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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    features of those who have survived its , ' grasp; we read it year after year a conspi¬ cuous title in our bills of mortality. It appears from the Report of the College of Physicians even now to destroy a sixth part of all whom it attacks; that one tenth of the whole mortality in London is occasioned by it; and that even in the disease when palliated by inoculation, one in three hundred has usually died. What then is the benefit of the inoculated small-pox ? That it confers a mitigated dis¬ ease on the individual, while at the same time it fosters, and regenerates, a perpetual source of contagion, which, so far from re¬ pressing, has actually been the means of in¬ creasing the aggregate of deaths occasioned by the general action of the disease. Before the inquiries of Dr. Jenner, by pur¬ suing withthepatient spirit of experiment, the sagacity and ardour of Bacon, a fact which' ];)reviously indeed existed in nature, but the B