CHAP. xvnr. VACCINATION A DELUSION. 261 



births." But these were almost certainly both adults 

 and children of various ages, and the official returns 

 now given show that down to 1812, when the whole re- 

 .duction of small-pox mortality had been effected, only 

 8 per cent, of the population had been vaccinated. We 

 are told, in a note to the official tables, that the first suc- 

 cessful vaccination in Stockholm was at the end of 1810, 

 so that the earlier vaccinations must have been mainly 

 in the rural districts ; yet the earlier Stockholm epi- 

 demics in 1807, before a single inhabitant was vacci- 

 nated, and in 1825, were less severe than the six later 

 ones, when vaccination was far more general. 



Bearing these facts in mind, and looking at Diagram 

 V., we see that it absolutely negatives the idea of vacci- 

 nation having had anything to do with the great reduc- 

 tion of small-pox mortality, which was almost all effected 

 before the first successful vaccination in the capital on 

 the 17th December, 1810! And this becomes still more 

 clear when we see that, as vaccination increased among 

 a population which, the official Eeport tells us, had the 

 most " perfect confidence " in it, small-pox epidemics in- 

 creased in virulence, especially in the capital (shown in 

 the diagram by the dotted peaks) where, in 1874, there 

 was a small-pox mortality of 7916 per million, reaching 

 10,290 per million during the whole epidemic, which 

 lasted two years. This was worse than the worst epi- 

 demic in London during the eighteenth century. 1 



But although there is no sign of a relation between 



1 The highest small-pox mortality in London was in 1772, when 

 3992 deaths were recorded in an estimated population of 727,000, or 

 a death-rate of not quite 5500 per million. (See Second Report, p. 

 290.) 



