INOCULATION FOR THE LUNG PLAGUE, ETC. 
367 
ing the contagion. In the one city (Edinburgh) in which the re 
suit of annihilating the disease has been claimed, it was shown 
that there existed special conditions, which eminently adapted the 
city to benefit by this measure without danger of spreading the 
disease, and that, without at all detracting from the value of in¬ 
oculation in that particular instance, it was only just to note that 
it was there supplemented by the slaughter of the sick and disin¬ 
fection of the premises, which, in the absence of inoculation, had 
virtually stamped out the disease from New York City in an 
equally short period of time. In the present paper will be set 
forth some of the dangers that would attend a general resort to 
inoculation over a whole country. 
The same contagious material is propagated in the inoculated 
disease as in the disease contracted in the natural manner. —To 
read the writings of most advocates of inoculation, one might be 
led to suppose that they were operating with a poison entirely dif¬ 
ferent from that of the lung plague. A well-known author says: 
“ An objection to inoculate which weighs in the case of human 
and ovine small pox, as well as rinderpest, is, that the inoculated 
disease is contagious ; that the cohabitation of healthy with inocu¬ 
lated animals may lead to extensions of the infection, and that 
the foci whence the disease spreads are always on the increase. 
Such objections cannot weigh against the inoculation for the lung 
plague, as the inoculated malady is not communicated, except by 
re-inoculation. My observations on this point are very numerous, 
and I do not know of a single instance recorded in which conta¬ 
gion from inoculated animals has been witnessed.” 
Such confident assertions would cast grave doubts on the value 
of the operation as a preservative from the plague. The liquids 
inoculated are the virulent products of the diseased lung; and as 
these do not produce disease of the lungs of the inoculated ani¬ 
mal, but only of the tissues where they have been inserted, it can¬ 
not be supposed that they exert any influence on the economy 
through any direct action on the lungs. If protective at all, it 
must be by reason of the propagation and increase of the disease 
germs of the lung plague in the blood, or in the seat of inocula¬ 
tion. If m the blood, there must be danger of their being given 
