LADY MONTAGU AND MODERN BACTERIOLOGY. 369 



sons had had a second attack of smallpox, and that there were 

 cases where people who had acquired what they thought cow-pox 

 in the natural manner had been attacked by smallpox later. He 

 set himself to study these anomalies, and became convinced that 

 there is one " right," strictly limited time for taking the vaccine 

 virus, and that matter taken later will produce a pustule and 

 severe illness, but affords no protection. Also, he learned that 

 there is a right and a wrong way in which to insert the virus in 

 short, that the operation is a nice exercise of medical art. He dis- 

 covered that certain eruptive diseases occurring at the same time 

 make the best virus inoperative, and he ascertained that there are 

 many circumstances that rapidly destroy the vitality of the virus 

 when not properly cared for. He left the fruits of all these obser- 

 vations embodied in a set of rules of procedure that nearly a 

 century of experience and medical advance has not improved upon. 

 Of course, he could not foresee the wonderful evolution in the 

 methods of the production of the virus that now puts such a large 

 and safe supply into the hands of the practitioner. 



We, who tranquilly enjoy the fruits of the great deliverance 

 from the horrible and universal plague of smallpox, see and know 

 so little of it as not to be able to form any just conceptions of the 

 monstrous proportions of the scourge when unchecked. The 

 average death-rate from it throughout England was such that if 

 applied to the present population it would give 70,000 per annum ; 

 in London alone before 1804 the annual deaths were 2,018 in a 

 population of a million; in 1890, in a population of four millions 

 there was just one death from smallpox. In the year 1886 there 

 was not a death from it in Massachusetts. 



Jenner went to London in April, 1798, intending to bring out 

 his book and illustrate his doctrines on the spot. He was pre- 

 pared with a pure and efficient virus that had been already tested, 

 but to his surprise and chagrin, although he was known in the 

 highest medical circles as a man worthy of undoubted credit and 

 of thoroughly established scientific repute, he could not find one 

 individual willing to submit to the operation. His pamphlet a 

 quarto of seventy pages was published on June 21, 1798. Sel- 

 dom has a book appeared fraught with greater consequences to 

 mankind. When he went home he left some virus in the hands 

 of a friend Mr. Cline who at the end of July inserted some of 

 it by two punctures on the hip of a child who had hip disease, 

 under the notion that the counter-irritation produced by it might 

 cure the trouble. It made no difference with the original disease, 

 but by a thorough inoculation afterward with smallpox virus the 

 child was found proof against that disease. 



When the book had had time to make its due impression, with 

 its thoroughly wrought- out and carefully written-out series of 



VOL. XLV. 29 



