Baltimore Evening Sun (12 June 1911): 6.

From an amateur philologist of Belair, in this fair county of Harford:

The treatise upon American synonyms would be incomplete without a chapter upon synonyms for “negro.” Not long ago an eminent Mississippi lawyer was severely censured by one of the judges of the Supreme Court of that State for using the word “nigger” in an argument. And yet there was a time when our brunette fellow-citizens did not object to the term and even used it among themselves. At the moment they seem to favor “Afro-American” and “colored man,” or, when they would be very polite, “gentleman of color.” In the West Indies “gentleman of color” or “colored man” means, not a negro, but a mulatto. The “colored man” down there despises and disdains the pure-blooded black, as he often does, in fact, in our own country. A blackamoor who is “bright”—i. e., light in color—looks down upon the “black” or “dark” man. The word “mulatto” is now seldom heard among us. In the same way “dinky,” “tar pot,” “pickaninny,” “dinge” and “coon” have begun to decline. “Negro” is too formal and “Afro-American” is absurd. Why not adopt “niggero,” an honest compromise between scientific accuracy and colloquial ease?

Those Baltimoreans who hesitate to submit to typhoid vaccination through fear of the immediate consequences are laboring under a serious misunderstanding of the operation and its effects. Unlike smallpox vaccination, it does not involve the scratching of the arm and the consequent creation of an open sore, and unlike smallpox vaccination again, it does not cause disabling illness. The vaccine is inserted. not by rubbing it into a wound, but with a hypodermic syringe, and as a result there is no sore at all, and no scar remains. And the illness that is produced—the so-called reaction—is usually so slight that it passes almost unnoticed.

Perhaps a personal experience may be more convincing here than a copious quotation from medical reports. Two or three months ago I submitted to inoculation. My left arm was made clean, the first dose of vaccine was taken into a syringe, the needle point of the syringe pierced my hide, and in went the dead germs. There was, at the moment, no sensation whatever. Not a drop of blood, of course, was shed. The disagreeable accompaniments of smallpox inoculation were entirely absent.

That was late in the afternoon. Four hours later my arm began to show a red spot and soon this red spot was six inches long and three wide. My arm felt a bit stiff, but there was no actual pain, and I was still able to operate a typewriter with perfect comfort. That night I slept soundly. In the morning I felt a bit stupid and heavy. There was no headache, no nausea, no pain in the arm, no fever—but still a certain languor was evident, like that which heralds a bad cold. Next day it was gone completely. And my arm, though still red, was no longer stiff.

So much for the first inoculation—of 250,000,000 dead germs. A week later followed the second, this time of 500,000,000. Again that transitory stiffness in the arm, again that feeling of languor, again that redness. My arm seemed to swell a bit. But I could still use it with freedom—and in 36 hours all symptoms had disappeared.

Another week and there came the third inoculation—of 1,000,000,000 germs. The reaction this time was a bit more severe. For 24 hours I felt very sleepy, indeed. But there was absolutely no headache, and neither was there the slightest nausea. As for my, arm, it was stiff for a day and grew very red. Then the stiffness vanished and the redness faded. For two weeks three hard lumps could be felt under the skin, at the points of inoculation. They disappeared finally and the adventure was ended.

I had not been incapacitated a single minute, I suffered no pain, I had no headache. I went about my daily work without the slightest interference. An ordinary cold would have been a hundred times as uncomfortable. Not one of the disagreeable features of smallpox vaccination appeared. The whole experience was absurdly trivial.

Now and then, of course, the reaction is more severe, but that in only seldom. The experience of the army surgeons between January 1, 1910, and December 1, during which time they injected 39,000 doses, showed that less than one patient in 100 is incapacitated by inoculation, and that even when headaches and other such things follow they are seldom severe and never last more than 48 hours.

The first inoculation, it appears, is usually more productive of discomfort than either the second or third. The army reports show that of every 1,000 persons inoculated for the first time 6 have to go to bed, 57 suffer from pretty severe headaches, 300 show a slight rise in temperature and are otherwise discommoded, and about 640 escape scot-free or with nothing worse than a slight feeling of languor. On the second inoculation the number floored falls to four and on the third two. There is, so far, not a single record of any serious illness following inoculation in the army, nor of any illness or discomfort of whatever sort lasting more then 48 hours. This in 14,286 separate cases.

That inoculation is an absolute preventive of typhoid is, of course, not true. As everyone knows, even typhoid itself is not an absolute preventive. A man who has once had the disease may conceivably have it again, and even die of it. But as everyone also knows, that is extremely improbable. Common experience teaches that the man who has once had typhoid is usually immune to it forever after. And the new vaccine, it would seem, produces just about the same degree of immunity.

Among the 14,386 soldiers vaccinated last year there were but six cases of typhoid, and all of them were mild ones, short in duration and ending in recovery. Among the 70,000 odd soldiers not vaccinated there were 418 cases and 32 deaths. In the one case one man out of every 2,381 was stricken by typhoid and none died. In the other case, one man out of every 167 was stricken and one man out of every 2,190 died. Thus it appears that the liability to infection at those not vaccinated was nearly 14 times that of those vaccinated.

And these figures do not tell the whole story, for they cover only the first year’s results. The immunity following inoculation is thought to last two or three years. During these years the vaccinated continue to enjoy immunity, but those not inoculated, even those who escape during the first year, are constantly liable. No doubt a complete report, covering say three years, would show that the unvaccinated, from beginning to end, ran a risk at least 25 or 30 times as great as that run by the vaccinated.