Mr. E. Atkinson, a subscriber to The Homoeopathic Recorder, resident in Bridgewater, Somerset, England, has sent us the following copy of an item appearing in the London Daily Mail under date of July 4, 1947:.
A PERFECT BABY GOES BLIND.
MINISTRY TO HOLD AN ENQUIRY.
While baby Margaret Ann Gooding played with her two brothers, whom she cannot see, in the living room of their home in Hatfield Peveral, Essex, yesterday, the Minister of Health promised in Parliament to enquire into the cause of her blindness.
Margaret Ann, one year and three weeks old, went blind following a third attempt at vaccination. The first two injections did not “take” but the third one apparently did.
She crawls and tumbles about the living room as confidently as if she could see, and her blue eyes seem quite normal, but when she drops her doll or toys she has to feel about for them. Her mother, 35 year-old Mrs. M. Gooding, wife of a Civil Servant, said last night, “I know it is wrong of me but sometimes as I watch her groping about I wish she had never been born.
“When strangers compliment me, as they often do, on having such a lovely baby I could cry. I dread her having to go away to a special school for blind children.”.
Mrs. Gooding said that five days after the third vaccination she found the child unconscious in her cot and rushed her to the hospital and also to a Harley Street Specialist. “They say that a very delicate operation may restore her sight. I am clinging to the slender hope that it will be successful. It is enough to break any mothers heart, and I cannot help feeling that there should be an enquiry. When she was born the Doctor described her as a perfect baby”.
This incident should be of interest to all homoeopaths as substantiating in some measure our contention that there are inherent dangers in vaccination. One wonders exactly what happened to little Margaret Ann to deprive her of her sight. One thinks first of meningitis or a meningo-encephalitis as being the most likely condition producing unconsciousness in a child of one year five days following vaccination.
Meningitis is noted for its effects upon the cranial nerves of which the optic nerve is one, but one wonders what sort of “delicate operation” would be successful in restoring sight in a person whose optic nerve is so severely damaged as to produce blindness. We have a feeling that such an operation should be the last resort. We also have the feeling that homoeopathy offers greater prospect of being able to restore Margaret Annas vision than does the surgeons knife. Perhaps Thuja, the tree of life, would benefit this baby more than cold steel.
Allan D. Sutherland was born in Northfield, Vermont in 1897, delivered by the local homeopathic physician. The son of a Canadian Episcopalian minister, his father had arrived there to lead the local parish five years earlier and met his mother, who was the daughter of the president of the University of Norwich. Four years after Allan’s birth, ministerial work lead the family first to North Carolina and then to Connecticut a few years afterward.
Starting in 1920, Sutherland began his premedical studies and a year later, he began his medical education at Hahnemann Medical School in Philadelphia.
Sutherland graduated in 1925 and went on to intern at both Children’s Homeopathic Hospital and St. Luke’s Homeopathic Hospital. He then was appointed the chief resident at Children’s. With the conclusion of his residency and 2 years of clinical experience under his belt, Sutherland opened his own practice in Philadelphia while retaining a position at Children’s in the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department.
In 1928, Sutherland decided to set up practice in Brattleboro.