CHAP, xviii. VACCINATION A DELUSION. 227 



great authority, therefore, has multiplied the real num- 

 ber by six ! In a later edition this statement is omitted ; 

 but in the first edition it was no mere misprint, for it was 

 triumphantly dwelt upon over a whole page and com- 

 pared with modern rates of mortality. 



Yet one more official misstatement. About the year 

 1884 the National Health Society, with the approval of 

 the Local Government Board, issued a tract entitled 

 Facts concerning Vaccination for Heads of Families, in 

 which appeared the statement, " Before the introduction 

 of vaccination, small-pox killed 40,000 persons yearly 

 in this country." We have already shown that Dr. 

 Lettsom's figure, 36,000 was utterly unfounded, and 

 probably three or four times greater than the truth. 

 Here we have a semi-official and widely-distributed 

 statement even more remote from the truth. In later 

 issues of the same tract this particular statement is with- 

 drawn, and a different but equally erroneous one substi- 

 tuted. Thus: " Before its discovery [vaccination] the 

 mortality from small-pox in London was forty times 

 greater than it is now." This is an altogether vague and 

 misleading statement. If it means that in some years of 

 the last century it was forty times greater than in some 

 years of this century, it is misleading, because even 

 within the last thirty years some years have a mortality 

 not only forty but eighty and even 200 times as great as 

 others. (In 1875 there were ten deaths per million, 

 while in 1871 there were 2420 deaths per million.) If 

 it means on an average of say twenty years, it is false. 

 For the twenty years 1869-98 the mortality was about 

 300 per million, while for the last twenty years before 

 the discovery of vaccination it was about 2000 per mil- 



