370 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



twenty-three cases, the most advanced minds among doctors at 

 home, as well as in all the capitals of Europe, were hospitable to 

 the discovery and perceived the immense benefits likely to flow 

 from it. On the 27th of November, 1798, Jenner vaccinated two 

 children of a Mr. Hicks with lymph taken from a farm at Stone- 

 house, this gentleman being the first private subject to allow the 

 experiment on his children. 



Lady Ducie was the first person of rank who gave tangible 

 support to the practice by having her only child vaccinated. No 

 better comment on the better day in which we live exists through 

 the diffusion of knowledge by the newspaper press, daily record- 

 ing the discoveries of scientists, than the audacious attempt made 

 in London to supplant Jenner, which came near being successful, 

 and during its progress beclouded his discovery and caused him 

 great anxiety, notwithstanding which the story of the triumphant 

 adoption of the practice in all the enlightened countries of the 

 earth reads like a fairy tale. Monarchs honored him, decorations 

 and gifts were showered upon him, and., in the height of his joy, 

 there was not wanting the one black drop to keep him humble and 

 sober, in the existence of a knot of anti-vaccinationists whose 

 pestilent successors are not yet vanished from the face of the 

 earth, though very recently towns in which their influence has 

 ruled have been scourged with smallpox. At this juncture he 

 wrote to his friend Gardner : " At present I have not the most 

 distant doubt that any person who has once felt the influence of 

 perfect cow-pox matter would never be susceptible of smallpox, but 

 on the contrary, when the disease has been excited by the matter 

 of cow-pox in an imperfect condition, the specific change of the 

 constitution necessary to render the contagion of smallpox harm- 

 less is not produced ; and in this point of view there is a close 

 analogy between the propagation of the cow-pox and the small- 

 pox. Therefore, I conceive that it would be prudent, until further 

 inquiry has thrown every light on the subject that it is capable of 

 receiving, that like those who were the objects of my experi- 

 ments all should be subjected to the test of variolous matter who 

 have been inoculated for smallpox." 



Another circumstance of a different sort at times tried Jenner's 

 accurate and scientific soul. He had vaccinated thousands gratui- 

 tously, and taught many persons to perform the operation cor- 

 rectly ; clergymen and noblemen and women learned to perform 

 the operation, strictly according to his instruction, and applied 

 their knowledge on thousands of the people dependent upon them 

 with perfect success ; but doctors, wise in their own conceit, 

 caused every now and again disaster, by not being careful enough 

 about the exact " right time " to take the lymph in the arm-to- 

 arm practice that had generally disseminated itself. 



