8o BARON DIMSDALE AND INOCULATION CHAP. 



and very seldom fatal ; and that the inoculated person was 

 then safe from future infection. It was called " buying " or, 

 in China, " sowing " the smallpox, and children were often 

 brought to a person sick of the disease for this purpose. 



It is well known that Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu found 

 the operation established in Turkey ; that her strong mind 

 and practical instincts discerned its value, and that she had 

 the courage to submit her only son, a boy of six years, for 

 inoculation in 1717. It was introduced soon after this, partly 

 by her efforts, into England ; was tried upon six criminals in 

 Newgate under promise of pardon ; then upon a Quaker 

 infant, Mary Batt, of Hertford, in 1721, the six domestic 

 servants of the house taking the natural disease by caressing 

 her ; and later upon many others, including the two young 

 royal princesses in 1722. The practice reached America at 

 the same period, commencing at Boston in 1721, through the 

 efforts of Cotton Mather and Dr. Boylston. In Britain a 

 storm of opposition, and a blast of pamphlets and sermons 

 against this " dangerous and sinful practice," 1 checked its 

 advance for a long time, but could not prevent its ultimate 

 progress, and by the middle of the century through the 

 advocacy of Mead and others the method had made much 

 way on both sides of the Atlantic, although medical opinion 

 was but half convinced. 



In order to understand the case for this new practice, we 

 must remember that the natural smallpox was in those days 

 an extremely common and fatal disease, attacking all classes 

 of society, and disfiguring those whom it did not slay. Queen 

 Mary II. died of the complaint in 1694. The great bulk of the 

 people had already suffered from it, so that its ravages at 

 any given time were confined to the fraction which had not 

 been attacked hitherto. One person, it was computed, died 

 out of every five or six who sickened, and these deaths formed 

 one-fourteenth part of the total deaths from all causes in the 

 London bills of mortality. 2 In the inoculated disease on the 

 other hand the fatalities seldom exceeded even at this period 

 one in a hundred cases. As time went on, advances were 



1 The Rev. Mr. Massey, preaching at St. Andrew's, Holborn, on Sunday, 

 July 8, 1722, declared that inoculation was first put in practice upon Job by 

 the devil, who thus raised his blood to such a ferment as to throw out a con- 

 fluence of inflammatory pustules all over him from head to foot. 



3 Dr. J. Jurin's statistics for the city of London for 42 years, 1667 to 

 1686, and 1701 to 1722. Letter to Dr. C. Cotesworth, London, 1723. Dimsdale 

 in his Tracts on Inoculation, 1781, gives similar statistics for a later period of 

 34 years, showing that one-eighth of the total deaths occurring to those 

 over two years of age were due to smallpox. 



