July 24, 1903.] 



SCIENCE. 



105 



the Prussian army, in which revaeeination 

 on entrance has been compulsory since 

 1834, with the French army, where it has 

 only been thoroughly carried out since 

 1888, and with the Austrian army, where 

 there was no revaeeination prior to 1886. 

 The attack rate per 100,000 in 1875-85 

 was 4.7 in the Prussian army, 133.6 in the 

 French army and 333.7 in the Austrian 

 army. In the twenty-five years 1875-99 

 there were only two deaths from smallpox 

 in the Prussian army, one in 1884 and one 

 in 1898. The main point to notice is that 

 these extraordinary results have been at- 

 tained by a general revaeeination of the 

 whole population. Revaeeination of only 

 a single class in the community can not 

 prevent the occurrence of occasional cases 

 in that class, because in a large body of 

 men there must always be some vaccina- 

 tions which have not been successful. Thus 

 the smallpox death rate in the English 

 armj' with revaeeination has ranged from 

 zero to twenty-nine di;ring the last forty 

 years. Wallace in 'Vaccination a De- 

 lusion' made these figures look larger by 

 raising them to rates per million (the basis 

 of calculation being about 200,000 men), 

 and then compared them with the rates for 

 Ireland at the age period 15 to 45, which 

 were only slightly higher from 1864 to 

 1894 (58 for the army, 65.8 for Ireland). 

 Later he showed that the rate for 1873-94 

 was 37 in the army, 36.8 in the navy and 

 14.4 in the city of Leicester, and concluded 

 that 'all the statements by which the public 

 has been gulled for so many years as to 

 the almost complete immunity of the revac- 

 cinated army and navy are absolutely 

 false.' 'There is no immiuiity. They 

 have )io protection.' That is, Mr. Wallace 

 selects one island in Europe where, largely 

 from its isolation, smallpox happens not to 

 have been serious, and one town in Eng- 

 land where there has been almost no small- 

 pox, and because these two places have had 



extraordinarily low death rates he main- 

 tains that the low army death rate, indi- 

 cates no pi-oteetion ! Yet the figures were 

 before him which showed that the average 

 of the annual death rates in the navy, which 

 was less than 32 from 1873 to 1899. had 

 been 257 from 1860 to 1873; in 1873 an 

 order was issued which provided for the 

 vaccination of all recruits on joining. 



The evidence derived from a comparison 

 of the same country before and after the in- 

 troduction of vaccination, and that based 

 on the contrast at the same period between 

 countries having different degrees of vac- 

 cination, have now been briefly considered. 

 The third class of facts includes the ' direct 

 evidence ' of the incidence of smallpox upon 

 persons in the same community protected 

 and unprotected by vaccination. At Chem- 

 nitz in 1870-1, a special census was made to 

 determine the condition of the population as 

 regards vaccination, and it appeared that 

 among those protected by vaccination or 

 previous smallpox the death rate was 1.2 

 per 10,000, while in the unprotected it was 

 442.9. Similarly at Sheffield in 1887-8* 

 the deaths per 10,000 were 7.5 among the 

 vaccinated and 347.9 among the nnvac- 

 einated. An objection to statistics of this 

 sort, made with some plausibility, is that 

 the unvaecinated class includes a large pro- 

 portion of children and of persons in feeble 

 health or living under poor sanitary condi- 

 tions. Kegarding the first point, the 

 Sheffield figures are conclusive. They are 

 divided according to age periods and show 

 that the rates per 10,000 living between 

 fifteen and twenty years were, 7.0 in the 

 vaccinated and 1,355.5 in the unvaecinated. 

 Here no age diffei-ence comes in question. 

 The second contention is met by the 

 statistics collected by Korosi with reference 

 to 14,678 pei'sons dj'ing from various 

 causes in some Hungarian hospitals in 

 1S86. The unvaecinated constituted 14 



' Reviewt'd bv Riirriilge, loc. cit. 



