A letter to the inhabitants of Ceylon on the advantages of vaccination / by J. Kinnis.

  • Kinnis, John, 1794?-1853.
Date:
1837
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to the inhabitants of Ceylon on the advantages of vaccination / by J. Kinnis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    of that place ; but its progress was immediately arrested by the indiscriminate vaccination of all the prisoners; and it found its way to no other part of the island, except to Putlam, where a cooly from Jaffna was taken ill of the disease in December, and recovered without communicating it to any other person. On this, as on all similar occasions, the appearance of small-pox had the good effect of proving the preservative efficacy of vaccination, and of rousing the people from their apathy in regard to it; for no fewer than 1,830 persons were vaccinated in the district of Jaffna, in the two last months of 1809, and amongst them several Bramins, men and women, who had hitherto declined submitting to the operation*. Yet the total number vaccinated in 1809 was five hundred less than in 1808, being 25,697. In January 1810 there remained only six cases of small-pox in Jaffna: the disease was kept up for some time longer by one of the native headmen, who presisted in inoculating with variolous matter, in defiance of a government order forbidding it; and small-pox was detected the same year in several other districts, but did not spread to any extent; only one case occurred in the district of Colombo, in a person who was ascertained to have brought the disease from the Kandian country, and there was no instance of any one who had gone through cow-pox having received the contagion The pre- sence of small-pox this year seems to have given an unusually strong impulse to vaccination, for the number vaccinated was 35,076, or more than double the annual average of the pre- ceding eight years. In February 1813, two recruits for the second Ceylon regiment, labouring under small-pox, landed from the Coast at Chilaw ; but the disease did not spread, and with this exception we find no mention of it from 1810 to the middle of 1819; and This INESTIMABLE BLESSING was Conferred on ceyi.on by VACCINATION. III. The absence of small-pox from the island for so long a period had the unfortunate effect of causing an annual diminution in the numbers vaccinated, from 35,076 in 1810 to 13,010, in the maritime districts, and 13,563 in the whole island in 1818. Vaccination had been first introduced into the Kandian provinces so lately before as September 1S16. and the total number vaccinated therein up to the end of * Chuistie pp. 94, 95. t Dr. High\s Letter to the Editor of the Ceylon Government Gazette. 2nd February 1611.