[794]Ibid.s. d.
[795]Report on Health of Navy, 1857, p. 69.
[796]Ibid.p. 41.
[797]Ibid.p. 131.
[798]Ibid.p. 112.
[799]Report for 1856, p. 100.
[800]Chaumezière,Fievre catarrhals épidemique, observée à bord du vaisseau ‘Le Duguay-Trouin’ aux mois de Fevr. et Mars, 1863. Paris, 1865. Cited by Hirsch.
[801]Dr Guthrie, of Lyttelton.
[802]Macdonald,Brit. Med. Journ., 14 July, 1886.
[803]Cruise of H.M.S. ‘Galatea’ in 1867-8.
[804]R. A. Chudleigh, inBrit. Med. Journal, 4 Sept. 1886. The experiences are not altogether recent, for they were noted for “the Chatham Islands and parts of New Zealand” by Dieffenbach, in his German translation of Darwin’sNaturalist’s Voyage round the World. See English ed. 1876, p. 435note.
[805]Pall Mall Gazette, 11 Dec. 1889.
[806]Hirsch,Geograph. and Histor. Pathol.I.29. Engl. Transl.
[807]See the chapter on Sweating Sickness in the first volume of this History, p. 269, and the author’s other writings there cited.
[808]See the first volume, pp. 456-461. I shall add here a reference to smallpox among young people in Henry VIII.’s palace at Greenwich in 1528. Fox, newly arrived from a mission to France, writes to Gardiner, 11 May, 1528 (Harl. MS. 419, fol. 103): The king “commanded me to goe unto Maystress Annes chamber, who at that tyme, for that my Lady prynces and dyvers other the quenes maydenes were sicke of the small pocks, lay in the gallerey in the tilt yarde.”
[809]Selections from the Records of the Kirk Session, Presbytery and Synod of Aberdeen.Edited by John Stuart, for the Spalding Club, Aberd. 1846,I.427.
[810]Mead to Stutteville, inCourt and Times of Charles I.,I.359. Joan, Lady Coke to Sir J. Coke, 26 June, 1628.Cal. Coke MSS.
[811]Lord Dorchester to the Earl of Carlisle, 30 Aug. 1628, inC. and T. Charles I.: “Your dear lady hath suffered by the popular disease, but without danger, as I understand from her doctor, either of death or deformity.”
[812]Gilbert Thacker to Sir J. Coke at Portsmouth, 9 June, 1628; Thomas Alured to the same, 21 June; Richard Poole to the same, 23 June.Cal. Coke MSS.,I.Thomas Alured’s house “hath been visited in the same kind, once with the measles and twice with the smallpox, though I thank God we are now free; and I know not how many households have run the same hazard.”
[813]Harl. MS., No. 2177.
[814]The original heading in the Bills of Mortality was “flox and smallpox.” “Flox” meant flux, or confluent smallpox, which was so distinguished, as if in kind, from the ordinary discrete form, seldom fatal. Huxham, in 1725,Phil. Trans.XXXIII.379, still used these terms: “When the pustules broke out in less than twenty-four hours from the seizure, they were always of the flux kind, as is commonly observed.... Pocks which at first were distinct would flux together during suppuration.” Dover,Physician’s Legacy, 1732, p. 101, has “the flux smallpox, or variolae confluentes,” as one of the varieties: and again, pustules “fluxing in some parts, in others distinct.”
[815]Having been omitted by Graunt in his table.Op. cit.1662.
[816]Cal. State Papers, under the dates. The epidemic seems to have revived in 1642. An affidavit among the papers of the House of Lords, excusing the attendance of a witness, states that Thomas Tallcott has recently lost his wife and one child by smallpox, and that he himself, six of his children and three of his servants are now visited with the same disease. 13 July, 1642,Hist. MSS. Com.V.38. The Mercurius Rusticus, 1643, says that Bath was much infected both with the plague and the smallpox. Cited in Hutchins,Dorsetshire,III.10.
[817]Remaining Works.Transl. by Pordage. Lond. 1681. “Of Feavers,” p. 142. In one of his cases Willis was at first uncertain as to the diagnosis, because “the smallpox had never been in that place.”
[818]Histor. MSS. Commis.V.156-154. Sutherland Letters.
[819]Sutherland Letters, u. s. Andrew Newport to Sir R. Leveson at Trentham.
[820]Mary Barker to Abel Barker, 26 May and 2 June, 1661.Hist. MSS. Com.V.398: “There is many dy out in this town, and many abroad that we heare of”; the squire’s mother is living “within a yard of the smallpox, which is also in the house of my nearest neighbour”; her own children had whooping cough, but do not appear to have taken smallpox.
[821]Hactenus Inaudita, or Animadversions upon the new found way of curing the Smallpox.London, 1663. Dated 10 July, 1662. The burden of his own complaint is of a prominent personage in the smallpox who was killed, as he maintains, by enormous doses of diacodium, an opiate with oil of vitriol, much in request among the partisans of the cooling regimen.
[822]His first book was Περὶ ὑδροποσίας, orA Discourse of Waters, their Qualities and Effects, Diaeteticall, Pathologicall and Pharmacuiticall. By Tobias Whitaker, Doctor in Physicke of Norwich. Lond. 1834. In 1638, being then Doctor in Physick of London, he publishedThe Tree of Humane Life, or the Bloud of the Grape. Proving the Possibilitie of maintaining humane life from infancy to extreame old age without any sicknesse by the use of wine.An enlarged edition in Latin was published at Frankfurt in 1655, and reprinted at the Hague in 1660, and again in 1663. The passages cited in the text occur in hisOpinions on the Smallpox. London, 1661.
[823]His only reference to the deaths in the royal family, which were currently set down to professional mismanagement, comes in where he opposes the prescription of Riverius to bathe the hands and feet in cold water: “this hath proved fatall,” he says, “in such as have rare and tender skins, as is proved by the bathing of the illustrious Princess Royal. Therefore I shall rather ordain aperient fomentations in their bed, to assist their eruption and move sweat.”
[824]Pyretologia,II.94, 112.
[825]Walter Harris, M.D.,De morbis acutis infantum, 1689. There were several editions, some in English.
[826]Jurin,Letter to Cotesworth. Lond. 1723, p. 11.
[827]Speaking of malignant sore-throat, he says: “The younger the patients are, the greater is their danger, which is contrary to what happens in the measles and smallpox.”Commentaries on Diseases, p. 25.
[828]Andrew’sPractice of Inoculation impartially considered. Exeter, 1765, p. 60.
[829]Duvillard (Analyse et Tableaux de l’Influence de la Petite Vérole sur la Mortalité à chaque Age.Paris, 1806) gives the ages at which 6792 persons died of smallpox at Geneva from 1580 to 1760, according to the registers of burials:
The public health of Geneva altered very much for the better in the course of two centuries from 1561 to 1760. From 1561 to 1600, in every hundred children born, 30·9 died before nine months, on an annual average, and 50 before five years. From 1601 to 1700 the ratios were 27·7 under nine months, and 46 before five years. From 1701 to 1760 the deaths under nine months had fallen to 17·2 per cent., and under five years to 33·6 per cent. (Calculated from a table in theBibliothèque Britannique, Sciences et Arts,IV.327.) Thus, with an increasing probability of life, the age-incidence of fatal smallpox may have varied a good deal within the period from 1580 to 1760. It is given by Duvillard separately for the years 1700-1783 (inclusive of measles): during which limited period a smaller ratio died under nine months, and a larger ratio above the age of five years, than in the aggregate of the whole period from 1580 to 1760. Whatever may have been the rule at Geneva, it cannot be applied to English towns; for, while some 30 per cent. of the smallpox deaths were at ages above five in the Swiss city (1700-1783), only 12 per cent. were above five in English towns such as Chester and Warrington in 1773-4.
[830]Pyretologia, 2 vols. Lond. 1692-94, vol.II.
[831]Natural History of Oxfordshire.Oxford, 1677, p. 23.
[832]In hisDiary, under the year 1646, homeward journey from Rome.
[833]The physician was “a very learned old man,” Dr Le Chat, who had counted among his patients at Geneva such eminent personages as Gustavus Adolphus and the duke of Buckingham.
[834]Dr Dover has left us an account of Sydenham’s practice in the smallpox as he himself experienced it: “Whilst I lived with Dr Sydenham, I had myself the smallpox, and fell ill on the twelfth day. In the beginning I lost twenty ounces of blood. He gave me a vomit, but I find by experience purging much better. I went abroad, by his direction, till I was blind, and then took to my bed. I had no fire allowed in my room, my windows were constantly open, my bedclothes were ordered to be laid no higher than my waist. He made me take twelve bottles of small beer, acidulated with spirit of vitriol, every twenty-four hours. I had of this anomalous kind to a very great degree, yet never lost my senses one moment.”The Ancient Physician’s Legacy.London, 1732, p. 114.
[835]Scotia Illustrata.Lib.II., cap. 10.
[836]De Febribus &c., Lond. 1657: cap. ix. “De Variolis et Morbillis,” p. 141.
[837]“First of all,” he says, “let the patient be kept with all care and diligence from cold air, especially in winter, so that the pores of the skin may be opened and the pocks assisted to come out. Therefore let him be kept in a room well closed, into which cold air is in no manner to enter, and let him be sedulously covered up in bed.... I desire the more to admonish my friends in this matter, for that Robert Cage, esquire, my dear sister’s husband,” etc.
[838]Besides cases to show the ill effects of blooding, vomits, purges and cooling medicines such as spirit of vitriol, he gives examples as if to refute Sydenham’s favourite notion that salivation, diarrhoea and menstrual haemorrhage were relieving or salutary. Morton’s chief object was to bring out the eruption, and to get it to maturate kindly; an eruption which languished, or did not rise and fill, was for him the most untoward of events. Sydenham, on the other hand, argued that the danger was in proportion to the number of pustules and to the total quantity of matter contained in them; and he sought, accordingly, to restrain cases which threatened to be confluent by an evacuant treatment or repressive regimen.
[839]Walter Lynn, M.B.,A more easy and safe Method of Cure in the Smallpox founded upon Experiments, and a Review of Dr Sydenham’s Works, Lond. 1714;Some Reflections upon the Modern Practice of Physic in Relation to the Smallpox, Lond. 1715. F. Bellinger,A Treatise concerning the Smallpox, Lond. 1721.
[840]Letter from Woodward to theWeekly Journal, 20 June, 1719, in Nichols,Lit. Anecd.VI.641.
[841]Rev. Dr Mangey to Dr Waller, 4 March, 1720, London. Nichols’Lit. Anecd.I.135.
[842]Huxham,Phil. Trans.XXXII.(1725), 379.
[843]Gent. Magaz., Sept. 1752.
[844]John Barker, M.D.,Agreement betwixt Ancient and Modern Physicians, Lond. 1747. Also two French editions. It is on Van Helmont that Barker pours his scorn for “breaking down the two pillars of ancient medicine—bleeding and purging in acute diseases.” That upsetting person forbore to bleed even in pleurisy; the only thing that he took from the ancient medicine was a thin diet in fevers; “and yet this scheme, as wild and absurd as it seems, had its admirers for a time.”
[845]Lynn (u. s. 1714-15) agrees as to the matter of fact, namely, that the mortality from smallpox was greater among the richer classes, who were too much pampered and heated in their cure, than among the poorer, who had not the means to fee physicians and pay apothecaries’ bills.
[846]He was under the tutelage of John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, who does not give a name to the malady (Coxe’sLife of Marlborough). Dr James Johnstone, junr., of Worcester, in hisTreatise on the Malignant Angina, 1779, p. 78, claims the death of the Duke of Gloucester as from that cause, on the evidence of Bishop Kennet’s account.
[847]In theGentleman’s Magazine, under the dates.
[848]A Direct Method of ordering and curing People of that Loathsome Disease the Smallpox, being the twenty years’ practical experience of John Lamport alias Lampard, London, 1685. The writer was probably an empiric, “Practitioner in Chyrurgery and Physick,” dwelling at Havant, and attending the George at Chichester on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the Half Moon at Petersfield on Saturdays. He says: “One great cause of this disease being so mortal in the country is because the infection doth make many physicians backward to visit such patients, either for fear of taking the disease themselves or transferring the infection to others.” He has another fling at the regular faculty: “Do not run madding to Dr Dunce or his assistance to be let bloud.” Empirics, although they were commonly right about blood-letting, were under the suspicion of not speaking the truth about their cures.
[849]Macaulay,History of England,IV.532. The moving passage on the former horrors of smallpox,à proposof the death of Queen Mary in 1694, is familiar to most, but it may be cited once more in the context of a professional history: “That disease, over which science has since achieved a succession of glorious and beneficent victories, was then the most terrible of all the ministers of death. The havoc of the plague had been far more rapid: but plague had visited our shores only once or twice within living memory; and the smallpox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover.” It is not given to us all to write like this; but it is possible that the loss of picturesqueness may be balanced by a gain of accuracy and correctness.
[850]Kellwaye, u. s., 1593.
[851]Dr Richard Holland in 1730 (A Short View of the Smallpox, p. 75), says: “A lady of distinction told me that she and her three sisters had their faces saved in a bad smallpox by wearing light silk masks during the distemper.”
[852]As I do not intend to come back to the subject of pockmarked faces, I shall add here that I have found nothing in medical writings of the 18th century, nor in its fiction or memoirs, to show that pockpitting was more than an occasional blemish of the countenance. At that time most had smallpox in infancy or childhood, when the chances of permanent marking would be less. The disappearance of pockpitted faces was discovered long ago. The report of the National Vaccine Board for 1822 says: “We confidently appeal to all who frequent theatres and crowded assemblies to admit that they do not discover in the rising generation any longer that disfigurement of the human face which was obvious everywhere some years since.” The members of this board were probably seniors who remembered the 18th century; and it is quite true that the first quarter of the 19th century was singularly free from smallpox in England except in the epidemic of 1817-19. But the above passage became stereotyped in the reports: exactly the same phrase, appealing to what they all remembered “some years since,” was used in the report for 1825, a year which had more smallpox in London than any since the 18th century, and again in the report for 1837, the first year of an epidemic which caused forty thousand deaths in England and Wales. These stereotyped reminiscences are apt to be as lasting a blemish as the pockholes themselves.
[853]Collinson,Hist. of Somerset,III.226, citing Aubrey’sMiscellanies, 33.
[854]Blomefield,Hist. of Norfolk,III.417.
[855]Thoresby,Ducatus Leodiensis, ed. Whitaker. App. p. 151.
[856]Cal. Le Fleming MSS.p. 408 (Hist. MSS. Com.). There are also many references to smallpox from 1676 onwards in the letters of the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir, lately calendared for the Historical MSS. Commission.
[857]In theLondon Gazetteof 11-14 May, 1674, the Vice-Chancellor and two doctors of medicine of the University of Cambridge contradicted by advertisement a report that smallpox and other infections were prevalent in the university.
[858]Marquis of Worcester to the Marchioness, [London] 8 June, 1675 (Beaufort MSS.Hist. MSS. Commis.XII.App. 9, p. 85): “They will have it heere that the smallpox and purple feaver is at the Bath, and the Dutchesse of Portsmouth puts off her journey upon it. The king askt me about it as soon as I came to towne. Pray enquire, and lett me know the truth.” TheLondon Gazetteof 17-21 June and 28 June-1 July, 1775, had advertisements “that it hath been certified under the hands of several persons of quality” that Bath and the country adjacent was wholly free of the plague or any other contagious distempers whatsoever.
[859]Burnet,History of his own Time,IV.240.
[860]Walter Harris, M.D.,De morbis acutis infantum. Ed. of 1720, p. 161.
[861]John Cury, M.D.,An Essay on Ordinary Fever. Lond. 1743, p. 40.
[862]See p. 438.
[863]Macaulay hardly realized the anomalous character of the queen’s attack of smallpox. “The physicians,” he says, “contradicted each other and themselves in a way which sufficiently indicates the state of medical science in that day. The disease was measles; it was scarlet fever; it was spotted fever; it was erysipelas.... Radcliffe’s opinion proved to be right.” There had been some doubt on the first appearance of the eruption whether it would turn to measles or smallpox. Sydenham says that it was often difficult to make the diagnosis at that stage, and in the queen’s case the first signs were anomalous as well. Next day, however, the eruption all over the body became “smallpox in its proper and distinct form.” But it did not long remain so; the livid spots, into which the pustules subsided, again raised doubts in the minds of some of the physicians whether it was not measles after all; and there was undoubtedly erysipelas of the face. Harris took the middle course of diagnosing “smallpox and measles mingled,” a name by which the form that we now call haemorrhagic smallpox had been known from the early part of the seventeenth century. It was at this late and ominous stage of the illness that Radcliffe was called in; it is not correct to say, as the historian says, that he was the first to pronounce “the more alarming name of smallpox.” The diagnosis was then a matter of little moment, for the queen was dying. He declared that “her majesty was a dead woman, for it was impossible to do any good in her case when remedies had been given that were so contrary to the nature of her distemper; yet he would endeavour to do all that lay in his power to give her ease.” (Munk’sRoll of the College of Physicians,II.458.) For some unexplained reason Radcliffe was made to bear the blame of the queen’s death, an accusation which he deserved as little as he deserved the credit given him by the historian of having been the only physician to make the correct diagnosis.
Macaulay is equally unfortunate in his remark that smallpox “was then the most terrible of all the ministers of death,” in his comparison of it to plague, and in his rhetoric generally. The haemorrhagic form, of which the queen died, was rare. Dover adds it as a fourth variety, but admits that he had seen only five cases of it. Ferguson, of Aberdeen, as late as 1808, in a paper on measles (Med. and Phys. Journal,XXI.359), described a haemorrhagic case of smallpox which he once saw, without knowing that it was a recognized variety of smallpox at all. However terrible a minister of death smallpox may sometimes have been, it happened that there was comparatively little of it in London during the period covered by Macaulay’s history; and it certainly did not “fill the churchyards,” as he might have found out by referring to that not altogether recondite source, the bills of mortality. From 1694 to 1700 fevers caused three and a half times more deaths than smallpox. In the year 1696, when “the distress of the common people was severe,” the smallpox deaths in London were 196, or about one-hundredth part of the mortality from all causes.
[864]Blomefield,III.432. The following are two cases from the London epidemic of 1710: June, 15.—“Lord Ashburnham’s brother has the smallpox, and the first, concluding he had had it, went to him, and now himself very ill of them. Doctor Garth, who says none has them twice, examined the servants, and they tell him he was but six days ill then; so he concludes that was not the smallpox.”Cal. Belvoir MSS.,II.190.
[865]Lynn, u. s. He recalls a remark made by a writer in 1710 that the severity of that epidemic “was not due to a peculiar state of the air, but to a defect in some of our great physicians, who, being too fully employed, could not give due attendance to all or even to any of their patients through the multiplicity of them: for want of which, and the severity of their injunctions, which hindered others from applying anything in their absence, many persons were lost who might otherwise have been saved with due care.”
[866]John Woodward, M.D.,The State of Physick and Diseases, with an inquiry into the causes of the late increase of them, but more particularly of the Smallpox; with some considerations on the new practice of purging in that disease. London, 1718.
[867]See the account of the Dispensary of the College of Physicians in Warwick Lane, in Munk’sRoll of the Coll. of Phys.II.499, under the head of Sir Samuel Garth. The dispensary was started in 1687 and languished until 1724. The General Dispensary in Aldersgate Street was opened in 1770 with Dr Hulme as physician, and Dr Lettsom as additional physician in 1773.
[868]Letter of 27 March, year not given.Hist. MSS. Com.V.618. See also the letter of 4 March, 1720, from Mangey to Waller, cited above, p. 450.
[869]Dr Philip Rose, of Bedfordbury (“over against a baker, next door to the Old Black Horse, two doors from Chandos Street, St Martin’s parish”), having been called by Lady Wyche to see her butler, pronounced him to be in the smallpox; whereupon the lady informed the physician that “she knew an eminent nurse who had managed above twenty of my Lord Cheyney’s servants in the smallpox, and every one of them had recovered.” Her butler was accordingly carried to this nurse’s house in a by street near Swallow Street.An Essay on the Smallpox.By Philip Rose, M.D. Lond. 1724, p. 18.
[870]“An Account or History of the Procuring the Small Pox by Incision, or Inoculation; as it has for some time been practised at Constantinople.” Being the Extract of a Letter from Emanuel Timonius, Oxon. et Patav. M.D., S.R.S., dated at Constantinople, December, 1713. Communicated toPhil. Trans.XXIX.(Jan.-March, 1714) 72, by Dr Woodward, Gresham Professor of Physic. Timoni had been in England in 1703, and had been incorporated a doctor of medicine at Oxford on his Padua degree: hence, perhaps, his correspondence.
[871]An Essay on External Remedies, Lond. 1715, p. 153. Kennedy settled in practice in London as an ophthalmic surgeon, and appears to have enjoyed the patronage of Arbuthnot. His other work,Ophthalmographia, or Treatise of the Eye and its Diseases, with appendix on Diseases of the Ear, Lond. 1723, which is dedicated to Arbuthnot, shows a knowledge of optics and of the structure of the parts concerned in operations on the eye.
[872]Sloane,Phil. Trans.XLIX.(1756), p. 516, “An Account of Inoculation given to Mr Ranby to be published, anno 1736.”
[873]Jacobus Pylarinus,Nova et Tuta Variolas excitandi per Transplantationem Methodus, nuper inventa et in usum tracta, qua rite peracta immunia in posterum praeservantur ab hujusmodi contagio corpora. Venetiis, 1715. Privilege dated 10 Nov., 1715. Reprinted inPhil. Trans.XXIX.(Jan.-March, 1716), p. 393.
[874]A Dissertation concerning Inoculation of Smallpox.By W. D[ouglass], Boston, 1730.
[875]loc. cit.
[876]Published under the initials J. C., M.D.
[877]De Peste dissertatio habita Apr. 17, 1721, cui accessit descriptio inoculationis Variolarum, a Gualt. Harris, Lond. 1721.
[878]Phil. Trans.XLIX.104.
[879]Sloane, u. s., 1736.
[880]Jurin,Account of the Success of Inoculating the Smallpox. Annual reports from 1723 to 1726.
[881]Alexander Monro, primus,An Account of the Inoculation of the Smallpox in Scotland. Edin. 1765 (Reply to circular of queries issued by the dean and delegates of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris).
[882]Phil. Trans.1722: papers by Perrot Williams, M.D. (p. 262), and Richard Wright (p. 267).
[883]Voyages du Sr. A. de la Motraye.Tome II. La Haye, 1727, Chap.III.p. 98. He saw Timoni at Constantinople on his return from the Caucasus. Timoni used “a three-edged surgeon’s needle,” which is more intelligible than three needles tied together. La Motraye’s travellers’ tales have not enjoyed the best credit. But this of the inoculation in Circassia has been made by Voltaire the sole basis of his spirited account of inoculation as the national practice of that country (Lettres sur les Anglais, Lettre XI. “Sur l’insertion de la petite-vérole,” 1727, reprinted as the article “Inoculation” in hisDict. Philosophique, 1764). There has never been a grosser instance of a myth constructed in cold blood. The fable does not need refutation because it is mere assertion, in the manner of aphilosophe. But the British ambassador at Constantinople made inquiries concerning the alleged Georgian or “Circassian” practice in 1755, at the instance of Maty, the foreign secretary of the Royal Society (Phil. Trans.XLIX.104). A Capuchin friar, “a grave sober man” who had returned shortly before from a sixteen years’ residence in Georgia and “gives an account of the virtues and vices, good and evil, of that country with plainness and candour,” solemnly declared to Mr Porter that he never heard of inoculation “at Akalsike, Imiritte or Tiflis,” and was persuaded that it had never been known in the Caucasus. It was impossible that either the public or private practice of inoculation could have been concealed from him, as he went in and out among the people practising physic. He had often attended them in the smallpox, which, he said, was unusually severe there. On the other hand La Motraye says: “I found the Circassians becoming more beautiful as we penetrated into the mountains. As I saw no one marked with the smallpox, it occurred to me to ask if they had any secret to protect them from the ravages which this enemy of beauty makes among all nations. They told me, Yes; and gave me to understand that it was inoculating, or communicating it to those whom they wished to preserve by taking the matter from one who had it and mixing the same with the blood at incisions which they made. On this I resolved to see the operation, if it were possible, and made inquiry in every village that we passed through if there was anyone about to have it done. I soon found an opportunity in a village named Degliad, where I heard that they were going to inoculate a young girl of four or five years old just as we were passing.” This was published fifteen years after, Timoni’s account being given in an Appendix.
[884]Travels,IV.484. See also for Algiers,Lond. Med. Journ.XI.141. In those cases there was no inoculation by puncture or otherwise.
[885]Miscell. Curiosa s. Ephemer. Med.-Phys. Acad. Nat. Curios.Decuria I., An. 2, Obs.CLXV.1671. D. Thomae Bartholini, “Febris ex Imaginatione.” Scholion by D. Henr. Vollgnad, Vratislaviae practicus.
[886]Miscell. Curiosa,l. c.1677.
[887]See Drage,Pyretologia. Lond. 1665.
[888]Nuremberg, 1662, p. 529.
[889]La Condamine cites Bartholin’s essay on Transplantation as if it really contained the germ of inoculation, which it does not, the single reference in it to smallpox being in a passage where the contagion of that, as well as of plague, syphilis and dysentery, is said to be capable of being turned aside from one to another.
[890]Drage (Pyretologia) gives a case where an ague passed from one person to another in the fumes of blood drawn in phlebotomy. He says also (Sicknesses and Diseases from Witchcraft, 1665, p. 21) that a witch could be made to take back a disease by scratching her and drawing blood.
[891]De Transplantatione Morborum.Hafniae, 1673, p. 24.
[892]De Febribus, u. s. In the plague, a live cock applied to the botch was thought to draw the venom; the cock was then to be buried. Also crusts of hot ryeloaf hung in the room where one had died of plague absorbed the venom. Gabelhover,The Boock of Physicke, Dort, 1599, p. 298. Bread was used for the same purpose in fevers as late as 1765. Muret,Mém. par la Société Econom. de Berne, 1766.
[893]Dissertationes in Inoculationem Variolarum, a J. à Castro, G. Harris, et A. le Duc. Lugd. Bat. 1722.
[894]Gardiner’sTriall of Tabacco. London, 1610, fol. 38.
[895]Ibid.fol. 43.The City Remembrancer, 1769, a work claiming to be Gideon Harvey’s, says that in the Great Plague of London, 1665, some low persons contracted the French pox of purpose to keep off the infection of plague.
[896]Inquiry how to prevent the Smallpox, Chester, 1785:—“No care was taken to prevent the spreading; but on the contrary there seemed to be a general wish that all the children might have it.” Cited from Mr Edwards, surgeon, of Upton, near Chester. Again (Sketch of a Plan, &c., 1793, p. 491), “They neither feared it nor shunned it. Much more frequently, by voluntary and intentional intercourse, they endeavoured to catch the infection.”
[897]History of Physic, Lond. 1725-26,II.288. This was written at a time when the novelty of inoculation had passed off, and may be taken as Freind’s mature opinion. Douglass, of Boston, writing in 1730, implies that Freind’s objections had been overcome; which may mean no more than he says in general: “Yet from repeated tryals the Anti-Inoculators do now acknowledge that inoculation, generally speaking, is a more easy way of undergoing the smallpox.” Condamine, in his French essay of 1755, counts Freind among the original supporters of inoculation, and ridicules the opposition to it. Munk, in citing the title of Wagstaffe’sLetter to Dr Freind showing the danger and uncertainty of Inoculating the Smallpox(London, 1722), omits the words “to Dr Freind,” at the same time describing the pamphlet as “specious.” There seems no reason to doubt that Freind shared Wagstaffe’s views.
[898]Hecquet, of Paris, who is supposed to have been the original of Dr Sangrado in ‘Gil Bias,’ gave the following reasons against inoculation (Raisons de doutes contre l’Inoculation): “Its antiquity is not sufficiently ascertained: the operation rests upon false facts: it is unjust, void of art, destitute of rules: ... it doth not prevent the natural smallpox: ... it bears no likeness to physic, and savours strongly of magic.”
[899]James Jurin, M.D.,Account of the Success of Inoculation, 1724, p. 3.
[900]G. Baker, M.D.,Oratio Harveiana, 1761, p. 24.
[901]Sloane, Phil. Trans.XLIX.516.
[902]They are given in Maitland’sVindication, 1722, and in one of Jurin’s papers.
[903]In regard to the last of them, when Frewen in 1759 was controverting the fancy of Boerhaave and Cheyne that smallpox might be hindered from coming on in a person exposed to contagion by a timely use of the Aethiops mineral, he said there was a fallacy in the evidence, because many persons ordinarily escape smallpox “who had been supposed to be in the greatest danger of taking it.” Huxham also pointed out that a person might be susceptible at one time but not at another, or insusceptible altogether; and the elder Heberden wrote: “Many instances have occurred to me which show that one who had never had the smallpox may safely associate, and even be in the same bed with a variolous patient for the first two or three days of the eruption without any danger of receiving the infection.” William Heberden, sen., M.D.,Commentaries on Disease, 1802, p. 437.
[904]Dr James Jurin was educated at Cambridge, and elected a fellow of Trinity College. He became a schoolmaster at Newcastle, where he also gave scientific lectures. Coming to London, with a Leyden medical degree, he devoted himself to the Newtonian mathematics and was made one of the secretaries of the Royal Society, Newton being the president. He was one of the original physicians of the new hospital founded in the Borough by Guy, the rich bookseller. He made a fortune by medical practice, and was elected president of the College of Physicians a few weeks before he died. In medicine his name is associated with the inoculation statistics, the idea of which, as well as most of the substance, he got from Nettleton, and with “Jurin’s Lixivium Lithontripticum,” or solvent for the stone, the idea of which belonged originally to Mrs Johanna Stevens, and was sold by her to the State for five thousand pounds on the 16th of June, 1739, the prescriptions having been made public in theLondon Gazetteof 19th June. On the 15th of December, 1744, Jurin was called to see the Earl of Orford (Sir Robert Walpole), who was suffering from stone, either renal or vesical. He began administering his alkaline solvent, “four times stronger than the strongest capital soap-lye,” and during the six weeks of his attendance had given his patient thirty-six ounces of it. Horace Walpole made him angry by arguing on the medicine: “It is of so great violence that it is to split a stone when it arrives at it, and yet it is to do no damage to all the tender intestines through which it must first pass. I told him I thought it was like an admiral going on a secret expedition of war with instructions which are not to be opened till he arrives in such a latitude.” (Letters of Horace Walpole, Cunningham,I.339.) His services were at length dispensed with, and the earl, whose case was probably hopeless before, died in a few weeks. A war of pamphlets followed, Ranby, the serjeant-surgeon, maintaining that the patient had “died of the lixivium.” Mead, also, expressed himself strongly upon the attempt to use a modification of Mrs Stevens’s solvent.
[905]The fatalities are given somewhat fully in Jurin’s annual accounts of theSuccess of Inoculation, 1723-27.
[906]John Wreden, body-surgeon to the Prince of Wales, author ofAn Essay on the Inoculation of the Smallpox(Lond. 1779), may also be counted among those who gave a more real smallpox. See especially his cases at Hanover.
[907]H. Newman, “Way of Proceeding in the Smallpox Inoculation in New England.”Phil. Trans.XXXII.(1722), p. 33.
[908]Thomas Nettleton, Letter to Whitaker.Ibid.p. 39.
[909]Phil. Trans.l. c.p. 46. A remark follows which is not quite clear: “There is one observation which I have made, tho’ I would not yet lay any great stress upon it, that in families where any have been inoculated, those who have been afterwards seized never had an ill sort of smallpox, but always recovered very well.”
[910]Phil. Trans.1722, p. 209. Dated from Halifax, 16 Dec. 1722.
[911]Dr William Douglass to Dr Cadwallader Colden, 28 July, 1721, and 1 May, 1722, inMassachu. Hist. Soc. Collections, Series 4, vol.II.pp. 166-9. AlsoA Dissertation concerning Inoculation of Smallpox. By W. D[ouglass]. Boston, 1730; andA Practical Essay concerning the Smallpox. By William Douglass, M.D. Boston, 1730.
[912]Boylston,Account of the Smallpox inoculated in New England. London, 1726.
[913]This was admitted, in a manner, for the great Boston epidemic of 1752, by the Rev. T. Prince,Gent. Magaz.Sept. 1753, p. 414. The epidemic attacked 5545 (in a population of 15,684), and cut off 569. The numbers inoculated were 2124 (including 139 negroes), of which number 30 died and were included in the total of 569. Many of the inoculated, says Prince, were not careful to avoid catching the infection in the natural way; “for I have known some, as soon as inoculated, receive visits from their friends, who had been with the sick of the same disease and ’tis likely carried infection with them; it seems highly probable that the inoculated received the infection from them into their vitals.” It may be supposed that the inoculated who were more careful formed a part of the 1843 who “moved out of town.” More than a third of the population took natural smallpox in some four months (April to July) of 1752, more than a third had had it before, a severe epidemic having occurred in 1730 as well as in 1721.
[914]Clinch,Rise and Progress of the Smallpox, with an Appendix to prove that Inoculation is no Security from the Natural Smallpox. 2nd ed. 1725.
[915]C. Deering, M.D.,An Account of an Improved Method of treating the Smallpox. Nottingham, 1736, p. 27. Woodville appears to accept this case as authentic.
[916]Pierce Dod, M.D., F.R.S.,Several Cases in Physic. London, 1746.
[917]Kirkpatrick, and after him Woodville, treat the alleged experience of Jones as pure fiction.
[918]La Condamine, of Paris, an amateur enthusiast for inoculation, did all he could to upset the case. He got his friend Dr Maty, foreign secretary of the Royal Society, to make inquiry through the British ambassador to the Porte. It happened that Angelo Timoni, son of the inoculator, was at that time an interpreter at the British Embassy; he applied to his mother, who re-affirmed the facts as to the inoculation of her child in infancy, and her death by the natural smallpox twenty-four years after. The only defence left was that the inoculation had not been done by Dr Timoni’s own hand. La Condamine,Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire de l’Inoculation. 2me Mémoire. Paris, 1768.
[919]Rush to Lettsom, Philadelphia, 17 June, 1808, in Pettigrew’sMemoirs of Lettsom,III.201.
[920]Fuller, in hisExanthematalogia, makes a somewhat late defence of it in 1729. But Richard Holland, who published in 1730A Short View of the Smallpox, does not mention inoculation, and in the following passage he writes of smallpox as if the extravagant hopes of the preceding years had vanished: “This last season having afforded too many melancholy instances of the fatal effects of the distemper, though under the care and direction of the most eminent physicians, since the disease, notwithstanding the plainness of its symptoms, is become theopprobrium medicinae,”&c.(p. 3).
[921]Phil. Trans.Jan.-March, 1722: “The way of proceeding in the Small Pox inoculated in New England.” Communicated by Henry Newman, Esq. of the Middle Temple, p. 33, § 3: “Yet we find the variolous matter fetched from those that have the inoculated smallpox altogether as agreeable and effectual as any other.”
[922]An Essay on Inoculation: occasioned by the Smallpox being brought into S. Carolina in the year 1738.By J. Kilpatrick. London, 1743, p. 50. The essay had been “first printed in South Carolina,” the London edition of 1743 having an Appendix dealing historically with the Charleston epidemic of 1738.
[923]Thomas Frewen, M.D.,The Practice and Theory of Inoculation. London, 1749.
[924]J. Kirkpatrick, M.D.,Analysis of Inoculation, with a consideration of the most remarkable appearances in the Small Pocks. Lond. 1754.
[925]Kirkpatrick,Analysis.
[926]La Condamine,Mémoires pour servir, &c.(Deuxième Discours), 1768, p. 91. It matters little what Lobb may or may not have done. But it does not appear that Boerhaave ever tried to get rid of the eruption of smallpox by means of drugs. In the chapter of hisAphorisms, “De Variolis” (§ 1392) he says that he imagines a specific might be found, in the class of antidotes, to correct and destroy the variolous virus, indicating antimony and mercury as likely agents for the purpose owing to certain physical properties of the medicinal preparations of them. Ruston (An Essay on Inoculation, 3rd ed. 1768) says that Boerhaave, who died in 1738, “never practised it himself; nor seems to have understood the manner in which these medicines operate to produce their salutary effects.” However they were known as the Boerhaavian antidotes to smallpox, and were used in Rhode Island, it is said with great success and as a secret. Ruston used them in England, and discovered by an analysis that Sutton’s secret powders were the same. They seem also to have been used by Cheyne to prevent the development of smallpox in persons who had been exposed to contagion and had presumably taken the contagion. Frewen, in 1759, published a pamphlet to show the improbability of antimony and mercury having any such action, and the fallacy of the claims made for their success.
[927]The Duchess gave the following account of her own case (Gent. Magaz.Nov. 1765, p. 495, sent by Gatti to a friend in London): “On the 12th of March, 1763, I was inoculated for the smallpox, and about four or five days afterwards a redness appeared round the orifice, which Mons. Gatti called an inflammation, and assured me was a sign that the smallpox had taken effect: these were the very terms he used. The redness or inflammation increased every day, and about the seventh or eighth day, the wound began to suppurate. There appeared also about the wound six small risings, or pimples, which successively suppurated and disappeared the next day. Mons. Gatti, upon their appearance, again assured me that the smallpox had taken effect. In the afternoon of the eleventh or twelfth day of my inoculation I felt a general uneasiness and emotion, a pain in my head and my back, and about my heart, in consequence of which I went to bed sooner than ordinary. I slept well, however, and rose without any disorder in the morning. These symptoms Mons. Gatti assured me were the forerunners of the eruption. The next day a pretty large rising or pimple appeared in my forehead, turned white, and then died away, leaving a mark which continued many days.
“The wound in my arm continued to suppurate seven or eight days, and Mons. Gatti now assured me that I had nothing to fear from the smallpox; and upon this assurance I relied without the least doubt, and continued in perfect confidence of my security till the natural smallpox appeared. I continued very well during the whole time of my inoculation, except one day, as mentioned above, and I went out every day.
“Monmorency, D. de Boufflers.”
[928]Gibbon’sAutobiography. It was to Dr Maty that Gibbon, in 1759, submitted his French essay on the Study of Literature, having had a fair copy of it transcribed by one of the French prisoners at Petersfield. Of Maty he says: “His reputation was justly founded on the eighteen volumes of theJournal Britannique, which he had supported almost alone, with perseverance and success. This humble though useful labour, which had once been dignified by the genius of Bayle and the learning of Le Clerc, was not disgraced by the taste, the knowledge and the judgment of Maty.”
[929]Angelo Gatti, M.D.,New Observations on Inoculation. Translated from the French by M. Maty. Lond. 1768. The French edition was published at Brussels in 1767.
[930]John Andrew, M.D.,The Practice of Inoculation impartially considered. Dated 17 June, 1765, Exeter, p. 61.
[931]La Pratique de l’Inoculation.Paris, An.VII.(1798), p 51.
[932]Andrew, u. s. p. 53.
[933]“I am sorry to have found that this operation has not always secured the patient from having the smallpox afterwards, if the eruptions have been imperfect without maturation. I attended one in a very full smallpox, which ran through all its stages in the usual manner; yet this patient had been inoculated ten years before, and, on the 5th day after inoculation, began to be feverish, with a headache, followed by a slight eruption, which eruption soon went off without coming to suppuration; the place of inoculation had inflamed and remained open ten days, leaving a deep scar, which I saw.” William Heberden, Senr., M.D.,Commentaries on Disease(p. 436). This was published in 1802, after the author’s death; but as he was in the height of his practice from 1760 onwards, the case, which is undated, may be taken as illustrating Heberden’s position in the Suttonian controversy.
[934]Benj. Chandler, M.D.,An Essay on the Present Method of Inoculation. Lond. 1767.
[935]Method of Inoculating the Smallpox.Lond. 1766. Baker thought he was “an enemy of improvement and no philosopher,” who stood upon the antecedent improbability of securing the patient by a minimal inoculation such as Sutton used.
[936]Giles Watts, M.D.,Vindication of the Method of Inoculating. London, 1767.
[937]William Bromfeild,Thoughts on the Method of treating Persons Inoculated for the Smallpox. Lond. 1767. He was a Court surgeon and a man of some eminence. Morgagni dedicated one of the books of hisDe Sedibus et Causis Morborumto him as representing the Royal Society.
[938]W. Langton, M.D.,Address to the Public on the present Method of Inoculation. London and Salisbury, 1767. Dr Thomas Glass, of Exeter, replied in 1767 to Bromfeild and Langton, inA Letter to Dr Baker on the Means of procuring a Distinct and Favourable Kind of Smallpox. Lond. 1767, and in aSecond Letter to Dr Baker, 1767.
[939]W. Watson, M.D.,An Account of a Series of Experiments instituted with a view of ascertaining the most successful Method of Inoculating the Smallpox. London, 1768.
[940]John Mudge, Surgeon at Plymouth,A Dissertation on the Inoculated Smallpox. London, 1777. A copy of this essay was found in the library of Dr Samuel Johnson. The Doctor was a friend of the author’s father, the Rev. Archdeacon Mudge, whose published sermons he has characterized in one of his most amusing balanced sentences of praise qualified with blame. Johnson stood godfather to one of John Mudge’s children. Notes on “Dr Johnson’s Library,” by A. W. Hutton.
[941]Edward Jenner, M.D.,Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, or Cowpox. Lond. 1798, p. 56. See also hisFurther Observations on the Cowpox. 1799.
[942]Langton cites the following advertisement put out on 18 June, 1767, in his own district by Messrs Slatter and Duke, surgeons, of Ringwood, Hants: “The first objection I shall take notice of is that the disorder being in general so light, it is imagined there is danger of a second infection [i.e. a natural attack]. Whenever this has been supposed to have happened, I am certain the operation has failed, which not being discovered by the operator, proves to me that he was not experienced in the practice; for it may always be determined in four, five, or six days, sometimes sooner; and if there is the least reason to doubt, it is very easy to inoculate a second, third or fourth time, which may be done without the least inconvenience. I have inoculated several patients three or four times for their own satisfaction, having very little or perhaps no eruption.”
[943]Mem. Med. Soc. Lond.IV.114.
[944]John Covey, of Basingstoke, 8 May, 1786, inLondon Medical Journal,VII.p. 180.
[945]Address to the Inhabitants of Liverpool on the subject of a General Inoculation for the Smallpox.1 September, 1781.
[946]The account of the London charity is taken from theHistory of Inoculation in Great Britain(1796) by Woodville, who became physician to it in 1791.
[947]Med. Obs. and Inquiries,III.(1767), p. 287. The passage quoted (p. 306,note) is almost exactly in the words of Hufeland long after, with reference to the probable extinction of smallpox by cowpox. See hisJournal,X.pt. 2, p. 189.
[948]J. C. Lettsom,A Letter to Sir Robert Barker, F.R.S. and G. Stacpoole, Esq. upon General Inoculation. London, 1778.
[949]A Plan of the General Inoculating Dispensary, &c.Lond. (no date).
[950]T. Dimsdale,Thoughts on General and Partial Inoculation. Lond. 1776.An Introduction to the Plan of the Inoculation Dispensary.1778.Remarks on Dr Lettsom’s letter to Barker and Stacpoole.1779.
[951]Lettsom,Obs. on Baron Dimsdale’s Remarks, &c.1779; and other pamphlets on both sides.
[952]Clark,Report of the Newcastle Dispensary. 1789.
[953]Currie to Haygarth, 28 Nov. 1791, inSketch of a Plan, etc., pp. 451, 207.
[954]J. C. Jenner, “An Account of a General Inoculation at Painswick.”Lond. Med. Journ.VII.163-8.
[955]Gent. Magaz.April, 1788, reported by the Hon. and Rev. Mr Stuart, who was a grandson of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
[956]Monro,Account of Inoculation in Scotland, 1765; in hisWorks. Edin. 1781, p. 693.
[957]Statistical Account of Scotland.1791-99,III.376.
[958]Ibid.IV.130. It was about the year 1782 that the College of Physicians of Edinburgh appointed a committee to inquire into the mode of conducting the gratis inoculations of the poor, which had been tried at Chester, Leeds, Liverpool, &c. in 1781-82. Haygarth, u. s. 1784, p. 207.
[959]Ibid.III.582.
[960]Ibid.XX.502-7.