102 



SCIENCE. 



[X. S. Vol. XVllI. Xo. 447. 



vaccination has bestowed upon the human 

 race may best be estimated by comparing 

 the popular dread of smallpox prior to 

 1800 with the indifference with which it is 

 regarded now. The ' Concise History, ' re- 

 ferred to above, begins with a series of cita- 

 tions from the earliest medical writers, and 

 we note that Rhazes, in the tenth century, 

 attempted to explain how it happened that 

 scarcely any one could escape the disease, 

 and Mercurialis (born in 1530) said that 

 'almost every person must have it once.' 

 In the eighteenth century statistics first 

 became available from the works of 

 Siissmilch, De la Condamine and others. 

 The most important are those of Sweden, 

 where in the period from 1774 to 1800 the 

 annual smallpox death rate averaged 2,049 

 per million living and accounted for about 

 one thirteenth of the total deaths from all 

 causes. The statistics for Copenhagen, 

 for London, for Berlin, for Liverpool and 

 for' Glasgow show in general the same rela- 

 tions, although in the latter city from 1783 

 to 1800 smallpox caused nearly one fifth of 

 the total deaths. Nine tenths pi the fatal 

 cases of smallpox occurred in children un- 

 der ten years of age. 



Towards the end of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury the struggle against this dread disease 

 seemed almost hopeless. The practise of 

 inoculation, which consisted in the intro- 

 duction of actual smallpox matter under the 

 skin, in order to induce a mild attack at a 

 time when the body was in condition to 

 meet it, had failed to effect any reduction 

 in the general death rate. Just when it 

 seemed that 'the continued raging of that 

 pitiless plague' was the only prospect for 

 mankind, Edward Jenner proved that an 

 attack of the mild disease of cattle knoAvn 

 as cowpox furnished protection against in- 

 fection with the smallpox. He suggested 

 'vaccination' with cowpox material as a 

 simple prophylactic against smallpox, and 

 it is the introduction of this process which 



Dr. Edwardes calls 'the greatest sanitary 

 fact which the world has ever known.' 

 It was in June, 1798, that the physician of 

 Gloucestershire published his ' Inquiry into 

 the Causes and Effects of the Variola 

 VaccintE,' and by 1801 it had been ti-ans- 

 lated into Latin, German, French and 

 Dutch. "As if an angel's trumpet had 

 sounded over the earth, thus spread the 

 good tidings into all lands, that a pre- 

 ventive had been found against the horrible 

 disease smallpox, so long the scourge of 

 humanity. ' ' 



The protective effect of vaccination was 

 at once established by actual experiment, 

 and on a very large scale, by inoculating 

 those who had been vaccinated with the 

 true smallpox virus. Woodville stated in 

 1802 that of 7,500 persons vaccinated at 

 the smallpox hospital, about one half had 

 been since inoculated, without any effect 

 being produced. Dr. Charles Creighton 

 and Alfred Russel Wallace, the chief au- 

 thorities of the ' anti-vaccinationists, ' have 

 attempted to discredit these tests by claim- 

 ing that Woodville 's lymph was contami- 

 nated and that the vaccination was really 

 inoculation in itself. It is amusing to note 

 that Wallace adopts this explanation on 

 page 8 of his 'Vaccination a Delusion,' and 

 on page 76 of the same book seriously main- 

 tains not only that vaccination exercises 

 no protective effect, but that after a pre- 

 vious attack of smallpox 'instead of there 

 being any immunity, there is really a some- 

 what increased susceptibility to a second 

 attack.' It is odd that this startling fact 

 was not noticed in the days when every 

 one had the smallpox at least once ! Wood- 

 ville 's account of his experiments shows 

 that only a very small proportion of his 

 cases — and those all prior to June, 1799 — 

 lay open to the objection mentioned above, 

 and his conclusions were confirmed by sim- 

 ilar tests, notably by 8,000 cases treated at 

 the Medical College in Berlin. A small but 



