I 32 Vaccination. [March, 
natural smallpox was hotly contested by Dr. Wagstaffe, a 
well-known contemporary of Jurin, who declared that when 
he wrote the fatality of smallpox did “ not exceed one in a 
hundred.” And Isaac Massey, at the same period, Apothe- 
cary to Christ s Hospital, stated that in several years only 
one child (“ and he a surgeon’s patient before ”) had died of 
the disorder, although “ hundreds had been down of it.” 
Time operates with cooling wings ; and we may fairly sup- 
pose all partisan heat dissipated when the writer of the 
article on Smallpox Inoculation for “ Rees’s Cyclopedia,” 
published in 1779, stated that “ From a general calculation 
it appears that, in the hospitals for smallpox and inoculation, 
72 die out of 400 having the distemper in the natural way, 
and only one out of this number when inoculated.” That 
is, in the smallpox hospitals in this country in the last 
century, all the patients being necessarily unvaccinated, the 
fatality was 18 per cent. We take this as our standard rule. 
Now the disorder of smallpox being always of the same 
general character, “ changed in nothing,” and hospital ac- 
commodation at present not being inferior to that of the 
last century, we might fairly expecft the hospital fatality now 
to be about 18 per cent for the unvaccinated, and propor- 
tionately less in the total as the proportion of vaccinated 
patients incieased, if tt weve tvue that these died at a lower 
rate than the others. On the basis of a death-rate for the 
vaccinated of (say) one-fourth of that of the unvaccinated, 
what would be the total fatality in a hospital where one-half 
of the patients were vaccinated? Answer, percent. 
On the same basis, what would be the total fatality in hos- 
pitals where three-fourths of the patients were vaccinated ? 
Answer, 7$ per cent. But in the Highgate Smallpox Hos- 
pital, during the sixteen years 1836 to 1851, there were 5652 
patients, of whom 3094 (more than half) were classed as 
vaccinated, yet the fatality in the total was 19-97 per cent ; 
and in the hospitals under the care of the Metropolitan 
Asylums Board, during 1870, ’71, and ’72, there were 14,808 
patients, of whom no less than 11,174 (just over three- 
fourths) were classed as vaccinated, yet the fatality in the 
total was 18-66 per cent. That is to say, that what is proved 
true of the populations at large of England, Scotland, and 
France, is proved true also of the patients in smallpox hos- 
pitals, that the extension of vaccination has no diminishing 
effedt upon the smallpox death-rate. 6 
Although these hospital reports, which may be taken as 
typical, for almost all those published are drawn up on the 
same lines, reveal in this striking manner the failure of 
