To the Editor:

It is, perhaps, not so difficult as Lionel Abel [“Science versus Justice,” July] perceives to find “any real circumstance in which humanity requires the sacrifice of someone innocent.” Take, for example, the practice of vaccination against smallpox. In the mid-60’s, a British physician calculated that thirty children a year died in that country as a result of the compulsory vaccination procedures related to school entrance. (In the United States the results of vaccination have been described as including ½ of 1 per cent who suffered serious side-effects.) The physician pointed out that smallpox in Britain was then so rare as to be considered nonexistent and argued that compulsory vaccination should end. His argument was apparently on the point of acceptance, when a smallpox outbreak occurred in the country, presumably introduced by travelers from Pakistan. Mass campaigns were instituted for adults as well. There are no apparent grounds to assume that the statistical results of vaccination have changed.

Does Mr. Abel remember that at the time Nicola Chiaromonte was giving his lectures, Shirley Jackson was publishing “The Lottery”?

A. L. Malakoff
Grand Lancy, Switzerland

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Lionel Abel writes:

I think A. L. Malakoff indicates, by his communication, that it is indeed difficult, as I said in my piece, to find “any real circumstance in which humanity requires the sacrifice of someone innocent.” Certainly the example he gives, the practice of vaccination against smallpox, does not prove the contrary. What if in the mid-60’s some thirty children died in England as a result of compulsory vaccination? Society did not require that any of the children who had been vaccinated should die, society merely required that they be vaccinated. The instance of Mr. Malakoff exemplifies not the sacrifice of the innocent, but the fate of the unlucky, lamentable, to be sure, but in no sense required. I might add here that some of the rabbis have said that all humanity dies in the death of one who is deliberately sacrificed.

I did not know that Shirley Jackson was publishing “The Lottery” at the very time Mr. Chiaromonte was giving his lecture, but I don’t know what this fact proves. Miss Jackson’s story is interesting, and is, I am told, much admired by the young. I happen not to be one of those who admire it. The claim has been made that all metaphors are calculated category mistakes. Certainly this is true of some metaphors, and it is true of Miss Jackson’s story. The kind of people described by Miss Jackson in “The Lottery” are precisely the kind of people who would under no circumstances hold such a lottery. But in any case neither they, nor the people of England, for that matter, can be said to constitute the whole of humanity.