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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Statistics of this sort might be piled mountains high; but they 

 mean nothing and they count for nothing with the prejudiced. It is 

 well to remember at times that any agency and influence operating at 

 any one moment upon large masses of human beings of both sexes and 

 of all ages has to bear its percentage of damage and death. The killed 

 on the day of the passing of the funeral cortege of Queen Victoria, the 

 fatality attending ocean and railway travel, even the victims of the 

 awful fire-tragedies lately occurring in Paris and New York, which 

 shocked every reader of the public press, have not deterred men and wo- 

 men of ordinary common sense from going to fairs, sleeping in hotels, 

 or crossing the continent by rail or the ocean steamer. Vaccination of 

 every member of any community, including men, women and, in partic- 

 ular, infants will, without any question, be followed by untoward re- 

 sults in a proportion of cases. The mere statistics of common accidents 

 and ordinary disease account for a large part of the list in the relatively 

 slender catalogue of vaccination accidents. Men, women and children 

 perish annually from the stings of bees, from the bites of flies, from 

 the prick of a pin, and from the accidental impaction of a bit of food 

 in the larynx. Lately a physician reported a disease not due to vacci- 

 nation. An infant was brought by appointment to his office in order to 

 be inoculated, but the physician chanced to be called away from the 

 city, and the date of the trifling operation was postponed for a week. 

 In that week the child developed symptoms of syphilis, which would 

 probably have been laid to the account of the vaccination if the latter 

 had been performed. 



It has been said that if the modern tourist could be transported 

 to the streets of London in the eighteenth century, before the general 

 adoption of the practice of vaccination, he would be immensely aston- 

 ished, not so much by the quaintness of the dress and the speech of the 

 people, by the aspect of their shops, and by the odd-looking vehicles 

 on their streets, as by the extraordinary number of pock-marked faces 

 he would encounter on every hand. Even as early as the year 1778, 

 the officers of foreign troops on American soil wrote back to their 

 countrymen in the old world that the American women were sur- 

 passingly beautiful and were very ^seldom pock-marked.' Macaulay, 

 describing the distress in London in 1694, wrote as follows: "That 

 disease over which science has since achieved a succession of glorious 

 and beneficent victories was then the most terrible of all the ministers 



