA.

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Mr. Arthur Edmunds showed at a meeting of the Society for way in the matter of examinations or who bore a grudge Study of Disease in Children3 an English baby with against this or that professor. Interrupting not merely their similar pigmentation in the sacro-iliac region. The occur- own studies but those of their class-fellows from whom they rence of the so-called Mongolian pigmentation in European exact ’solidarity’ or action in common, they convert the infants may therefore be accepted as a fact, but the condition curriculum of the year into little more than a farce, so that would appear to be one of great rarity. failing (naturally enough) to meet the examination test in their own university they are fain to court that of another All this, as seen and deplored by more accommodating. AN "ACADEMIC PROLETARIAT." successive Ministers of Public Instruction but never put so "THE phrase"(writes an Italian correspondent) "is powerfully in evidence as by Italy’s prominent clinician and Guido Baccelli’s who, when Minister of Public Instruction, senator Guido Bccelli, calls loudly for remedial legislation, coined it in order to give currency to an impression, borne beginning with the suppression of at least three-fourths of the in upon himself and his predecessors in office, as to the evil existing universities and the absorption of the resources of wrought by Italy’s plethora of universities which turn out these into the four, as proposed by Biceelli, which would annually many hundreds of graduates in law, in medicine, encourage real learning and exclude all but the duly qualified and in engineering, of whom scarcely one half can expact from the professions. True. the reform indicated is fraught to gain a livelihood by their nominal profession. What with difficulties. Just as in the matter of the civil list the becomes of this great army of the educated unemployed ?7 King is periodically importuned in Parliament to suppress Disdaining to go into commercial or industrial pursuits, for the mny palaces inherited from the deposed dukes, grand which indeed they have scarcely more aptitude than dukes, and tiny monarchs who disappeared with Italian training, they reinforce the already swollen ranks of nnity, but has always to declare his inability to do so from journalism mainly political or of parliamentary ’agitation’ the local protests raised by the communities in which the mainly demagogic. Hangers-on of this or that political group, said palaces are cherished as an heirloom and an asset, they court the patronage of its chief by services on the plat- so in the case of the universities which, equally with form or the press, contributing tojournals which crop up the palaces, are retained long after the duchy or the like mushrooms, often as deciduous as they are unwhole- kingdom to which they belonged has ceased to exist, some, or strutting their little hour on public platforms and the reformer who proposes to extinguish them so as diffusing the malady, of which they are alternately the cause to concentrate their lights and to feed a larger and more an,d the effect, known to continental alienists asmania illuminating flame is met by an outcry from the ’seat of contionabunda.’ All this was put before parliament in learning’ and its neighbourhood which forces him to desist, Italy some nine or ten years ago by Dr. B iccelli in under a pressure aided and abetted by Parliamentarians the memorable speech in which he advocated the who, radical in other questions, become conservatives indeed reduction of Italy’s multitude of seits of learning to when their local interests are threatened. And yet somea minimum of four which, duly endowed and thing must be done, and that right early and right would be beyond the temptation of competing with thoroughly, if Italy is to rise to the height from which each other in the matter of matriculation, curriculum, and she has declined since the Renaissance and make her unigraduation, and by making their degrees attainable only by versities the trueAloiae Matres’ ornursing mothers’ earnest and competent aspirants would bring down the total which they once were, not only to herself but to the outlying of graduates to a number corresponding to public wants and world. Then, but not till then, shall we witness the disso cut at the roots of the upas tree-- the academic proleappearance ofacademic strikes’ andquadrangular duels’ between professoriate and BIPI’sohensohaft and with it the in tariat’ aforesaid. administration the Unfortunately, which Baccelli was charged with the portfolio of Public deflection of undergraduate energies into their normal and Instruction collapsed before his Bill for University Reform fertilising channels-to the revival of Italy’s fair fame in the could pass through its preliminary stages, and so the mis- sphere of research and practice and to the extirpation of chief wrought by the plethora of’seats of learning’ that malignant fungus now poisoning her public life-the remains as active as ever-to the prejudice alike of Academic Proletariat." professional efficiency and of public well-being. In VACCINIA AND VARIOLA.1 fact, the University curriculum would seem often to be accepted by the undergraduate less as a preparaTHE Association of Public Vaccinators of England and tion for the legal or the medical calling than for the Wales has done well to publish Dr. De Korte’s paper career of the publicist,’ if we may judge from the proneThe paper read at its annual meeting last October. ness of the student to intervene in the politics of the hour, constitutes a most useful addition to the easily accesIt differs from most domestic or international. Messages of sympathy, voted by sible literature on the subject. undergraduatesin council assembled’ (which is often but writings in defence of vaccination in respect that it a turbulent meeting in the quadrangle), are despatched to touches only slightly on the statistical evidence and this or that ‘cause,’ native or foreign, which happens to be confines itself almost wholly to a historical and scientific in conflict with the central authority ; sides are taken with study of the vaccinal process and to the nature of the a fervour and a vehemence redolent of the parliamentary immunity conferred. The statistical evidence that vaccination prevents small-pox is so overwhelmingly strong and has arena rather than of the Groves of Academe’ ; and many a youth who might have made a respectable citizen as prac- been so frequently set forth that there was no need for its titioner in law or medicine is seduced by the success of his repetition, but the bacteriology of vaccinia and variola has harangue and the triumph of hisside’ to pose ere long as been seldom dealt with excepting in larger works. Dr. De Korte discusses the principle of Jennerian vaccination and a little Gracchus hungry for place,’ or (let us say) as ’Gracchulus esuriens’ in the parliamentary lobbies. refers to the experiments of Simpson and King and others a Aping. the methods of the industrial proletariat, as these as to the relationship of cow-pox to small-pox. He discusses are dictated by the professional agitator, the under- also the cause of ulceration in Jenner’s day and the sidegraduate here goes out on’strike’ and just the other chain theory and alexocyte theories of immunity, the histoday we had all over Italy outbreaks of thesciopero logical changes in variola and vaccinia, umbilication and accademico’ on the part of students who wanted their own 1 Vaccination Scientifically Considered, by W. B. De Korte, the

equipped,

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M.B. Lond.

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THE

LANCET, Feb. 3rd, 1906, p. 299.

England

Published by the Association of Public Vaccinators of and Wales. Price 6d.