A review of the early vaccination controversy with an original letter by Jenner referring to it, and to the spread of vaccination to the Spanish possessions in America, the Philippines and other European settlements in the Orient / [Philip King Brown].

  • Brown, Philip King, 1869-1940.
Date:
[1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A review of the early vaccination controversy with an original letter by Jenner referring to it, and to the spread of vaccination to the Spanish possessions in America, the Philippines and other European settlements in the Orient / [Philip King Brown]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    greater, under judicious treatment, than i in i,(X)0. It cannot be denied, however, that besides this risk to life, the disease, even under this mitigated form, has frequently proved an exciting cause to scro- phula, and other dreadful distempers, and has often been attended with blindness and deformity.” It will be clear from these statements what a frightfully high mortality attended epidemic small- pox, and its prevalence may be estimated from the data presented later by the House of Com- mons Committee appointed to investigate cow-pox vaccination. From a calculation made by Dr. Heberden whose name has come down to us through the association with the nodes on the joints in rheumatism, it seems that over a period of thirty years before vaccination 95 persons died of small-pox in Ivondon nut of every 1000 deaths, and the annual death rate of Great Britain was upw'ard of 40,000. This would make the number of cases of small-pox annually between 240,000, based on all the deaths being from the natural disease, to a half million if one-fortieth of the total deaths were due to the inoculated disease. This was the status of affairs when Jenner an- nounced the results of his observations on cow-pox and its relation to the prevention of small-pox. His own account of these observations is Interest- ing; “My inquiry into the nature of the cow-pox commenced upwards of twenty-five years ago. My attention to this singular disease was first excited by observing, that among those whom in the country I was frequently called upon to Inoculate, many resisted every effort to give them the small- pox. These patients I found had undergone a dis- ease they called the cow-pox, contracted by milk- ing cows affected with a peculiar affection on tbeir