Hints to parents on the comparative advantages of small-pox and cow-pox inoculation / by William Blair.

  • William Blair
Date:
1806
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hints to parents on the comparative advantages of small-pox and cow-pox inoculation / by William Blair. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    &c. &c. 1 OU who are blessed with the gift of children, are no less bound by the Christian religion, than prompted by parental affection, to preserve your offspring from every threatening evil; and particularly from those destructive pestilential dis* eases which may be caught, either by infectious air, or the breath of contaminated persons. If a plague or a putrid fever raged in your neighbour's family, you would deem it a crime to expose your children to its contagious influence ; and, if you knew any mode of se- curing your babes from infection, through life, how anxious would you be to use such means as early as possible ! Then let me ask, if you ever considered the Small-pox as a dreadful plague, much more dangerous than a common putrid fever ? Do you not know, that the small-pox kills every year about forty thousand inhabitants of this kingdom, little as it is in comparison of many empires ? Did you never leain that, in London alone, nearly three thousand individuals are annually cut off by this single disease ? Surely it is impossible not to have heard, that the natural small-pox destroys a sixth part of those who catch it; and that considerably more than half the population of this Island have the disease, during one period or another of their lives! Those who recover from it, are too commonly disfigured by visible marks; some have their constitutions ruined, or their limbs completely disabled ; while others suffer the loss of hearing or sight, and are ever afterwards afflicted with the scrofula, or consumption, &c. &c. so as to drag on a miserable and burthensome existence ! Should you think to prevent all those distressing conse- quences by inoculating your children for the small-pox ; it is to be remembered that the same kinds of disorders may even .?ht:: follow the inoculation, although the danger is thereby r A I
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