Copy 1

London Vaccine Institution, for inoculating, and supplying matter, free of expense.

  • London Vaccine Institution.
Date:
1813
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: London Vaccine Institution, for inoculating, and supplying matter, free of expense. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    3g evercoming every artifice to prevent him tearing his flesh to pieces, is the most melancholy:sight which the fond mother can “witness. By-standers no longer recognize the temper or features of the lovely infant. Happy if he escape without actual loss of vision, and the dimples of the cherub cheek are not furrowed into deep seams and unsightly pits. Parents at such a moment would willingly compro- mise every external grace for the possession of life. But fate yet hangs suspended ona thread. The swelling of the face abates. 29. The limbs in their turn become tumefied. 30. The fever, which had remitted somewhat of its first violence, recurs, from the matter ab- sorbed, and the poor tortured victim undergoing a second conflict more dreadful than the first, with weakened powers of resistance, 31. Most commonly from between the fourteenth to the seventeenth day, (one out of three or four usually dying of the natural small- pox) finds a release from his miseries by the arrow of Death, now esteemed as a kind deliverer, instead of the horror of the human conception. 32. Or if nature should come off victorious, how scarred ! how each bone protrudes through the skin! how the limbs totter! how fretful the temper ! ‘how emaciated the countenance! how sunk the eye! how livid the flesh ! Perhaps even then the destroyer has still accomplished his work, and the patient, too early congtatulated, sinks under, 1. A lingering consumption, 2. Or he is eaten away by slow Bae ati ulcers, com- monly called the king’s evil or scrophula.” From the London Bills of Mortality, it appears, that the small- pox have, upon an average, annually destroyed more than 2020 per- sons during seventy-five years, ending at 1777; the total amount be- ing 151,570; and during twenty-four years, ending in 1800, there. were 43,660, cut off by it in the metropolis; making 195,230 victims in ninety-nine years. - . But the destruction made by this pestilential disease, has, proba- bly, been still much greater than is here stated, since those bills do not include the deaths in the two populous parishes of Pancras and Marie-la-bonne, in which the Foundling and Small-pox Hospitals are situated. About the year 1757, the small-pox broke out in Burford, Oxford- shire, occasioned, as was generally supposed, by some infected clothes being sent there from London. It raged with all the fury of a plague, from a short time after Michaelmas, till near Midsum- mer following, duriag which time it was computed to have carried off upwards of 900 of the inhabitants. In consequence of the dis- ease, the market was suspended, the country people not venturing to