The truth about vaccination and smallpox / by William B. Carpenter.

  • William Benjamin Carpenter
Date:
[1881?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The truth about vaccination and smallpox / by William B. Carpenter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    inmates of Blind Asylums, even within my own time, owed their privation to it. The fatality of the disease, and the universality of lability to it, were so generally recognised at that time, as to consti- tute the justification for the artificial spread of it by Inocula- tion. This practice, which seems to have prevailed for many centuries previously in some Hastern countries, was introduced into England in 1720 by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the English Ambassador to Turkey; the object of it being to communicate the disease at an early age, in its mild- est form, and under the most favourable circumstances, to those who (it was considered) were sure to take itat one time or another. It soon became general in England, and was common throughout the remainder of the last century ; it was kept up (as I have already mentioned) by a few doctors of the old school, even within my own remembrance; but it was made illegal by Act of Parliament in the year 1840. There is clear evidence that, when practised with due pre- caution, it reduced the per centage mortality from Smallpox; that is, out of every 100 persons to whom the disease was thus communicated, a smaller proportion died, than among 100 who took Smallpox in the natural way. This was in a great measure due to the fact which careful observation has now fully established,—that, under favourable circumstances, Smallpox is less fatal in children than in adults. But as. Smallpox was thus given to many who might otherwise have escaped, and was constantly kept up, instead of only appear- ing epidemically from time to time, the total number of persons who died annually of Smallpox seems to have been rather increased than diminished bythe practice. Notwithstanding the ‘‘protection”’ thus obtained, epidemic visitations of Small- pox still recurred ; and with such severity, that a hundred years ago the Smallpox mortality of London alone, with its. then population of under a million, was often greater in six months, than that of the twenty-five millions in England and Wales is now in any one year. The average Smallpox mortality of this country during the latter part of the last century, is estimated (on the best data procurable) at about 8,060 per million living. How much of this was chargeable upon Inoculation, and would therefore have disappeared with the discontinuance of that practice, it is impossible now to say. We can only judge by general testimony, not only of the Medical but of other writers of that time, that Inoculation was on the whole beneficial. And if we were to admit for the sake of argument that this average mortality of 3,000 per million living, was double what it would have been without Inoculation (an admission scarcely possible to those who know what Smallpox was before Inoculation), we shall presently see what an enormous reduction has since taken place, which can be attributed to nothing else than Vaccination.
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