Report of a committee appointed by the Sanitary Commission to prepare a paper on the value of vaccination in armies.

Date:
1861
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of a committee appointed by the Sanitary Commission to prepare a paper on the value of vaccination in armies. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Death-rate per 100 cases. Places and times of observa- Total No. of cases Among the un- Among the tion. observed. protected. vaccinated. Wirtemberg, 183H—5^ 1,442 Carniola, 1834—35 441 Vienna Hospital, 1834 360 511 12i Oarinthia, 1834—35 . 1.626 m k Adriatic, 1835 . 1,102 2} Lower Austria, 1835 . 2.287 254 1H Bohemia, 1835—55 15,640 29f Gallicia, 1836 1,059 23£ H Dalmatia, 1836 . 723 H London Smallpox Hospital, ■ 9,000 35 7 1836—56 Vienna Hospital, 1837—56 6,213 30 5 Kiel, 1852—53 . 218 32 6 Wirtemberg, no date . 6.258 38 ft H Malta, no date . 7,570 21.07 4.2 Epidemiological Society re- ] 4,624 19.7 2.9 turn, no date . . .J In an important paper in the Transactions of the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London (vol. xxxv.), Dr. J. G. Bal- four, Surgeon to Eoyal Military Hospital, Chelsea, shows that the smallpox mortality of the British navy has not reached a third, nor that of the British army a fourth of the London rate; and that in the experience of the Ro}7al Military Asylum for 48 years (within which time 5,774 boys have been received for training), only four deaths by smallpox occurred, and these all in non-vaccinated boys, who were believed already to have suf- fered smallpox once before becoming inmates of the school. And, in the words of the reviewer of the above papers, the combined weight of testimony from all sources of evidence is to show that in the proportion as vaccination is general and efficient, so is the exclusion of smallpox from the community, and the mortality greatly lessened.* From a paper on smallpox and vaccination, read before the Boston Sanitary Association by Robert Ware, M. D., and pre- * Brit, and For. Med.-Chir. Rev., Oct. 1857.