ihe National Vaccine Establishment. 125 
fidenee in the benefits of it. We are happy to say that it ap- 
pears to have been practised more extensively than it was, not- 
withstanding the influence of exaggerated rumours of the frequent 
occurrence of small pox subsequently, on the minds of some per- 
sons, and the obstinate prejudices of others, who still continue 
to adopt inoculation for that disease. The unavoidable conse- 
queuce of the latter practice is to supply a constant source of in- 
fection, and to put the merits of vaccination perpetually: to the 
severest trial. 
Of small pox, in the modified and peculiar form which it as- 
sumes when it attacks a patient who has been previously vacci- 
nated, many cases indeed have been reported to us in the course 
of last year, and some have fallen within the sphere of our own 
observation ; but the disorder has always run a safe course, being 
uniformly exempt from the secondary fever, in which the patient 
dies most commonly when he dies of small pox. 
For the truth of this assertion, we appeal to the testimony of 
the whole medical world ; and for a proof that the number of 
such cases bears no proportion to the thousands who have pro- 
fited to the fullest extent of security, by its protecting influence, 
we appeal confidently to all who’ frequent the theatres and 
crowded assemblies, to admit that they do not discover in the 
rising generation any lenger that disfigurement of the human face 
which was obvious every where some years since. 
To account for occasional failures, of which we readily admit the 
existence, something is to be attributed to those anomalies which 
prevail throughout nature, and which the physician observes, not 
in some peculiar constitutions only, but in the same constitution at 
different periods of life, rendering the human frame at one time 
susceptible of disorder from a mere change of the wind, and ca- 
pable at another, of resisting the most malignant and subtile con- 
tagion. But amongst the most frequent sources of failure which 
have occurred, and will for a time continue to occur, is to be 
numbered that careless facility with which unskilful benevolence 
undertook to perform vaccination in the early years of the disco- 
very; for experience has taught us, that a strict inquiry into the 
condition of the patient to be vaccinated, great attention to the 
state of the matter to be inserted, and a ‘Vigilant observation of 
the progress of the vesicles on the part of the operator, are all es- 
sentially necessary to its complete success, 
That less enlightened parents should hesitate to accept a sub- 
stitute for inoculation, which is not perfect in all its pretensions, 
and absolutely and altogether effectual to exempt the objects of 
their solicitude from every future possible inconvenience, does not 
_ surprise us: but we cannot forbear to express our unqualified re- 
probation of the conduct of those medical practitioners, who, 
; knowing 
