CHAP. xvin. VACCINATION A DELUSION. 243 



long been over 90 per cent, of the whole, and are now 

 often even 94 or 95 per cent. The hospitals of the 

 Metropolitan Asylums Board, which take in mostly 

 pauper patients, give a lower percentage the Homer- 

 ton hospital 85 per cent., the Deptford hospital 87 per 

 cent., and the Hampstead hospital 75 per cent. in the 

 two latter cases adding the " doubtful " class to the 

 vaccinated, as the facts already given prove that we have 

 a right to do and still probably give too high a propor- 

 tion of unvaccinated. As the proportion of the London 

 population that is vaccinated cannot be over 90 per cent, 

 (see Minority Keport, pp. 173-174), and is probably 

 much lower, and considering the kind of patients the un- 

 vaccinated include (see back, p. 241), there remains abso- 

 lutely nothing for the effects of vaccination. We have 

 already seen that the total case-mortality of these hospi- 

 tals agrees closely with that of the last century; the two 

 classes of facts, taken together, thus render it almost cer- 

 tain that vaccination has never saved a single human life. 



III. 



THE GENERAL STATISTICS OF SMALL-POX MORTALITY IN 

 RELATION TO VACCINATION. 



HAVING thus cleared away the mass of doubtful or 

 erroneous statistics depending on comparisons of the vac- 

 cinated and the unvaccinated in limited areas or selected 

 groups of patients, we turn to the only really important 

 evidence, those " masses of national experience " which 

 Sir John Simon, the great official advocate of vaccina- 

 tion, tells us we must now appeal to for an authoritative 

 decision on the question of the value of vaccination; to 



