London Vaccine Institution, for inoculating and supplying matter free of expense : Report and Prospectus.

  • London Vaccine Institution
Date:
1814
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: London Vaccine Institution, for inoculating and supplying matter free of expense : Report and Prospectus. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the success of the irresistibly impetuous followers of Mahomet has been attributed. “The army and most of their attendants, except their children, having previously had the small-pox, would introduce it into every fresh province they invaded, where it would attack nineteen in every twenty of the inhabitants, and prove fatal to one fourth of the whole people ; when the contagion is first introduced among barbarians, its mortality usually rises to this proportion. Let us picture to ourselves the wretched distress that must inevitably result from such compli¬ cated calamities. In circumstances so embarrassing, few nations could resist a foreign invasion. It hence appears, that a principal cause of the revolutions of nations is buried in the darkest oblivion/* Among the ignorant natives on the western coast of Africa, the small-pox has often made considerable ravages. It sometimes raged in the vessels conveying the wretched natives across the Atlantic into bondage, and thus even reached the colonies to which the poor suf¬ ferers were transported. The small-pox was carried from Africa, in 1738, into South Caro¬ lina, where it proved exceedingly fatal, as it did soon afterwards in Philadelphia, till the mortality, in both places, was arrested by ino¬ culation. By means of a present of an old infected blanket, to an American Indian, nearly a whole tribe of them was swept away by the small¬ pox. The small-pox was first introduced into the frozen regions of Greenland in 1733; when the mortality of this disease was so great, that it almost depopulated the whole country. Some years ago, it. made its appearance amongst a tribe of Esquh maux Indians, on the coast of Labrador, and raged with unprece¬ dented violence. Many of the natives tied, to avoid the contagion, and did not venture to return till ihree years were elapsed, when their country had become a desart, in which they found the skeletons of five hundred persons who had fallen victims to the disease. The small-pox was first introduced into New Spain in 1520, by a negro slave who attended Narvarez in his expedition against Cortes, J orribio affirms, that one half of the people in the provinces visited with this distemper died. According to tiie reports which Cortes ordered to be made to him, there died in the empire of Mexico, alone, 3,500,000. Not long after this, 800,000 Indians perished by fresh variolous infection brought over from Europe, which has con¬ tinued to communicate this scourge at intervals of thirty, twenty, or a Jess number of years. The infection extending itself from Vera
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