in France to deprive him of the honour of his discovery, from a French clergyman at Montpellier having told two English gentlemen there, in 1781, that there was a disease in animals, and especially in sheep, but also in cows, which, being caught by the milkers of ewes and cows, rendered them safe from small-pox. One of these Englishmen, it is said, declared that he should report the fact to his friend Jenner. Jenner, however, was never so informed; and, if he had been, his answer would have been that he had been studying that very fact for above a dozen years, and had communicated the result of his observations to the profession five years before,—viz., in 1776.
There was no haste about his method of proceeding at any time. He soon found that most persons who had had the cow-pock were unable to receive small-pox by inoculation, and never had it otherwise; but he also ascertained that some persons did take the small-pox who were declared to have had the cow-pock. Here began the difference between Jenner and a multitude of doctors, and others who caught at the notion, after his practice was fully established, taking anybody's word for having had cow-pock, and believing any disease of any cow to be the thing wanted. Jenner was aware what care, patience, and discrimination were necessary to ascertain and command all the conditions of such an experiment; and he pursued his inquiry in silence for years before he brought the world down upon him by the announcement of his discovery. It was at least ten years, from 1770 to 1780, before he confided to an intimate friend the strong hope he entertained of standing between the living and the dead, and staying the plague.
And what a plague it was! Small-pox was for centuries confounded with what we now call specifically the plague. The first case we know of that can be distinctly pointed out as small-pox, was that of the daughter of Alfred the Great, Elfrida, wife of Baldwin, Earl of Flanders. She recovered; but her grandson (the next case recorded), died of it in A.D. 961. For nearly eight hundred years it went on ravaging Europe at short intervals; and whenever Europeans set foot on a new soil, there they left the disease, if they did not find it. In Persia, it occasionally swept through the land, leaving the stench of death in its track; and millions of Hindoos have sunk under it. It so raged among them at the time of Jenner's discovery, that they were tricked into the practice of vaccination in a curious way. A Sanscrit scholar, Mr. Ellis, wrote a poem in praise of vaccination, transcribed it on some very ancient paper, and put it where it was "found" as a relic of antique literature. Another gentleman, Dr. Anderson of Madras, did precisely the same thing; and the Hindoos, with their established practice of inoculation, and their veneration for the cow, took easily to the practice. But one consequence of the deception was that others than Hindoos were misled; and we find among French authors, at this day, notices of the passages in Sanscrit literature which prove that vaccination was practised thousands of years ago! The Red Indians, and the tribes of Africa, and the islanders of the Pacific, have been less fortunate than peoples who have an ancient literature. Whole tribes have been destroyed by the disease. Mr. Catlin's pathetic account of the death of the last of the Mandans is only an illustration of what has passed in every known country on the globe. What the scourge was in every-day life at-home, in every European nation, all history shows. I may observe that, to increase the consternation, there were occasional instances of persons having the disease more than once. Louis XV. of France, who died of it at sixty-four, was universally known to have had it at fourteen; and it is said that 130 writers have furnished instances of this liability.
Grave as was the evil up to the beginning of the last century, it was bearable in comparison with what happened afterwards, for eighty or ninety years. Before the practice of inoculation was introduced, the pestilence came every few years, and never entirely died out between; but it left people's minds comparatively at ease in the intervals. Its raging periods were truly shocking. It carried off several persons in one house, if not the entire family. It left those who recovered blind of one eye, or of both; or deaf; or in such a state as to die by pleurisy in a few weeks, or consumption in a few months. Scrofula remained behind, in almost every house where small-pox had been. It had been supposed that the blindness was caused by pustules on the eyeball; but it was ascertained that the real evil was a putrescence of the substance of the eye, proceeding from the sunk state of the frame, which caused some other fatal mischief, if it spared the eyes. This was the stage in which wine and bark, meat and brandy, were administered; and not erroneously, some high authorities tell us. The hot fires and closed windows were a terrible mistake; but not the stimulating diet and medicine, they say. When the visitation was over for the time, what a wreck was left! Those who had fled in good time returned, almost afraid to look about them. Strong men seemed palsied; the young and beautiful were altered, past all knowledge, with their swollen features and weak senses; infants were blinded and disfigured: the remnants of households were in mourning, or watching some coughing, wasting relative, called convalescent, through the downward stages of consumption. Bad as all this was, there was worse to come.
Early in the last century, several pamphlets appeared in the course of three or four years on the practice of inoculation for small-pox, as witnessed in Turkey ; but no great attention was paid to the suggestion till Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who investigated the subject at Constantinople, caused her own son to be inoculated, and brought him home as an evidence of the benefits of the practice. From the date of her arrival in London, 1722, the practice spread through the kingdom—at first slowly, and then very rapidly, till every educated parent had his children inoculated, as we have them vaccinated now. Yet not quite in the same way. Dr. Jenner had a wretched remembrance of the method in his own case. He was bled, starved, and sunk till he was considered low enough to run the risk of premature small-pox. Many children suffered permanently from