CHAP. xvm. VACCINATION A DELUSION. 225 



Wardens of the College of Surgeons. We cannot pos- 

 sibly suppose that they knew or believed that they were 

 publishing untruths and grossly deceiving the public. 

 We must, therefore, fall back upon the supposition that 

 they were careless to such an extent as not to find out 

 that they were authorizing successive statements of the 

 same quantity, as inconsistent with each other as 2000 

 and 5000. 



The next example is given by Dr. Lettsom, who, in 

 his evidence before the Parliamentary Committee in 

 1802, calculated the small-pox deaths of Great Britain 

 and Ireland before vaccination at 36,000 annually; by 

 taking 3000 as the annual mortality in London and mul- 

 tiplying by twelve, because the population was estimated 

 to be twelve times as large. He first takes a number 

 which is much too high, and then assumes that the mor- 

 tality in the town, village, and country populations was 

 the same as in overcrowded, filthy London! Small-pox 

 was always present in London, while Sir Gilbert Blane 

 tells us that in many parts of the country it was quite un- 

 known for periods of twenty, thirty, or forty years. In 

 1782 Mr. Connah, a surgeon at Seaford, in Sussex, only 

 knew of one small-pox death in eleven years among a 

 population of 700. Cross, the historian of the Norwich 

 epidemic in 1819, states that previous to 1805 small-pox 

 was little known in this city of 40,000 inhabitants, and 

 was for a time almost extinct; and yet this gross error, 

 of computing the small-pox mortality of the whole coun- 

 try from that of London (and computing it from wrong 

 data) was not only accepted at the time, but has been 

 repeated again and again down to the present day as an 

 ascertained fact! 



