A letter to the Right Honourable Spencer Perceval ... on the expediency and propriety of regulating by Parliamentary authority the practice of variolous inoculation, with a view to the extermination of the small-pox.

Date:
1807
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to the Right Honourable Spencer Perceval ... on the expediency and propriety of regulating by Parliamentary authority the practice of variolous inoculation, with a view to the extermination of the small-pox. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    hand of the'state can confer a general good, or can restrain a general evil, it is no visio¬ nary speculation that calls for its assistance; no duty of imperfect obligation that should prompt it to exertion. When, in the year 1720, the public mind, deluded by prospects of sudden wealth, and intoxicated by the arts of projectors, was turned from the progress of industry to the flights of adventure—the Legislature by its acts, the Crown by its proclamations, inter- i posed to crush the bubbles that had been \ raised ; to prohibit these nuisances” from ' being again created, and to rescue the people from the effects of their own infatuation: and this, too, when the mischief applied to the fortunes only, not to the health, the safety, and relative population of the empire. But that due measures of restraint and of coercion, and, where the public health is in¬ terested, even of domestic interference v/ithin t]je,*j>ody of the kingdom, may not be I