On Vaccination. • ' [A^Ritj 



examine, rersders it impossible to admit them as proofs in a 

 discussion like the present. 



We have met with strangers to the art of medicine, especially 

 parents, who have assured us that their children, after having 

 been carefully and successfully vaccinated, experienced several 

 inconveniences, sometimes eruptions, sometimes a weakness of 

 health to which they had not been subject before vaccination. 

 These symptoms in some cases obliged them to have recourse to 

 blisters and issues in order to remove them. It was impossible 

 for us to make ourselves so well acquainted with the origin of 

 these facts as to be able to judge how far the allegations were 

 well founded \ but without rejecting them altogether, we may 

 say that all the children, and even adults, that we have had an 

 opportunity of vaccinating ourselves, or that we have seen vacci- 

 nated, never exhibited any such symptom. 



There is a circumstance which we observe frequently, and to 

 which we ought to attend particularly, while discussing the 

 present question. We often see an accidental impression, an 

 emotion, a fall, occasion the developement of a disease, to the 

 nature of which that occasional cause is obviously a stranger. 

 The small-pox itself often appears after such accidents, and in 

 other cases they have occasioned violent fevers or other maladies 

 to which a disposition seems to have pre-existed, and only 

 required an occasion to call it into action. Is it not also possible 

 that in circumstances which we can neither determine nor 

 foresee, vaccination may give occasion to the appearance of a 

 malady, without being its cause, and thus bring about what any 

 other commotion would have done, experienced at the same time? 

 In that case there would be nothing in such diseases connected 

 with vaccination, or proceeding from the cow-pox virus. 



Since then there is not one of the observations, collected 

 hitherto, which can of itself serve as a proof of the opinion 

 which we are examining, it remains for us to see whether taken 

 collectively their number is such, compared with that of the 

 cases whose history is known, as to give some solidity to the 

 objection. 



The collections to which we have had recourse already, in order 

 to give an answer to the other questions, will still furnish us with 

 numerous facts to satisfy this. 



The correspondence of Paris, besides the .facts which we have 

 noticed above, furnishes the following : erysipelas in the arm in 

 the proportion of one case to 10,000 ; suppurations continuing 

 in the cow-pock, in the proportion of 1 to 10,000 ; and these 

 are only local accidents, particular to the parts on which the 

 inoculation was performed. As to general accidents, they have 

 only been observed when from particular objects the number of 

 punctures has been very much increased, as when they have 



