DISEASES OF CHILDREX. 



tribe. Thus, in the course of a few weeks, their strength and their courage were 

 broken, and nothing was to be heard but the frightful wailings of death in their 

 camp. Every thought of war was dispelled, and the few that are left are as humble 

 as famished dogs. No language can depict the scene of desolation which the country 

 presents. In whatever direction we go, we see nothing but melancholy wrecks of 

 human life. The tents are still standing on every hill, but no rising smoke announces 

 the presence of human beings, and no sounds but the croaking of the raven and the 

 howling of the wolf interrupt the fearful silence. The above accounts do not 

 complete the terrible intelligence we receive. There is scarcely a doubt that the 

 pestilence will spread to the tribes in and beyond the Rocky Mountains, as well as to 

 the Indians in the direction of Santa Fe and Mexico. It seems to be irrevocably 

 written in the book of fate that the race of red men shall be wholly exterminated in 

 the land in which they ruled the undisputed masters, till the rapacity of the whites 

 brought to their shores the murderous firearms, the enervating ardent spirits, and 

 the all-destructive pestilence of the small pox. According to the most recent 

 accounts, the number of Indians who have been swept away by the small pox, on 

 the western frontier of the United States, amounts to more than 60,000." 



Having endeavoured to present to the mind of the reader some notion of what 

 small pox really was in the days before Jenner's great discovery, we now pass on to 

 a consideration of the question of vaccination. "Among the dairy -folks of Glouces- 

 tershire there was a curious tradition that a certain pustular eruption observed on 

 the teats of cows, and supposed to be engendered in them by contagion from ' the 

 grease ' of horses, might extend its infection to the human subject ; and that persons 

 who had suffered from this cow pox, as it was called, were by it rendered insuscep- 

 tible to small pox." This was the tradition which Edward Jenner had heard, and 

 which he set himself to investigate, and which culminated in the great discovery of 

 vaccination, which was first made publicly known in 1798, and which was first 

 practised in London in 1799. It is well known that the spread of vaccination and 

 the decline of small pox have gone hand-in-hand, and there is every reason to believe 

 that the disease which once was the terror of Europe may become ultimately extinct. 



There is one fact concerning vaccination which, taken alone, would almost 

 be sufficient to prove the great boon it has been, and the real and undoubted 

 protection that it is. It is this, that at the small pox hospital it is always the 

 custom to vaccinate the nurses, whether they have been previously vaccinated or 

 not, before they enter upon their duties, and it has resulted from this that no nurse 

 employed in the small pox hospital Jias ever contracted small pox. Jenner never 

 claimed for his discovery that it was absolutely preventive of small pox, but he 

 asserted that it was as good a safeguard against the disease as small pox itself. 

 Many people have had small pox twice, and many even of those who have been 

 thoroughly vaccinated suffer from small pox, but the disease in both these cases is so 

 modified and of such a mild type that it is robbed of all its terrors. It has been 

 observed also that the mortality among those who have been vaccinated is infinitely 

 less than among those who are not so protected. Whenever small pox becomes 

 epidemic, the writer of this article is always vaccinated, and he is thus enabled to 

 move about among the sufferers from the disease without a shadow of apprehension. 



