CHAP. xvni. VACCINATION A DELUSION 271 



of Leicester, which for the last twenty years has rejected 

 vaccination till it has now almost vanished altogether. 

 The second is that of our Army and Navy, in which, for 

 a quarter of a century, every recruit has been revacci- 

 nated, unless he has recently been vaccinated or has had 

 small-pox. In the first we have an almost wholly " un- 

 protected " population of nearly 200,000, which, on the 

 theory of the vaccinators, should have suffered exception- 

 ally from small-pox ; in the other we have a picked body 

 of 220,000 men, who, on the evidence of the medical 

 authorities, are as well protected as they know how to 

 make them, and among whom, therefore small-pox 

 should be almost or quite absent, and small-pox deaths 

 quite unknown. Let us see, then, what has happened 

 in these two cases. 



Perhaps the most remarkable and the most complete 

 body of statistical evidence presented to the Commission 

 was that of Mr. Thomas Biggs, a sanitary engineer and a 

 town councillor of Leicester. It consists of fifty-one 

 tables exhibiting the condition of the population in rela- 

 tion to health and disease from almost every conceivable 

 point of view. The subject is further illustrated by 

 sixteen diagrams, many of them in colors, calculated to 

 exhibit to the eye in the most clear and simple manner 

 the relations of vaccination and sanitation to small-pox 

 and to the general health of the people, and especially 

 of the children, in whose behalf it is always alleged vac- 

 cination is enforced. From this wealth of material I 

 can give only two diagrams exhibiting the main facts of 

 the case, as shown by Mr. Biggs' statistics in the Fourth 

 Report of the Koyal Commission, all obtained from offi- 

 cial sources. 



