Papers relating to the history and practice of vaccination.

  • Great Britain. General Board of Health.
Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Papers relating to the history and practice of vaccination. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    escaped this infection.* * * § Seventy years of age were no security; and for such as were dis- posed to triumph at the end of an epidemic which had spared them, there was often quoted the old saw, Nemo ante obitiim beat us. Thus, at every rumour of the disease, men might tremble for the valuable lives of othersf or for their own; and that horror of the living- patient, which so loathsome an infliction occasioned, became, when death had ended his sufferings, a very panic towards his corpse. J Perhaps at no previous moment of English history had the horror of small-pox been greater or more fully justified than at the beginning of the last century. And now for the first time there came to us a story that we could, so to speak, make terms with this loathsome and murderous enemy; that, by receiving it of our own accord, we could disarm it; that we could (as it was expressed) “buy the small-pox” cheap ; that the susceptibility to contract its fatal infection could be exhausted by artificial means, giving, indeed, the disease, but giving it so mildly, that life was almost unendangered in the process. This, indeed, was substantially the fact; and to the present time it remains one of the most interesting and least explained facts in pathology, that the specific contagion or ferment of small-pox, so uncontrollable in its operations, when it enters a man in the ordinary way of his breathing an infected atmosphere, becomes for the most part disarmed of its virulence, when it is artificially introduced to the system through a puncture of the skin; so that a person exposed to this artificial infection very generally contracts the disease in its mildest and most tractable form.§ This practice, subsequently known in England as inoculation for the small-pox, seems to have been followed for ages in the East. Not only, it is said, had the Chinese since the sixth century been accustomed to procure, by special means of their own, an artificial infection of the disease; but the Brahmins from remote antiquity had practised the very operation which was now to be discussed in England. In Persia, Armenia, and Georgia, it is stated also to have been in vogue, and to have spread as a popular custom, not only about the shores of the Mediterranean, but even to those of the Baltic, to Scotland, and still less accountably to Wales. It was not thus, however, that the discovery first became notorious in England, but in the years 1714-16 communications on the subject were published in London by members of the medical profession who had witnessed in Constantinople and Smyrna the great success of the practice; and in 1717 Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s well-known letter (xxxi.) from Adrianople effectually awakened the public curiosity. Yet by her example, even more con- vincingly than by her pen, did Lady Mary introduce the knowledge of inoculation ; for while * “ All mankind, with few exceptions, are susceptible of the variolous poison at some period of their lives “ A few persons pass through a long life apparently insensible to or insusceptible of the small-pox virus. It is a “ curious and important circumstance, that, so far as is yet known, such constitutions exhibit a like inaptitude to “ receive and nourish the vaccine disease.”—Gregory, in Cyclop. Pract. Medicine, iii. 744. f E. g. “ The small-pox raged this winter (1694-5) about London, some thousands dying of them, which gave us “ great apprehension with regard to the Queen, for she had never had them. In conclusion she was taken ill ”— Burnet’s Hist. William and Mary, p. 136. J Witness Saint Simon’s account of the Grand Dauphin’s death:—“ La Valliere fut le seul des courtisans qui, ne “ l’ayant point abandonne pendant sa vie, ne l’abandonna point apres sa mort. II eut peine a trouver quelqu’un pour “ aller chercher des Capucins pour venir prier Dieu aupres du corps.” Or Besenval’s description how, on a different occasion, when Louis XV. had been huddled into his coffin, “ quelques pretres, dans la chapelle ardente, furent It s “ seules victimes condamnees a ne pas abandonner les restes d’un roi qui .... &c.” § Moore’s Hist, of Small-pox, p. 218 et seq. ; also communications by Timoni and Pylarini in the Philosoph. Transactions, Nos. 339 and 347 ; also Kennedy’s Essay on External Remedies, 1715; and Maitland s Account of Inoculating the Small-pox, 1722. In Kennedy’s Avork, p. 157, mention is made of “some parts of the Highlands of Scotland, where they infect their children by rubbing them with a kindly pock, as they term it;” and the attractive estimate given of such inoculated small-pox is, that “ it need be no more minded than as in giving or taking the itch.” Commence- ment of 18 th century. Inoculation of small-pox. Introduction of the practice in England.