WATERHOUSE 1202 WATERHOUSE matter. This was done and none of the per- sons so inoculated contracted smallpox. Thus VVaterhouse was assured that the process of vaccination was the same in America as in England and that vaccination protected against smallpox. He comments on his work as fol- lows : "One fact in such cases is worth a thousand arguments." Soon after this, various }-oung men who had been studying in England, returned to America with vaccine. Some of these men had studied with Woodville, whose book with its erroneous teaching had been read by Waterhouse. As a result, vaccination soon fell into disfavor be- cause Tenner's golden rule was broken, namely; "Never to take the virus from a vac- cine pustule, for the purpose of inoculation, after the efflorescence is formed around it." Another cause for this disfavor was the fact that many persons took any old piece of cloth and saturated it with the pus from a vac- cinated arm and hawked small strips of the cloth at a small price about the country. The result was many badly infected arms, and it is probable that b- 1801 all real vaccine had disappeared from Boston and the surrounding counties ; and the same was true in other parts of the country. Waterhouse finally obtained new material from ten different sources in England, and it was with this, his second importation, that vaccination was introduced throughout the country. Dr. Waterhouse had been in cor- respondence with President Jefferson for some time regarding the matter of vaccination, and after several unsuccessful attempts, in 1801 he succeeded in sending some active virus to Monticello, with which President Jefferson had his family vaccinated; from there it was sent to Washington, and later to various points in the South. New York and Philadelphia were likewise supplied, not once but several times, as their vaccine suffered the same de- terioration as had taken place in Boston and vicinity. The value of vaccination was much debated in and about Boston, as well as elsewhere, and in order to settle the matter finally, Dr. Water- house proposed to the board of health of Boston that a public e..periment be made by taking a number of children, vaccinating them, and later having them inoculated for small- pox. This plan was adopted although a sim- ilar proposition made by Dr. James Jackson on his return from Europe had been previously refused. The experiment was carried out under the observation of a committee of seven of the most reputable physicians in the town. In August, 1802, nineteen children were vac- cinated; in November of the same year, these children were inoculated on two different occasions with variolous matter and exposed for twenty days to the contagion of smallpox at the smallpox hospital on Noddle's Island (East Boston). The experiment proved con- clusively that cowpox is a complete security against smallpox, as not one of the children took the disease. Similar experiments were carried on in Milton, and a very extensive one, in which seventy-five persons or more were involved, at Randolph, Vermont. Dr. Waterhotise continued to write and to work hard for the new prophylactic remedy, and it is due entirely to his persistence in maintaining the purity of his vaccine virus that vaccination was finally put on a true and scientific basis. Dr. Waterhouse w-as never popular with his professional brethren. He was not a good practitioner of medicine as "patients bored him." He lived in Cambridge and belonged to the sect of Friends ; he was a Jeffersonian Re- publican when such political ideas were en- tirely hostile to the temper of the ruling faction in the State of Massachusetts, which was long the home of Federalism. Early in the nineteenth century, j-oung and vigorous men, fresh from European hospitals, returned to Boston and sought for an outlet of their newly-attained medical enthusiasm, and the first decade of the century was filled with acrimonious disputes with the unpopular professor of theory and practice. At the end of this time, he was deprived of his professor- ship, and from then on deyoted himself largely to letter writing and the care and supervision of the United States medical posts on the coast of New England. Waterhouse's most important literary pro- ductions were his writings regarding smallpox. A lecture delivered to the students of Cam- bridge on "Cautions to Young Persons Con- cerning Health" became very popular. It con- tained the general doctrine of chronic disease, showing the evil tendency of the using of to- bacco upon young persons, more especially the ruinous effects of smoking cigars, with obser- vations on the use of ardent and vinous spirits in general. Dr. Waterhouse pictured in his lecture the rapid deterioration of the Harvard student of the day and asserted that "six times as much ardent spirits were expended here (in Cambridge) annually as in the days of our fathers. Unruly wine and ardent spirits have supplanted sober cider." For twenty-seven years, from 1769 to 1796, there had been but nine deaths among the students ; in the follow- ing eight years, there had been sixteen deaths,
