[961]Ibid.XX.348. Account by Rev. Abercromby Gordon, who gives in a note (p. 349) the following instance of professional zeal: “A surgeon in the north, presuming that self-interest has a stronger hold on man than superstition, has lately opened a policy of insurance for the smallpox! If a subscriber gives him two guineas for inoculating his child, the surgeon in the event of the child’s death pays ten guineas to the parent; for every guinea subscribed, four guineas, for half a guinea, two guineas, and for a crown one guinea.”
[962]James Lucas,Lond. Med. Journ.X.269.
[963]Currie to Haygarth, 28 Nov. 1791, in the latter’sSketch of a Plan, &c.p. 453.
[964]A Conscious View of Circumstances and Proceedings respecting Vaccine Inoculation.Bath, 1800. The author was probably James Nooth, senior surgeon to the Bath Hospital, who removed to London and practised in Queen Anne Street, holding the appointment of surgeon to the Duke of Kent. He wrote on cancer of the breast.
[965]Tracts on Inoculation.London, 1781.
[966]R. Pulteney, M.D., in a letter of 21 June, 1766, to Dr G. Baker, given in hisInquiry into the Merits of a Method of Inoculating the Smallpox. Lond. 1766.
[967]Pulteney, “Births, Deaths and Marriages of Blandford Forum, 1733-1772.”Phil. Trans.LXVIII.615.
[968]Pulteney to Baker, App. toInquiry into the method of Inoculating. 1766; Hutchins,Dorsetshire, I. 217.
[969]On 23 July, 1785, the apothecary makes a note in his book: “Some inspectors are not sufficiently careful to send information to the Hospital when children have had the smallpox.” MS. Records.
[970]Experiments, &c.1768.
[971]Sir W. Watson, M.D., F.R.S., “On the Putrid Measles of London, 1763 and 1768.”Med. Obs. and Inquiries,IV.153.
[972]Charles Kite, surgeon, Gravesend, “An Account of some anomalous Appearances consequent to Inoculation of Smallpox.”Memoirs Med. Soc. Lond.IV.(1794), p. 114.
[973]Fosbroke,Lond. Med. Repository. June, 1819, p. 466.
[974]Jenner to James Moore, in Baron’sLife of Jenner,II.401: “Is not that a precious anecdote for your new work?” See alsoCourt and Private Life of Queen Charlotte(Journals of Mrs Papendiek). Lond. 1887,I.41, 70, 270.
[975]In Baron, u. s.
[976]A Conscious View, &c.u. s.
[977]Earle, in Jenner’sFurther Observations. 1799.
[978]T. Adams to Richard Pew, M.D., of Sherborne.Lond. Med. and Phys. Journ.April, 1829.
[979]John Forbes, M.D., “Some Account of the Smallpox lately prevalent in Chichester and its vicinity.”Lond. Med. Reposit.Sept. 1822, p. 218.
[980]Discourse on Inoculation.Eng. Transl. 1755.
[981]A Series of Experiments, &c.1768.
[982]John Haygarth, M.B.,Inquiry how to prevent the Smallpox. Chester, 1784, p. 154.
[983]History of Inoculation in Britain.Vol. I. London, 1796, p. 33.
[984]History of Edinburgh.Edin. 1779, p. 260.
[985]W. Hillary,Rational and mechanical Essay on the Smallpox. Lond. 1735.
[986]J. Barker,The Nature of Inoculation explained and its Merits stated. London, 1769, p. 33. He taught that a depraved habit, by ill diet, &c., “serves for a nidus wherein the variolous matter rests.” If the variolous matter to be expelled is small, “by reason of natural health, temperance, or the power of preparation,” the disease is of the distinct kind; when large, of the confluent. “And wise indeed must he be who can find out any laws respecting the reception and expulsion of diseases superior on the whole to those which are original.” p. 9.
[987]“I have taken an account in this town [Halifax], and some parts of the country, and have procured the same from several other towns hereabouts, where the smallpox has been epidemical this last year, with as much exactness as was possible.”Phil. Trans.XXXII.211.
[988]“A small neighbouring market town.”
[989]“More than usually mortal.”
[990]“A small market town in Lancashire, including two neighbouring villages.”
[991]Account taken “by a person of credit” and sent to Dr Whitaker. Jurin says, more generally: “Taken in several places by a careful enquiry from house to house.”Account, &c.1724, p. 7.
[992]“At Uxbridge and in the neighbourhood, the smallpox having been exceedingly fatal all thereabouts.”
[993]Mr Maitland’s Account of Inoculating the Smallpox vindicated.2nd ed. Lond. 1722.
[994]Phil. Trans.XXXIII.379. “A short account of the Anomalous Epidemic Smallpox beginning at Plymouth in August, 1724, and continuing to the month of June, 1725, By the learned and ingenious Dr Huxham, physician at Plymouth.”
[995]The totals are given in Jurin’sAccountfor 1725. The ages are in the original communication of the Rev. Mr Wasse, among the MS. papers which Jurin had deposited with the Royal Society.
[996]The most singular thing in the Aynho experience is that there should have been no cases in infants under two years. It was observed, however, some two generations after this, that smallpox attacked children at the earliest ages in the great towns (Haygarth,Sketch of a Plan, &c., 1793, p. 31), and even in the worst conditions of infancy it has attacked relatively few in the first three months of life. Again, it is nearly as remarkable that there should have been only three cases at Aynho in the third year of life and only four in the fourth. However, the fewness of cases in the five first years of life must be taken as exceptional, even for a village epidemic. If Nettleton, who made the first of these censuses of smallpox epidemics and suggested to Jurin that they should be carried out elsewhere, had given the ages, he would certainly have included some in infancy, for he mentions, in the course of his inoculation experiences, particular cases at nine months, eighteen months, etc.
[997]Frewen,Phil. Trans.XXXVII.108.
[998]See above, pp. 485-6 and 490-1.
[999]Deering,Nottingham vetus et nova. 1751, pp. 78, 82. He says, in an essay on smallpox (Improved Method of treating Smallpox.Nottingham, 1737) that he treated fifty-one cases in the epidemic of 1736, of which only three proved fatal.
[1000]Gent. Magaz.1741, p. 704.
[1001]Alex. Monro, primus, in his Report to the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris on Inoculation in Scotland, 1765. Reprinted in hisWorks. Edin. 1781, p. 485. He does not give ages, but an inspection of the burial registers is said to show that they were nearly all under five.
[1002]Gent. Magaz.1742, p. 704. Blomefield gives 1710 and 1731 as great smallpox years in Norwich.
[1003]Ibid.1747, p. 623. The population of Northampton in 1746 was 5136. Price,Revers. Payments. 4th ed.I.353.
[1004]Part of the account extracted from the parish registers by the Rev. Samuel Partridge, F.S.A., vicar of Boston, and sent to Dr George Pearson, who published it in theReport of the Vaccine Pock Institution for 1800-1802. London, 1803, p. 100.
[1005]J. C. M’Vail, M.D. inProc. Philos. Soc. Glasgow,XIII.1882, p. 381, from a MS. register kept by the session clerk of Kilmarnock, now in the General Register House, Edinburgh. The baptisms and burials have not been extended from the MS. for more years than the table shows.
[1006]Statist. Acct. of Scotland.
[1007]Sketch of a Plan, &c.1793, pp. 33-34.
[1008]The following is the Ackworth bill given by Price,Phil. Trans.LXV.443.
[1009]The following are some examples of rural fecundity and health: Middleton, near Manchester, 1763-72, births 1560, deaths 993, average of 4·75 children to a marriage. Tattenhall, near Chester, 1764-73, births 280, deaths 130; Waverton, same county and years, births 193, deaths 84. Stoke Damerel (now the dockyard near Plymouth), in 1733 (in part an influenza-year), births 122, deaths 62, population 3361. Landward townships of Manchester in 1772, births 401, deaths 246. Darwen, in 1774-80, births 508, deaths 233, population 1850. From Papers inPhil. Trans.by Percival and others.
[1010]Statist. Acct. of Scot.I.155.
[1011]Hoare’sWiltshire,VI.521. There had been a general inoculation to the number of 422, from 13 August, 1751, to February, 1752, just before the epidemic. Brown to Watson, inPhil. Trans.XLVII.570.
[1012]Huxham,Ulcerous Sore-throat, 1757.
[1013]Gent. Magaz.1751, Supplement, p. 577. See also June, 1751, p. 244, and letter of “Devoniensis,”ibid.1752, p. 159. The subject had been raised by Corbyn Morris in hisObservations on the past growth and present state of London, and was discussed, from an actuary’s point of view, by Dodson inPhil. Trans.XLVII.(Jan. 1752), p. 333.
[1014]The weekly average deaths for eight weeks of September and October is 30·5 from two to five years and 11·1 from five to ten, which are about half the average at each age period during the maximum prevalence of smallpox.
[1015]W. Black, M.D. (Observations Medical and Political on the Smallpox, etc.London, 1781, p. 100) says: “I am induced by various considerations to believe that whatever share of smallpox mortality takes place in London amongst persons turned of twenty years of age, is almost solely confined to the new annual settlers or recruits, who are necessary to repair the waste of London, and the majority of whom arrive in the capital from twenty to forty years of age.”
[1016]Maddox, bishop of Worcester, preaching a sermon in 1752 for the Smallpox and Inoculation Charity, enforced his pleading by relating the recent case of “a poor man sick of this distemper, of which his wife lay dead in the same room, with four children around her catching the dreadful infection, but destitute of all relief, till they foundsomein that too narrow building which now importunately begs your compassionate bounty to enlarge its dimensions.”
[1017]TheGent. Magaz.Sept. 1752, p. 402, contains a long letter to refute the very prevailing notion among many people that there is very little occasion for doctors and apothecaries in smallpox, but that a good nurse is all the assistance that is usually wanted. “Whence this notion took its rise I cannot conceive, unless it was from the disease being visible, so that every one who has been at all used to it knows it when they see it.”
[1018]This was an argument used in the first writings on Inoculation, so as to prove the real hazard of dying by the natural smallpox. Thus, Maitland in hisVindicationof 1722, which Arbuthnot is said to have had a hand in, deducts a quarter of the annual London deaths before he begins to estimate the ratio of smallpox among them, for the reason that eight out of nine infants who die in their first year are “non-entities”quâsmallpox, other causes of death having had the priority (p. 19). Jurin used the same argument for the same purpose in hisLetter to Caleb Cotesworth, M.D., 1723, p. 11: “It is notorious that great numbers, especially of young children, die of other diseases without ever having the smallpox”; and again, “very young children, or at most not above one or two years of age,” including the stillborn, abortives and overlaid, chrisoms and infants, and those dead of convulsions. “It is true, indeed, that in all probability some small part of these must have gone through the smallpox, and therefore ought not to be deducted out of the account”; but he does deduct 386 in every 1000 London deaths before he estimates the ratio of smallpox deaths, which so comes out 2 in 17.
[1019]Percival,Med. Obs. and Inquiries,V.1776, p. 287; population inPhil. Trans.LXIV.54.
[1020]Haygarth,Inquiry how to prevent the Smallpox, 1784.
[1021]Haygarth,Sketch of a plan to exterminate the Natural Smallpox. Lond. 1793, p. 139.
[1022]John Heysham, M.D. “An Abridgement of Observations on the Bills of Mortality in Carlisle, 1779-1787,” in Hutchinson’sHistory of Cumberland. 2 vols. Carlisle, 1794, and separate reprint, Carlisle, 1797; also reprinted in Appendix to Joshua Milne’sTreatise on the Valuation of Annuities. London, 1815, pp. 733-752.
[1023]See Loveday’sDiary of a Tour, 1732, p. 120.
[1024]Gent. Magaz.1755, p. 595. In a parish near Glasgow, Eaglesham, eighty children are said to have died of smallpox in 1713. Chambers,Domest. Annals,III.387.
[1025]Robert Watt, M.D.,Treatise on the History, Nature and Treatment of Chincough ... to which is subjoined an Inquiry into the relative mortality of the Principal Diseases of Children, and the Numbers who have died under ten years of age in Glasgow during the last thirty years. Glasgow, 1813.
[1026]This high mortality was probably caused by the epidemic agues of 1780, which specially affected Lincolnshire.
[1027]In 1802 the smallpox epidemic recurred, with 33 deaths. In 1801 there was one death.
[1028]Barker and Cheyne, u. s.
[1029]James Sims, M.D.,Observations on Epidemic Disorders. London, 1773.
[1030]Two papers on Fever and Infection, 1763, p. 112.
[1031]Medicina Nautica.
[1032]Haygarth,Sketch of a Plan, &c., 1793, p. 32.
[1033]Gaol at Bury St Edmunds: In the winter of 1773, five died of the smallpox. No apothecary then. Leicester County Gaol: In 1774 three debtors and one felon died of the smallpox. “Of that disease, I was informed, few ever recover in this gaol.” Oxford Castle: In 1773 eleven died of the smallpox. In 1774 that distemper still in the gaol. In 1775 one debtor died of it in May, three debtors and a petty offender in June; three recovered. No infirmary, no straw to lie on.State of the Prisons.
[1034]I append Haygarth’s full table of the Chester smallpox epidemic, 1774:
[1035]Isaac Massey,Remarks on Dr Jurin’s last yearly Account of the Success of Inoculation. Lond. 1727, p. 6. Huxham held that children might be “prepared” for the natural smallpox, as it was then the custom to prepare them for the inoculated disease, so that few of them need have it severely: “I am persuaded, if persons regularly prepared were to receive the variolous contagion in a natural way, far the greater part would have them in a mild manner.”On Fevers.2nd ed. 1750, p. 133.
[1036]C. Deering, M.D.,Account of an improved Method of treating the Smallpocks. Nottingham, 1737.
[1037]John Lamport alias Lampard, u. s.
[1038]Obs. on Ship Fever, &c.New ed. Lond. 1789, p. 448.
[1039]Thomas Phillips, “Journal of a Voyage,” &c. in Churchill’sCollection of Voyages,VI.173.
[1040]Berkeley’s claim for tar-water in smallpox was a double one, as a preventive or modifier, and as a cure. Of the former he says: “Another reason which recommends tar-water, particularly to infants and children, is the great security it brings against the smallpox to those that drink it, who are observed, either never to take that distemper, or to have it in the gentlest manner.”Further Thoughts on Tar-water, 1752. In hisSecond Letter to Thomas Prior, Esq.1746 (inWorks. 4 vols. Oxford, 1871,III.476) he gives the famous case of curing by it:—“the wonderful fact attested by a solemn affidavit of Captain Drape at Liverpool, whereby it appears that, of 170 negroes seized at once by the smallpox on the coast of Guinea one only died, who refused to drink tar-water; and the remaining 169 all recovered, by drinking it, without any other medicine, notwithstanding the heat of the climate and the incommodities of the vessel. A fact so well vouched must, with all unbiassed men, outweigh, &c.”
[1041]Prince,Gent. Magaz.Sept. 1753, p. 414.
[1042]Walter Lynn, u. s. 1715,ad init.
[1043]Reports, &c.1819.
[1044]Whytt,Med. Obs. and Inquiries,II.(1762), p. 187.
[1045]Cleghorn,Diseases of Minorca. London (under the years).
[1046]Hillary,Changes of the Air, and Epidemical Diseases of Barbados.
[1047]Muret,Mém. par la Société Économique de Berne, 1766. “Population dans le pays de Vaud”: p. 102, “J’ai vu à Veney, la petite vérole être générale dans toute la ville, des centaines d’enfans attaqués de cette maladie, et qu’à peine il en mouroit sept ou huit.”
[1048]Gent. Magaz.1753, p. 114. Letter from Sam. Pegge, rector, 17 Feb. 1753.
[1049]Haygarth,Phil. Trans.LXV.87.
[1050]Morton,Pyreologia,II.338: “Et quidem omnes haereditario quasi jure benignis istis variolis tentabantur, quae (Deo favente) eventum secundum habuerunt; nunquam enim quemquam meâ vel conjugis meae stirpe ortum hoc morbo periisse memini.” The case of hereditary tendency to fatal smallpox is No. 53, p. 470: “Domina Theodosia Tytherleigh, virgo elegans ac formosa, stirpe celeberrima (sed cui hic morbus jure quasi haereditario funestus esse solebat)” &c. She died in a late stage of the disease.
[1051]Cal. Coke MSS.(Hist. MSS. Commis.)II.429.
[1052]Rutty,Chronological History of the Weather and Seasons, and prevailing Diseases in Dublin during forty years. London, 1770, under the dates.
[1053]Short (Comparative History of the Increase and Decrease of Mankind in England, &c.Lond. 1767) has found somewhere a statement that in 1717 there was “a most fatal continual fever in the West of Scotland, in January and February, and not less fatal confluent smallpox in March and April.”
[1054]Lond. Med. Journ.VII.163.
[1055]W. Watson, inMedical Observations and Inquiries by a Society of Physicians in London,IV.(1771), p. 153. Whether the epidemic that preceded the smallpox was measles or scarlatina is a question that was raised by Willan, and is referred to in the chapter on “Scarlatina and Diphtheria.”
[1056]Annals of the Lords of Warrington and Bewsey from 1587.By W. Beamont. Manchester, 1873, p. xix.
[1057]John Aikin, M.D.,Descriptions of the Country from thirty to forty Miles around Manchester. London, 1795, p. 302.
[1058]Taken out of the register by Aikin at the request of Dr Richard Price, and published by the latter in the 4th ed. of hisObs. on Reversionary Payments. Lond. 1783,II.5, 100.
[1059]Arthur Young,Six Months Tour through the North of England. 4 vols. London, 1770-71,III.163.
[1060]Percival,Phil. Trans.LXV.328.
[1061]Beamont, u. s. p. 116-17.
[1062]Ferriar,Med. Obs. and Reflections.
[1063]Price,Reversionary Payments. 4th ed.II.
[1064]Aikin,Phil. Trans.LXIV.(1774), p. 438; Haygarth,ibid.LXVIII.131.
[1065]“Almost ended at the winter solstice, only 19 remaining ill in January, 1775.”
[1066]Percival, for Warrington,Med. Obs. and Inquiries,V.(1776), p. 272 (information from Arkin); Haygarth, for Chester,Phil. Trans.LXVIII.150. Haygarth (Sketch of a Plan, &c.p. 141) gives the following table of the smallpox deaths and the deaths from all causes at several ages of children up to ten years at Chester from 1772 to 1777 inclusive:
[1067]Sketch of a plan, &c.p. 31.
[1068]Heysham,Obs. on Bills of Mortality in Carlisle, 1779-1787. Carlisle, 1797. Reprinted from App. Vol.II.of Hutchinson’sCumberland.
[1069]Lucas, Lond. Med. Journ.X.260: “The number of those who were still uninfected was found on a survey to be 700.”
[1070]Dr Henry, of Manchester, to Haygarth, 20 March, 1789, in the latter’sSketch of a Plan, &c.p. 369: “In large and populous places such as Manchester, the smallpox almost always exists in some parts of the town. I have known it strongly epidemic in one part without any appearance of it in others.... At present it is prevalent and fatal in the outskirts, but very rarely occurs in the interior parts of the town.”
[1071]“Most of them [Jenner’s colleagues] had met with cases in which those who were supposed to have had cowpox had subsequently been affected with smallpox.” Baron,Life of Jenner,I.48.
[1072]Haygarth to Worthington, 15 April, 1794, in Baron’sLife of Jenner,I.134.
[1073]See the cases and remarks by John Hunter, Sir W. Watson, Lettsom and others.
[1074]Joseph Adams,Observations on Morbid Poisons, Phagedaena and Cancer. 1st ed. Lond. 1795. Preface, 31 March.
[1075]I have collected all the scattered references in Jenner’s writings to cowpox in the cow or in infected milkers in myNatural History of Cowpox and Vaccinal Syphilis. London, 1887, pp. 53-57.
[1076]G. Pearson,Inquiry concerning the History of Cowpox. Lond. 1798.
[1077]Beddoes’Contributions to Physical and Medical Knowledge. Bristol, 1799, p. 387.
[1078]See myNatural History of Cowpox, &c.u. s. 1887. The most systematic descriptions, both for cows and milkers, are by Ceely, inTrans. Provinc. Med. and Surg. Assocn.VIII.(1840) andX.(1842). Professor E. M. Crookshank has reproduced these valuable memoirs, with the coloured plates, in hisHistory and Pathology of Vaccination. 2 vols. London, 1889. The plates are in vol.I., the memoirs in vol.II.Crookshank’s volumes, which are a convenient repertory of the more important earlier writings on cowpox, contain also the author’s original observations (with plates), of cowpox in Wiltshire in 1887-88.
[1079]In my essay of 1887 (u. s.) I maintained, as an original opinion, that the true affinity of cowpox was to the great pox of man, and that the occasional cases of so-called vaccinal syphilis were not due to the contamination of cowpox with venereal virus but to inherent (although mostly latent) properties of the cowpox virus itself. This opinion was at first received with incredulity, but is now looked upon with more favour. See Hutchinson,Archives of Surgery, Oct. 1889, and Jan. 1891, p. 215. The concessions hitherto made are only for cases that have arisen since my book was published, such as the case at the Leeds Infirmary in 1889. I believe that my explanation of vaccinal “syphilis” will at length be accepted for all cases, past or future.
[1080]An Inquiry, &c.1798. “Remarks on the term Variolae Vaccinae.”
[1081]That Dr Jenner foresaw this line of proof, and dismissed it as irrelevant, is made clear by G. C. Jenner,Monthly Magazine, 1799, p. 671, in reply to Dr Turton, of Swansea: “It is possible that variolous virus inserted into the nipples of a cow, might produce inflammation and suppuration, and that matter from such a source might produce some local affection on the human subject by inoculation. But all this tends only to show, what was well known before, that virus taken from one ulcer is capable of producing another by its being inserted into any other part of the body.”
[1082]Jenner,Further Observations on the Variolae Vaccinae, 1799.
[1083]Thornton, in Beddoes’Contributions to Physical and Medical Knowledge. Bristol, 1799.
[1084]Hughes,Med. and Phys. Journ.I.(1799), p. 318. Many other tests, English and foreign, are detailed in my book,Jenner and Vaccination. London, 1889, for which see the Index under “test.”
[1085]Woodville tabulated 511 cases of applicants for inoculation at the hospital in whom cowpox matter was used, giving “the number of pustules” opposite the name of each; 90 had from a thousand to a hundred pustules, 215 had less than one hundred. William Woodville, M.D.,Reports of a Series of Inoculations for the Variolae Vaccinae or Cowpox; with remarks on this disease considered as a substitute for the Smallpox. London, 1799. In a subsequent letter (Med. Phys. Journ.V., Dec. 1800), he thus explained the occurrence of smallpox among those recently inoculated with cowpox: “If a person who has been exposed to the contagion of smallpox for four or five days be then inoculated for this disease, the inoculation prevents the effects of the contagion, and theinoculatedsmallpox is produced. But if the vaccine inoculation be employed in a case thus circumstanced, the smallpox is not prevented, although the tumour produced by the cowpox inoculation advance to maturation. It was not before the commencement of the present year [1800], that I ascertained that the cowpox had not the power of superseding the smallpox. For, though from the first trials that I made of the new inoculation it appeared that these diseases, as produced in the same subject from inoculation, did not interrupt the progress of each other; yet as the casual does not act in the same manner as the inoculated smallpox, and may be anticipated by the latter, I thought it still probable that the cowpock infection might have a similar effect. Numerous facts have, however, proved this opinion to be unfounded, and that the variolous effluvia, even after the vaccine inoculation has made a considerable progress, have in several instances occasioned an eruption resembling that of smallpox.”
[1086]European Magazine,XLIII.137.
[1087]Bateman, u. s. 1819, Aug.-Nov. 1807: “In a court adjoining Shoe Lane, in the course of one month, twenty-eight persons had died of smallpox.” Autumn, 1812: “In one small court in Shoe Lane, seventeen have lately been cut off by this variolous plague.” Also in the summer of 1812, “perhaps universally through the metropolis.”
[1088]Extracted from the Annual Reports of the Dispensary.
[1089]Heysham to Joshua Milne, in the latter’sTreatise on the Valuation of Annuities. London, 1815. App. p. 755.
[1090]Cross, 1819, u. i. p. 2.
[1091]Most of these were brought to light by inquiries upon the alleged failures of cowpox to avert the epidemic. The serial numbers of theMedical Observercontain frequent references to them.
[1092]Letter to Joshua Dixon, inMemoirs,III.368.
[1093]Bateman,Edin. Med. Surg. Journ.VIII.515.
[1094]C. Stuart,ibid.VIII.380.
[1095]Rigby,ibid.X.120.
[1096]Joshua Dixon,The Literary Life of William Brownrigg, M.D.Whitehaven, 1801, pp. 238-9.
[1097]Haygarth says: “With us in Chester, smallpox is seldom heard of except in the bills of mortality.Thereits devastation appears dreadful indeed.”Sketch of a Plan, &c.1793, p. 491.
[1098]Barker and Cheyne,Account of the Fever, &c.2 vols. 1821.I.92.
[1099]Francis Rogan, M.D.,Obs. on the Condition of the Middle and Lower Classes in the North of Ireland. Lond. 1819, p. 17. He proceeds to say:—“The numerous cases, which came to my knowledge, of children in the neighbouring towns who had taken smallpox, after having been vaccinated by medical practitioners of high respectability, led me to pay particular attention to those whom I myself inoculated [with cowpox]; and, although they were numerous both in private practice and at the Dispensary, not one instance occurred among them.” It comes out however that he did not keep them long in sight; he saw them on the 7th day after vaccination, and again on the 11th; and as they were meanwhile almost daily exposed to contagion, without catching it, he concluded that his own cases never would do so.
[1100]W. L. Kidd. “A concise Account of the Typhus Fever at present prevalent in Ireland, as it presented itself to the Author in one of the towns in the North of that country.”Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ.XIV.(1817), 144. He goes on: “A great number of those attacked werereportedto have been formerly vaccinated. At Londonderry, in particular, great numbers who weresaidto have undergone vaccination were the subjects of smallpox; and, whether justly or not, vaccination has in that part of the country lost much of its credit as a preservative against smallpox.”
[1101]Redhead (dated Ulverston, 3 July, 1816) inMed. and Phys. Journ.Jan. 1817, p. 3.
[1102]James Black, “On Anomalous Smallpox.”Ed. Med. and Surg. Journ.Jan. 1819, p. 39.
[1103]Henry Dewar, M.D.,Account of an Epidemic of Smallpox which occurred in Cupar in Fife in the Spring of 1817. Lond. 1818.
[1104]P. Mudie, M.D. to Thomson, 18 Oct. 1818: “Many of the cases occurring after vaccination so much resembled smallpox that, if my mind had not been prejudiced against the possibility of such an occurrence, I should have pronounced the eruption to have been of a variolous nature”—which, of course, it was.
[1105]Thomson,Account of the Varioloid Epidemic in Scotland, &c.Edin. 1820.
[1106]In Thomson, u. s.
[1107]Thomas Bent, M.D., “Observations on an Epidemic Varioloid Disease lately witnessed in the County of Derby.”Med. and Phys. Journal, Dec. 1818, p. 457. One Jennerian, Dr Pew, of Sherborne, adopted an arrogant tone towards Bent (Ibid.April, 1819, and farther correspondence). Jenner employed Fosbroke, of Berkeley, son of his friend and neighbour the antiquary Fosbroke, to traverse the whole case of the epidemic of 1817-19, in a long paper in theMedical Repositoryfor June, 1819. The object of the paper appears to be to confuse the issues with a view to a verdict ofnon liquet. TheEdinburgh Reviewthought Thomson’s book on the epidemic of 1817-19 important enough for an article, which has been attributed to Jeffrey. The article pronounced vaccination to be a very great blessing to mankind, but not a complete protection. This was not enough for Jenner, who wrote of the article: “It will do incalculable mischief: I put it down at 100,000 deaths at least.”
[1108]John Green Cross,A History of the Variolous Epidemic which occurred in Norwich in the year 1819. Lond. 1820.
[1109]Cross, u. s. Appendix.
[1110]W. Shearman, M.D., “Cases illustrating the Nature of Variolous Contagion and the Modifying Influence of Vaccine Inoculation.”Lond. Med. Repos.Dec. 1822. Case of a mother, with good vaccine marks, attacked with smallpox, which became dry and horny about the fifth day; case of her child, in which the eruption ran the full course of pustules, but also a mild case.
[1111]Lond. Med. and Phys. Journ.May, 1818, p. 488: “By Mr Field’s report of Christ’s Hospital smallpox in a mild form has been frequentpost vaccinationem.”
[1112]Thomas Stone, F.R.C.S. “Table of Deaths from Smallpox in Christ’s Hospital, 1750 to 1850, with remarks,” in Appendix toPapers on the History and Practice of Vaccination: Parl. Papers, 1857. In 1761 there were four deaths from smallpox. For ten years, 1775 to 1784, there were none. In some other years of the latter half of the 18th century there were one or two deaths from that cause. There must have been some special reason for the four deaths in 1761. According to Massey (supra, p. 545), the apothecary in the beginning of the 18th century, not one death happened in forty attacks, the ages from five to eighteen being the most favourable of all for smallpox to fall in. In the present century scarlatina has displaced smallpox as an infectious cause of death in that school as in others. The deaths from scarlatina at Christ’s Hospital during the six years 1851-56 were nine.
[1113]John Forbes, M.D., “Some Account of the Smallpox lately prevalent in Chichester and its Vicinity.”Lond. Med. Repos.Sept. 1822, p. 208.
[1114]H. W. Carter, M.D., inLond. Med. Repos.Oct. 1824, p. 267: “The cases which came to light of smallpox after vaccination were unfortunately numerous; some, it must be confessed, were exceedingly severe; others were exaggerated.”
[1115]The vaccinations are given in Cleland’sRise and Progress of the City of Glasgow. Glasgow, 1820. The smallpox deaths from 1813 to 1819 are given, on Cleland’s authority, in theEdin. Med. and Surg. Journal,XXVI.p. 177.
[1116]R. Watt, M.D., Appendix toTreatise on Chincough.
[1117]John Roberton,Obs. on the Mortality, &c. of Children. Lond. 1827, p. 59,note.
[1118]Gregory,Report of the London Smallpox Hospital for the year 1825. Cited in theMed. and Phys. Journ.Feb. 1826, p. 176.
[1119]Cross, u. s.
[1120]Carter, u. s.
[1121]T. Proudfoot, M.D.,Ed. Med. and Surg. Journ.July, 1822.
[1122]C. Stuart, u. s.
[1123]Dr Stokes, of Chesterfield,Med. and Phys. Journ.v. 17.
[1124]Benjamin Moseley, M.D.,A Review of the Report of the Royal College of Physicians on Vaccination. 1808, p. 11. Jenner writing to James Moore, 18 Nov. 1812 (in Baron,II.383), enumerates his various grievances against Pearson, “and finally, finding all tricking useless, his insinuations that vaccination is good for nothing.”
[1125]The equality of the two methods in this respect comes out incidentally in two reports of the Whitehaven Dispensary. In the report for 1796, when smallpox matter was in use, it is said that “173 were inoculated, all of whom, soliciting little medical assistance, recovered.” In 1801, when cowpox matter had been substituted in every case, the same phrase is used: “We seldom find any medical assistance required in this disease.”
[1126]The Beneficial Effects of Inoculation.Oxford University Prize Poem. Oxford, 1807. It seems probable that this was the “Oxford copy of verses on the two Suttons” that Coleridge (Biographia Literaria(1817), Pickering’s ed.II.89) professed to quote from in the following passage; at least it would be remarkable if there had been printed another Oxford poem on the same subject and in the same manner: “As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of unaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudopoesy, or the startling hysteric of weakness over-exerting itself, which bursts on the unprepared reader in sundry odes and apostrophes to abstract terms. Such are the Odes to Jealousy, to Hope, to Oblivion, and the like, in Dodsley’s collection and the magazines of the day, which seldom fail to remind me of an Oxford copy of verses on the two Suttons, commencing with
‘Inoculation, heavenly maid! descend!’”
It appears that Coleridge himself contemplated a poem on Cowpox Inoculation, which was to have exemplified what poetry should be, just as the 18th century Oxford poem on Smallpox Inoculation exemplified what poetry should not be. It was clearly more than the difference ’twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee. Writing to Dr Jenner on 27 Sept. 1811, from 7, Portland-place, Hammersmith, he said: “Dear Sir, I take the liberty of intruding on your time, first, to ask you where and in what publication I shall find the best and fullest history of the vaccine matter as the preventive of the smallpox. I mean the year in which the thought first suggested itself to you (and surely no honest heart would suspect me of the baseness of flattery if I had said, inspired into you by the All-preserver, as a counterpoise to the crushing weight of this unexampled war), and the progress of its realization to the present day. My motives are twofold: first and principally, the time is now come when the ‘Courier’ ... is open and prepared for a series of essays on this subject; and the only painful thought that will mingle with the pleasure with which I shall write them is, that it should be at this day, and in this the native country of the discoverer and the discovery, be evenexpedientto write at all on the subject. My second motive is more selfish. I have planned a poem on this theme, which after long deliberation, I have convinced myself is capable in the highest degree of being poetically treated, according to our divine bard’s [Milton’s] own definition of poetry, as ‘simple,sensuous, (i.e. appealing to the senses by imagery, sweetness of sound, &c.) andimpassioned, &c.’”The Life of Edward Jenner, M.D.By John Baron, M.D. 2 vols.II.175.
[1127]Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ.I.507.
[1128]Jenner to James Moore, 26 Feb. 1810, in Baron,II.367.
[1129]Walker to Lettsom, 1 Sept. 1813, in Pettigrew’sMemoirs of Lettsom. Lond. 1817,III.350.
[1130]Dr Smith to Dr Monro, Dunse, 2 June, 1818, in Monro’sObs. on the different kinds of Smallpox, 1818. There appears to have been some reluctance to face the facts. “Though I have seen,” says Smith, “a multitude of cases in which smallpox has in every possible shape taken place after vaccination, I feel myself placed in the painful situation [why painful?] of bringing forward many facts to which gentlemen of the first eminence in the profession will probably give little or no credit.”
[1131]Lond. Med. Repository.Sept. 1822.
[1132]J. J. Cribb,Smallpox and Cowpox. Cambridge, 1825.
[1133]Ibid.Letter of Rev. R. Marks, of Great Missenden, 6 May, 1824: “The summer I came here the smallpox was introduced, and as the weather was very hot, and the confluent sort was what appeared, the people began to die almost as fast as they took the plague. Great prejudice prevailed against vaccination, in consequence of the parish having some years ago been vaccinated by a gentleman who knew nothing of the matter, and contaminated the people with decomposed virus, when it was good for nothing but to make ulcers and produced very wretched arms, and left them all liable to smallpox, which they were all inoculated for the same year.” This clergyman subsequently vaccinated 500 cases, and the parish surgeon 300: “and here,” says the former, “I had the happiness of seeing the plague and destruction of a most horrid smallpox completely stopped.”
[1134]Robert Ferguson, M.D.A Letter to Sir Henry Halford, proposing a method of Inoculating the Smallpox, which deprives it of all its Danger, but preserves all its Power of Preventing a Second Attack.London, 1825.
[1135]John Roberton,Observations on the Mortality and Physical Management of Children. London, 1827, p. 59,note.
[1136]J. Dalton, “Smallpox as it prevailed at Bury St Edmunds in 1825.”Lond. Med. and Phys. Journ.May, 1827, p. 406.
[1137]Cribb, u. s.
[1138]“Observation on Smallpox as it has occurred in London in 1825.”Med. and Phys. Journ.Feb. 1826, p. 117.
[1139]Med. and Phys. Journ.1826, p. 122. “The general voice of the public satisfactorily showed that the upper ranks of society suffered during the past year from smallpox much less than the lower.”
[1140]Gregory,Report on the Smallpox Hospital, 4 Dec. 1825.
[1141]Farr, in the First Report of the Registrar-General (1839, p. 100), said: “It may be safely asserted that the parish clerks registered little more than half the deaths that occurred within the limits of the London bills of mortality.” Outside the limits of the bills there were large parishes, such as St Pancras, Marylebone, Kensington and Chelsea, which had large mortalities from smallpox in the first years of registration.
[1142]Tables in Murchison’sContinued Fevers of Great Britain.
[1143]Med. Chir. Trans,XXIV.15. His other papers are: “Cursory Remarks on Smallpox as it occurs subsequent to Vaccination,”ibid.XII.324; and “Notices of the Occurrences at the Smallpox Hospital during the year 1838,”ibid.XXII.95. He contributed the treatise on Smallpox to Tweedie’sLibrary of Medicine,I.1840, and indicated his final opinions (which are interesting) in hisLectures on the Eruptive Fevers, 1843.