296 On the Progress and present Stale of Vaccination. 



the balance in favour of vaccination, in the proportion of 

 ten to one. But when we consider tiie actual state of the 

 circumstances ; — that the number of deaths from inoculated 

 sraall-pox really exceeds the number of " failures" of vac- 

 cination ; — that these '•' failures" are, in a great majority of 

 instances, the means of insuring a very mitigated and harm- 

 less small-pox ; — and that they have, perhaps, in no in- 

 stance, been followed by a fatal small-pox ; — the chances 

 of fatality from a failure of the vaccination are so trivial as 

 to elude calculation; and the only chance of injury that en- 

 sues, is reduced to that of a temporary inconvenience. 



Lastly, let us reflect on the non-contagions nature of the 

 vaccine disease, which, while it secures the individual from 

 blindness, deformity, or fatuity, too often consequent on 

 the small-pox, injuries no one, and spreads no epidemic 

 around, and we shall he compelled to admit, that, " with 

 all its imperfections on its head," with a frequency of failure 

 that its opponents have never yet ascribed to it, vaccination 

 would still prove a blessino-, such as few individuals have 

 had the happiness to confer upon mankind. 



We might here have terminated our observations, but 

 the leadins; circumstance^ communicated in the late Report 

 from the National Vaccine Establishment, demands some 

 notice. It is singular, that at the time when the jiublie 

 attention was attracted by the occurrence of small -pox 

 after vaccination, in the sons of the earl of Grosvenor and 

 sir Henrv Martin, the second occurrence of smalj^-pox in 

 the rev. Joshua Rowlev, miss liooth, and two other per- 

 sons, should have happened. In three of these cases, the 

 previous small-pox had been taken by inoculation, and in 

 the fourth, in the natural way. But the truth is, that the 

 small-pox itself, in whichsoever of these two ways it is 

 produced, is liable to the same anomalies and exceptions as 

 the cow-pock, 'iliere are several examples of the fact on 

 record; one of the most striking of which is the case of 

 Mr. Langford, related in the 4th volume of the Memoirs of 

 the Medical Society of London. This person was so " re- 

 markably pitted and seamed" by a former malignant small- 

 pox, " as to attract the notice of all who saw him :" yet he 

 died at the age of fifty, in an attack of confluent small-pox, 

 in which he communicated the infection to five other in- 

 dividuals of the family, one of whom al>o died. It will be 

 unnecessary here to detail the various examples which au- 

 thors have described. The writer will just notice an in- 

 stance which occurred under his own observation not long 



