ix A GUEST AT THE RUSSIAN COURT 89 



Dimsdale now proceeded to some preliminary opera- 

 tions. His son inoculated two cadets aged about four- 

 teen years, taking the matter from a poor man's child, 

 which was sick of smallpox and afterwards died. One 

 of the cadets fell ill of fever and vomiting on the second 

 day ; and continued to lie in a serious condition. Dims- 

 dale deemed that this trouble was foreign to the inocula- 

 tion, and said so, ascribing it to a surfeit of fruits, but 

 under the circumstances it was not a little disquieting. 

 The Empress had reports of the case twice daily. " I 

 saw her," he writes, " when things were at the worst. 

 She said : ' I will not have you look dull and unhappy, 

 I shall take your word for it, and you shall inoculate me 

 whenever you think proper : I even long for the happy 

 day.' This was indeed a cordial." The boy lost his 

 fever, and both subjects had the disease but slightly. 

 Dimsdale then inoculated five others with matter from 

 another patient. 1 Strange to say, the usual signs failed 

 to develop in all these cases, but an inflamed pustule 

 appeared at the point of insertion. This event per- 

 plexed him greatly ; it had never happened to him before, 

 nor did it afterwards. Had he only known it, Dimsdale 

 was here on the verge of a discovery. The virus of the 

 disease had become in some way attenuated, and the 

 resulting disorder was closely akin to vaccinia. Dr. 

 Joseph Adams had a like experience in 1805 : from a case 

 of natural smallpox which had been inoculated in the 

 interval between infection and outbreak, he cultivated 

 a strain of virus which produced only local pustules, like 

 those of vaccinia, and he continued the strain through 

 eight series of cases. 



After consideration Dimsdale came to the conclusion 

 that these five persons must have passed through the 

 natural smallpox at some early period of their lives. 

 He desired they might all be inoculated again, in the old 

 manner, with a long incision, and gave his opinion that 



1 The case was one of natural smallpox ; the eruption was full, but favour- 

 able and distinct, and the pocks near the time of maturation ; the patient was 

 shut up in a room with a foul atmosphere, but recovered nevertheless. 



