sg4 On the Progress mid present: State of 



indisputable, that *' the truth seems to be established as 

 firmly as the nature of such a question admits '/' 



The oppositioato the practice, which is still but too suc- 

 cessf'ullv kept up by a few clamorous individuals in the me- 

 dical profession, rests principally upon a mistaken view of 

 the nature of the question. It rests upou the notion that 

 the result of the practice should be uniform and mvanahle; 

 that the rule should be void of all exceptions. But there is 

 ho such regularity in the operations of the animal cecono- 

 nay : there is no disease without its anomalies ; and the di- 

 versity of human constitutions is infinite. Several of these 

 anomalies, or exceptions to the general rule, have doubtless 

 occurred in the practice of vaccination ; " but," to use the 

 words of a judicious and experienced observer, " certainly 

 not so often as was expected by those who considered the 

 subject from the first dispassionately, nor have they been in 

 sufficient number to form any serious objection to the prac- 

 tice founded on Dr. Jenner's discovery t-" In truth, if this 

 principle were received, — that no operation ought to be per- 

 formed on the human body which was liable to occwsional 

 failure, — what medicine would remain for us to exhibit, or 

 what surgical assistance for us to offer ? 



But let us examine the nature of these exceptions, or 

 *' failures," as they have been emphatically called, which 

 have occurred in the practice of vaccination.^- The very 

 sound of the word excites an alarm in the niiflds of many 

 persons, as xi failure were synonymous with death, or im- 

 plied the certain occurrence of a desperate or mortal-small- 

 pox. But this is so far from being the case, that upon a 

 deliberate view of the facts, we do not hesitate, to affirm, 

 that, if all the cases of alleged failure, which the opponents 

 of vaccination have raked up, upon any sort of evidence, 

 and often upon none, had really occurred, and that number 

 had been doubled or tripled, its advantages over the inocu- 

 lation of small-pox would still baj'incalculable. 



In the first place, it has been ascertained by the concurring 

 observations of almost all the practitioners who have attended 

 to the subject, that(to use the words of theCollegeof Physicians) 

 *'in almost every case in which the small-pox has succeeded 

 vaccination, whether by inoculation or by casual infection, 

 the disease has varied much from its ordinary course ; it 

 has neither been the same in violence, nor in the duration of 

 its symptoms; biit has, with very few exceptions, been re- 

 markably mild, as if the small-pox had beeii deprived ly the 



* See the Report of the Royal College of Physicians on Vaccination, July 

 18074 f See Dr. Willan's Treatise on Vaccination. 



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