so genial in her quiet way, with such a lovable inclination to plants and animals and other people’s children besides her own. People said she was a born lady, that mistress of the Hollens. That was small praise—say rather hers was a strong, pure heart early anchored in still, profound faith in goodness and God.
SMALLPOX IN LONDON.
An epidemic of smallpox in London in the year 1863;—people packing and running into the country;—letters in the “Times” giving “certain” cures for this loathsome disease; other letters detailing the best means of preventing “pitting;”—persons blotched with scarcely-dried pustules meeting you in every street! Shade of Jenner, is the merciful shield which thy genius has held over us for more than half a century pierced and broken at last? And are we to mourn the reappearance of a once conquered plague, and to bewail afresh its ravages upon youthful beauty? There is scarcely warranty for all these fears, but there is quite enough warning given, to show us that although the shield is as impervious as ever, we are neglecting from time to time to use it. The Registrar-General’s returns for these last eight or nine months prove that smallpox is gradually gaining upon us, and that for months past the deaths from this disease have averaged something higher than sixty weekly.
The cause of all this is the difficulty of getting the public to take even the smallest trouble for the sake of warding off a merely prospective evil; or perhaps we may rather ascribe it to that immobility of the human mind which is such a bar to progress of every kind.
Without going into a detailed history of the proceedings of Jenner, we may say that the tardy discovery of vaccination itself affords one of the best examples of the length of time the seed of an idea calculated to save an enormous amount of human suffering to all posterity, will sometimes lie in the mind before it bears fruit. Let us take inoculation as an instance.
At a time when smallpox was as destructive as the plague itself, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu happening to be at Adrianople, was struck with the fact that the Turks were in the habit of making terms with the disease, by receiving it into their system by way of the skin, instead of by the lungs, as in the natural mode of infection. Possibly the lively nature of the lady’s letters had more to do with the sensation this new practice created in England than the magnitude of the truth she made known, and to this day we believe that the public have some idea that it was a discovery made by her ladyship, and which she had the boldness to put in practice upon her own son. Yet no fact is more certain than that throughout Asia the practice of inoculation had obtained for ages; and that the Chinese—the inevitable nation to which we have always to go back for the birth of any great discovery—systematically employed inoculation as early as the sixth century. Yet strange to say, in Asia this precious knowledge came to a dead stand-still; and had it not been for the lively English lady, inoculation might not have been introduced into England for another half century, and possibly vaccination would even now be in the womb of time.
That inoculation was a grand step towards the practice of vaccination there can be little doubt, although science did not at the time appreciate the fact. It taught us that the disease received into the circulation by the skin was infinitely less dangerous than the disease “caught” by inhalation through the lungs, a circumstance which medicine cannot explain to this day. The deaths from smallpox during some of the severe epidemics of the last century were not less than a third of those attacked, but the improved practice of inoculation reduced these deaths to one in two hundred!
This in itself, no doubt, was a grand result, but unfortunately it told only for those who were inoculated, for inasmuch as it was the practice of physicians to send their patients into the open air, and as inoculated smallpox was as contagious as the disease pure and simple, those persons in their turn became centres of contagion. If it had been possible to have insulated every inoculated person until he had passed the stage of infection, it is just possible that vaccination might not yet have been discovered, inasmuch as half measures often keep off for a long time sweeping reforms; but as this was not possible, inoculation only made matters worse.
This fact was clearly proved by the London Bills of Mortality, which showed that during the first thirty years of the eighteenth century (before inoculation), out of 1000 deaths, those from smallpox were seventy-four, whilst during an equal number of years at the end of the century, after inoculation, they amounted to ninety-five—thus proving that the practice had increased the deaths in a proportion of five to four. This result, however, came from putting the practice in force in a crowded city; no doubt the result would have been widely different in country places and among thinly-populated districts, otherwise it would not have been handed down for centuries over vast continents.
But the extreme difficulty with which the idea of vaccination germinated was still more remarkable than the slow progress made by inoculation. It must not be supposed that Jenner was the first to discover that the inoculation of the matter from pustules in the cow’s teat afforded a protection to the milkers against smallpox. So far from this being the case, the fact was noticed in a Gottingen paper as early as 1769; and at Keil, in Germany, and also in Holstein, the protective influence of the cowpox irruption was recognised nearly as early. Strange to say, in Asia also, in the province of Lus, the milkers have a disease long known as Photo-Shooter, contracted from milking the camel in the same way as cowpox is contracted from milking the cow, and it is found to be equally protective against the smallpox. It was Jenner’s glory that, having become acquainted with the fact from the Gloucestershire dairymaids, by a pure process of induction he proved the value of the protective agent, by first inoculating the boy Phipps with the cowpox, and after the