PROTECTIVE INOCULATIONS. 301 



"The statement of that Commission that the statistics which they had 

 been able to obtain of the preventive inoculations of Ferrari were to a con- 

 siderable degree void of any official character may be true, and perhaps it is 

 also true that they emanated from the partisan friends of Ferra.ii ; but it must 

 be distinctly remembered that at that day there were practically no official 

 statistics of this kind in the hands of any one. The official statistics collected 

 under the orders of the Spanish Government were gotten together at a far 

 later date. 



' ' Upon the appointment of the Government at Madrid of the second offi- 

 cial Spanish Commission to investigate the Ferran question in the provinces 

 where the inoculations were being practised, it was ordered that official sta- 

 tistics of inoculation should be collected in the usual manner ; that is to 

 say, by the customary statistical officers of the Government. This second 

 medical Commission was also accompanied by an independent statistical 

 commission who were charged with the duty of forming statistics of those 

 inoculations which were expected to be witnessed by the Medical Commission 

 in their tour of investigation, and the report to the Spanish Government of 

 this statistical commission is based exclusively upon the official statistics 

 which they themselves collected. 



' ' In estimating the value of the official character and the authority of the 

 official statistics, which have since the visit of the French Commission to 

 Spain been collected and published, the following circumstances should be 

 taken into account : The provincial governments of Spain are somewhat 

 peculiar, in that the civil governors change with the changes which take 

 place in the Government at Madrid, so that the political constitution of the 

 provincial governments is always a reflex of that of the central government 

 at Madrid. Moreover, the political sentiment of the provincial government 

 is also more or less perfectly reflected by the local governments of the towns 

 of the province. 



" The hostility of the Minister of the Interior at Madrid to Dr. Ferr'dn, and 

 his attempts at the prevention of cholera by inoculation, is a well-known fact 

 now generally admitted ; and the hostility which Dr. Ferran met with from 

 the civil governor of the province of Valencia was even greater than that 

 manifested by the Minister of the Interior himself. 



"The official statistics of the Ferrari inoculations are in the first place 

 signed by the physicians of the locality ; and in the next place by the judge 

 of the municipal court, and sometimes also by the president judge of the 

 judicial district, by the parochial priest, and by the mayor of the municipality, 

 whose signatures and seals are attested by an authorized notary public. 



"It must, therefore, be obvious that the charge made by the French Com- 

 mission, which has been so constantly reiterated everywhere, that the public 

 statistics of the anti-choleraic inoculations are void of official character and 

 are to be regarded as ex-parte testimony of the partisans of Ferran, cannot 

 apply to official statistics which were collected under the supervision of the 

 municipal authorities of the villages wherein the inoculations were per- 

 formed, and attested not only by the local judicial officers and the parochial 

 priests, but also by the political officers that is to say, the secretaries and 

 the mayors of the municipalities ; for it must be admitted that neither the po- 

 litical officers of the municipalities nor of the provincial governments, any 

 more than the parochial priest, can reasonably be charged with being the 

 partisans or friends of Ferran the Minister of the Interior continuing dur- 

 ing the time of collection of these official statistics to be hostile to the claims 

 of Ferran. It therefore follows that the attack upon the statistics of the in- 

 oculations made by the French Commission, and so widely accepted by the 

 medical world as conclusive, does not apply to the official statistics of which 

 we are speaking. And, in view of this fact, the evidence as to the efficiency 

 and harmlessness of the anti-choleraic inoculations should be re-examined. 

 As I have already said, the results of the preventive inoculations of Ferran 

 as set forth in the official statistics appear to very strongly support his claim 



