Lectures on the eruptive fevers : as now in the course of delivery at St. Thomas's hospital, in London / by George Gregory.
- George Gregory
- Date:
- 1851
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Lectures on the eruptive fevers : as now in the course of delivery at St. Thomas's hospital, in London / by George Gregory. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![1842, the number of cases of scarlet fever was just one half that of measles.] Everything teaches us that when one avenue to death is closed, another opens,— Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis. You will perceive from all this, that vaccination, great as its merits are (and no one more fully appre- ciates them than I do), does not, and cannot do all that its too sanguine admirers promised. The blessings of vaccination are met and counterbalanced by the law of vicarious mortality. How and why is this 1 The explanation is easy. The weak plants of a nursery must be weeded out. If weakly children do not fall victims to small pox, they live to fall into the jaws of tyrants scarcely less inexorable. Scarlet fever and measles are both advancing in respect of mortality, and the increase of deaths by hooping cough since this century set in is quite extraordinary. These statistical considerations are both curious and instructive, but they are not to diminish our zeal in behalf of vaccination, or our efforts to lessen the sum of human misery. [The subject of vicarious mortality is one of much interest, and one which has not received the attention it deserves. Statistics prove that the per centage of deaths under five years of age is rather on the increase than the contrary, in cities at least; or, at any rate, remains about stationary, and that at a high point in the scale, notwithstanding the many lives acknowledged to have been saved by vaccination ; and it is no less true, that the mortality by scarlet fever, measles, and hooping cough has increased, both in this country and in Europe, within the last twenty years. It must necessarily be the case that the lives saved from small pox increase, by just so many, the number of those who are exposed to other causes of death ; and if the susceptibihty to each exanthem be the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21055257_0027.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
