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so fortunate. It was to them one of those horrors too 

 ghastly to confront. Deadly to a degree almost incom- 

 prehensible to us, its lethal force was perhaps its least 

 offensive characteristic : for when not fatal, it left behind 

 it blindness, debility, and the seeds of disorders only 

 less desolating than itself. Just before the settlement of 

 Cape Ann, it had completely depopulated this region of its 

 native stock, and if we charge that familiar fact to the 

 exposures and irregularities of savage life, what shall we 

 say to the correlative fact, that of the patients under the 

 best known scientific treatment in London Hospitals, 

 thirty per cent, of those stricken with it died? In 

 spite of inoculation, which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 

 had introduced from Constantinople in 1718-20, but 

 which made slow progress, one-tenth of all the deaths in 

 England, during the last half of the last century, were 

 deaths from small-pox. 19 The statistics for New England 

 cannot be very different. Private diaries of persons in 

 the most favored positions in life are full of the records 

 of friends sacrificed to this pest. Judge Lynde of Salem, 

 though chief justice of the province, more than once 

 removed his family from his house, and once sent them into 

 the country and from place to place, to avoid danger 

 during a period of contagion ; and was once the recipient 

 of an anonymous letter charged with the deadly infection, 

 from the effect of which he happily escaped; and this 

 too in the Revolutionary period, when a celebrated Ger- 

 man surgeon, attached to the Hessian troops, Dr. Johann 

 David Schopff, writes home that in America inoculation is 

 an "almost universal practice." 



"The disease was no respecter of persons, but like death in all its forms, 

 cequo pulsat pede pauper nm tabervas Regumque, turres. May 10, 1774. surrounded 

 by all the splendors of Versailles, Louis XV, at the age of sixty-four, King of 

 France since his fifth year, died a miserable death from a second attack of small- 

 pox, a disease which he had had in youth and which he gave to the two princesses, 

 his daughters, who attended his death bed. 



