Is vaccination injurious? : a popular essay on the principles and practice of vaccination / by Henry Alleyne Nicholson, M.D.

  • Nicholson, Henry Alleyne, 1844-1899.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Is vaccination injurious? : a popular essay on the principles and practice of vaccination / by Henry Alleyne Nicholson, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    the disease, and its final retirement from the place, will be due either to the fact that alarm has led to the establishment of something like an efficient quarantine, or to the fact that all who are susceptible to the malady have been attacked; its ultimate recession, in either case, being helped by the well- known, though unexplained, fact that all epidemics tend to get milder after continuing for a certain length of time, and tend therefore to their own extinction. This is the natural course of an epidemic of scarlatina, and such used to be the course of an epidemic of small-pox. It is clear, however, that the course of either epidemic might be very materially modified by one of two things—either by maintaining a complete quarantine, or by ren- dering those who are subjected to contagion insusceptible, or less susceptible than they would naturally be. In practice it has been found impossible, especially amongst the poor, to maintain anything like a serviceable isolation of the patient; and we may, therefore, leave this out of account, though there is no doubt but that the spread of any infectious disease may be wonderfully limited by a strict system of quarantine. There remains, then, to see if there are any means of annulling or reducing the susceptibility to infection. In the case of scar- latina and measles no such means, beyond special sanitary precautions, are as yet known to us ; though it has been alleged that belladonna exerts a prophylactic effect in the former disease. In the case of small-pox it has been believed for more than seventy years that we have in vaccination such a means of reducing the susceptibility to infection; and the practice of inoculation dates from more than a hundred years earlier. We have now to examine the grounds upon which this belief rests, and we will commence with the consideration of inoculation. Inoculation.—The practice of inoculation for small-pox is one of great antiquity, and was no doubt founded upon the general observation that the disease was not liable a second time to affect, except in rare instances, those who had once suffered from it The practice had been apparently in general use in various parts of the East from time immemorial, and was certainly largely followed in Constantinople in the year 1700.