64: DISEASES OF CHILDREN. 



which occurs in children after vaccination, and although it is hardly fair to count it 

 among 1 the diseases of childhood, we shall nevertheless discuss the topic at some 

 length, because of the agitation against the practice which has sprung up of 

 late years. The reasons for the anti-vaccination agitation seem to be twofold, 

 and the most important of these lies in the fact that the present generation 

 cannot be said to have any real acquaintance with the disease which vaccination 

 protects us against. It is true that now and again we have an epidemic of small pox, 

 but the epidemics of modern times are nothing when compared with the horrible 

 pestilences of a century ago. When an enemy is in sight, and still more when he is 

 in our very midst, we gladly submit to any amount of taxation in order to be rid of 

 him j but when the enemy retires again, we are very apt to grumble even at the 

 moderate taxation which serve to support the armaments, the existence of which 

 keeps him at a distance. Vaccination is the tax as it were which has enabled us to 

 compel the small pox to surrender at discretion ; and the enemy being driven off, the 

 thoughtless have raised a fruitless agitation against the tax. 



Before the days of Jenner (a man whose memory should be enshrined with the 

 memories of the greatest names that have adorned our history), small pox raged 

 to an extent that was simply appalling. It was estimated that half a million 

 of deaths annually were due to small pox in Europe alone, and in London one- 

 fourteenth of the entire deaths were attributable to this cause. Mr. Simon, in 

 an able paper appended to the report of the Select Committee on Vaccination 

 (1871), reminds us that a fourteenth of the total deaths meant much more, when 

 the total, " as compared with the population, represented perhaps double our 

 present death-rate." 



It was a pestilence doubly horrible because the seeds of it seemed capable of 

 flourishing in any soil. It smote the wealthy living in palaces equally with the poor 

 in their hovels, and proved as destructive to Indian tribes encamped upon the open 

 prairie as to populations crowded in close cities. 



Mr. Simon, in the report above alluded to, says : 



" For a popular notion of the disease it may be enough to cite what it did in 

 royal families. In the circle of William the Third, for instance, his father and 

 mother died of it, and, not least, his wife ; and his uncle the Duke of Gloucester ; 

 and his cousins, the eldest son and youngest daughter of James the Second ; and he 

 himself (like his friend Bentinck) had suffered from it most severely, barely surviving 

 with a constitution damaged for life." 



Or again in the Court of Austria, " Joseph the First," says Vehse, " was cariied 

 off, when not more than thirty-three years of age, by the small pox, to which, in the 

 course of the eighteenth century, besides him, two empresses, six archdukes and 

 archduchesses, an elector of Saxony, and the last elector of Bavaria, fell victims." To 

 this list might have been added, no doubt, many other names ; among them, for 

 instance, a Dauphin (1711) and a King (1774) of France, a Queen (1741) of Sweden, 

 and an Emperor (1727) of Russia." 



It would be thought an awful epidemic nowadays that should strike like this in 

 high places. 



The following account (taken from the same source) will show that we are not 



