1884. J 
Vaccination. 
131 
But if the vaccinated are in no better position than the 
unvaccinated with regard to attack, are they not better 
situated with regard to recovery ? The answer of the French 
record is clear to the contrary. Taking the years and groups 
of Departments as above, the figures in regard of smallpox 
deaths to births are 52 to 17, 52 to 11, and 28 to 8. The 
less vaccination, the less smallpox mortality. 
Yet further, the proportions of smallpox deaths to small- 
pox cases for the same groups and years are, in percentages, 
9-1 to 77, I 2‘9 to 8*5, and io*6 to 9-2 ; or for the three 
years taken together, io*86 in the Departments most vacci- 
nated to 8^46 in the Departments least vaccinated. These 
fadts are so much opposed to the constant assertions made 
respecting the greater fatality of smallpox among the un- 
vaccinated, on the authority of Hospital reports, that we 
must now endeavour to bring a little scientific measurement 
to bear on these. 
To obtain our standard rule we must revert to the condi- 
tion of things in the last century, in this country, when and 
where the smallpox was a more or less constant subjedt of 
controversy. The controversy arose in this manner : — Lady 
Mary Wortley Montague returned from Turkey imbued with 
the desire to introduce the Turkish method of inoculation 
of the smallpox as a means of averting an attack of the 
disorder when epidemically prevalent. All English physi- 
cians did not take kindly to the notion ; and when her 
ladyship’s influence at Court procured the release of six 
prisoners from Newgate, conditional on their submitting to 
the operations of Mr. Maitland, there were pretty lively 
passages of literary arms among the medical men who took 
an interest in the subjedt, the operator and his friends re- 
porting a complete success, and others denying that the 
disease inflidted had any of the proper characteristics of 
smallpox. None of the six died, however, from the effedts 
of the operation, and fashion and fashionable physicians 
speedily arranged themselves by the side of her ladyship. 
Among these was Dr. Jurin, some time Secretary of the 
Royal Society, who took the very obvious method of recom- 
mending the new practice by contrasting the small fatality 
resulting from it with the general fatality of smallpox oc- 
curring in the usual way. He was an industrious, clever, 
and honest partisan, and, by no small efforts, he collected 
from different parts of this country records of various epi- 
demic attacks amounting altogether to 18,066 cases with 
2986 deaths, being a fatality of 16*53 per cent. The con- 
clusion that this should be accepted as the normal fatality of 
