Vaccination and its relation to animal experimentation / Jay Frank Schamberg.

  • Schamberg, Jay Frank, 1870-1934.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vaccination and its relation to animal experimentation / Jay Frank Schamberg. 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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    common during the seventeenth century and reached their maximum of frequency and extent in the eighteenth century. For official data concerning the disease in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we are largely indebted to the London Bills of Mortality, which gave a weekly account of burials and christenings, and from 1629 to 1S45 the specific causes of death, in- cluding smallpox. It has been estimated that the population of London in 1685 was 530,000; in 1750 it was approximately 653,900; in 1801 it was determined by census to be 746,233. The mortality from smallpox in London for an aver- age of ten years, from 1681 to 1690, was over 3 per thousand of population (3,000 per 1,000,000) ; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it frequently rose to 4.5 or more per thousand. In the 54 years from 1647 to 1700, there was an aver- age mortality from smallpox in London of 1,079 per year. The average yearly deaths by smallpox in the eighteenth century were 1,958. As it has been com- puted that about one in five died, it would appear that there were on an average over 5,000 cases of smallpox annually in the English capital in the seventeenth cen- tury, and almost 10,000 cases a year in the eighteenth century. As will be readily comprehended, smallpox was a great scourge before the days of vaccination; but a small percentage of people escaped its ravages. It is asserted by contemporaneous writers that in the eighteenth cen- tury from 85 to 95 per cent, of the inhabitants of Euro- pean countries suffered at one time or another from the smallpox. Indeed, smallpox was as prevalent in the eighteenth century as measles is at the present time. Haygarth gives an account of an epidemic of smallpox in Chester, England, in 1744, at which time, out of a population of 14,713, 1,202 persons took the disease and 202 died. At the termination of the epidemic there were but 1,060 persons, or 7 per cent, of the population who had never had smallpox. In 1722 smallpox devastated the small English town of Ware, whose population numbered 2,515 souls; of this number, there were only 914 persons susceptible to smallpox, inasmuch as 1,601 had already passed through an attack of the disease. During the epidemic referred