PROTECTIVE INOCULATIONS. 301 
‘‘The statement of that Commission that the statistics which they had 
been able to obtain of the preventive inoculations of Ferran were to a con- 
siderable degree void of any official character may be true, and perhaps it is 
also true that they emanated from the partisan friends of Ferrdn ; but it must 
be distinctly remembered that at that day there were practically no official 
statistics of this kind in the hands of any one. The official statistics collected 
under the orders of the Spanish Government were gotten together at a far 
later date. 
“Upon the appointment of the Government at Madrid of the second offi- 
cial Spanish Commission to investigate the Ferrén question in the provinces 
where the inoculations were being practised, it was ordered that official sta- 
tistics of inoculation should be collected in the usual manner; that is to 
say, by the customary statistical officers of the Government. This second 
medical Commission was also accompanied by an independent statistical 
commission who were charged with the duty of forming statistics of those 
inoculations which were expected to be witnessed by the Medical Commission 
in their tour of investigation, and the report to the Spanish Government of 
this statistical commission is based exclusively upon the official statistics 
which they themselves collected. 
‘In estimating the value of the official character and the authority of the 
official statistics, which have since the visit of the French Commission to 
Spain been collected and published, the following circumstances should be 
taken into account: The provincial governments of Spain are somewhat 
peculiar, in that the civil governors change with the changes which take 
place in the Government at Madrid, so that the political constitution of the 
provincial governments is always a reflex of that of the central government 
at Madrid. Moreover, the political sentiment of the provincial government 
is also more or less perfectly reflected by the local governments of the towns 
of the province. 
‘‘The hostility of the Minister of the Interior at Madrid to Dr. Ferran, and 
his attempts at the prevention of cholera by inoculation, is a well-known fact 
now generally admitted ; and the hostility which Dr. Ferran met with from 
the civil governor of the province of Valencia was even greater than that 
manifested by the Minister of the Interior himself. 
“The official statistics of the Ferr4n inoculations are in the first place 
signed by the physicians of the locality ; and in the next place by the judge 
of the municipal court, and sometimes also by the president judge of the 
judicial district, by the parochial priest, and by the mayor of the municipality, 
whose signatures and seals are attested by an authorized notary public. 
“Tt must, therefore, be obvious that the charge made by the French Com- 
mission, which has been so constantly reiterated everywhere, that the public 
statistics of the anti-choleraic inoculations are void of official character and 
are to be regarded as ex-parte testimony of the partisans of Ferran, cannot 
apply to official statistics which were collected under the supervision of the 
municipal authorities of the villages wherein the inoculations were per- 
formed, and attested not only by the local judicial officers and the parochial 
priests, but also by the political officers—that is to say, the secretaries and 
the mayors of the municipalities ; for it must be admitted that neither the po- 
litical officers of the municipalities nor of the provincial governments, any 
more than the parochial priest, can reasonably be charged with being the 
partisans or friends of Ferran—the Minister of the Interior continuing dur- 
ing the time of collection of these official statistics to be hostile to the claims 
of Ferran. It therefore follows that the attack upon the statistics of the in- 
oculations made by the French Commission, and so widely accepted by the 
medical world as conclusive, does not apply to the official statistics of which 
we are speaking. And, in view of this fact, the evidence as to the efficiency 
and harmlessness of the anti-choleraic inoculations should be re-examined. 
As I have already said, the results of the preventive inoculations of Ferran 
as set forth in the official statistics appear to very strongly support his claim 
