96 BARON DIMSDALE AND INOCULATION CHAP. 



Memory of Fothergill, his " friend and adviser for more 

 than forty years." It appears that the latter had at 

 one time thought that a son of Dimsdale might succeed 

 to his practice. 1 



The practice of inoculation was continued to the close of 

 the eighteenth century. Dr. John Haygarth indeed formed 

 a plan for exterminating smallpox by its means from Great 

 Britain. He first carried it out with much success in his own 

 city of Chester. In 1778 he laid his more extensive scheme 

 before Fothergill, and the latter brought it to the notice of 

 his medical friends. It had however but a mixed reception, 

 varying " in proportion to their humanity." The mode of 

 infection was at that time often hi dispute. Fothergill used 

 to tell the story of a medical wig which conveyed the disease 

 from London to Plymouth. His relative Waterhouse capped 

 the tale with like incidents that had come to his own knowledge ; 

 one doctor, after visiting a smallpox hospital, " neglected to 

 smoke his wig," and conveyed the disease in consequence to 

 his daughter. Haygarth on the contrary maintained that the 

 infection was only aerial. 2 



Inoculation was at length superseded by vaccination, for 

 which it had in truth paved the way. Jenner published his 

 work on the Variola Vaccinia in 1798, and five years later 

 the Royal Jennerian Institution was founded, and the new 

 practice came into large employ. Inoculation, however, was 

 still used by many for a long time ; and in some countries, for 

 example Persia, it is practised at this day ; but in England it 

 fell under general condemnation, and in 1840 was prohibited 

 by the first Vaccination Act as a felony. 



It was considered, in the first place, that inoculation 

 tended to spread the disease, although in a milder form. 

 This seems to have been true, for the necessity of isolation 



1 On Dimsdale see, besides the references in the Diet. Nat. Biog., Biographical 

 Catalogue of the Friends' Institute, London ; Soc. Frds. MS. Registers ; L. 

 Tumor, Hist. Hertford ; Berry, Herts Pedigrees ; Extracts and MSS. in Frds. 

 Ref. Lib. ; Eliz. G. Dimsdale, MS. Memoirs of the Family. The account of 

 the first visit to Russia is chiefly taken from MS. letters to H. Nicols, and other 

 papers in the possession of Dowager Lady Dimsdale, who has most kindly 

 allowed the author to make use of them. A description of Dimsdale's visits 

 to Russia is given in E. A. B. Hodgett's Life of Catherine the Great, 1914, 

 c. xvi., based upon a French MS. preserved in the Imperial Archives in Peters- 

 burg. This is evidently for the most part a translation of Dimsdale's narrative 

 in his Tracts. Several books and tracts on Inoculation were published by 

 Dimsdale at Petersburg in 1770. See his Thoughts on Inoculations, London, 

 1776, and Tracts on Inoculation, 1781 ; Gent. Mag., 1801, i. 88, 209, ii. 669. 



2 Haygarth, Sketch of a Plan to Exterminate the Casual Small Pox, 1793, 

 pp. i, 265, 320. 



