CHAPTER IX 



BARON DIMSDALE INOCULATION FOR SMALLPOX 



The physician that bringeth love and charity to the sick, if he be 

 good and kind and learned and skilful, none can be better than he. 

 Love teacheth him everything, and will be the measure and rule of all 

 the measures and rules of medicine. SAVONAROLA. 



La Persecution aigrit les Esprits. La Liberte de Conscience au 

 contraire amollit les Cceurs les plus endurees, ramene les opiniatres de 

 1'Obstination la plus inveteree, et etouffe les Disputes si funeste a la 

 tranquillite de 1'Etat, et si contraire a 1'Union qui doit regner entre les 

 Citoyens. TSARINA CATHERINE II. of Russia, MS. Instructions, in 

 Museum at St. Petersburg, 1787. 



THE practice of the inoculation of smallpox seems to 

 have arisen in various countries at an uncertain period 

 in the past. 



It was long used in India, and was thence introduced into 

 China. Some ages later, towards the end of the ijth 

 century, history tells that it was brought to Constantinople 

 from Greece. Meanwhile it existed already in other parts 

 of the east, and in some European countries, for example in 

 Wales and in Scotland ; but it was in the hands of old women 

 and the wiseacres of the country-side, and had not come to 

 the ears of the learned. Fothergill was the means of showing 

 that inoculation had also long been practised among the 

 negroes of the American colonies. 1 



There is then evidence of the discovery, made probably by 

 accident, and it would appear independently in various lands, 

 that smallpox could be artificially conveyed through a lesion 

 of the skin to a healthy person ; that it there produced a 

 much milder form of the disease, developing more quickly 2 



1 Letter of Cadwallader Golden, 1752, communicated by Fothergill to the 

 Medical Society (of Physicians), Med. Obs. & Inq. i. 227. 



2 The patient sickened on the 8th, gth or loth day, instead of from 

 the isth to the 2oth day (Dimsdale). 



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