A report on vaccination and its results : based on the evidence taken by the Royal Commission during the years 1889-1897. Vol. 1, The text of the commission report.
- Great Britain. Royal Commission on Vaccination
- Date:
- 1898
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A report on vaccination and its results : based on the evidence taken by the Royal Commission during the years 1889-1897. Vol. 1, The text of the commission report. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![COW-POX AND JENNER’s OBSERVATIONS. First, upon wliat was this belief founded ; and, secondly, does the history of smallpox mortality from the time when the practice of vaccination became prevalent, support the view that it has such a protective influence ? 12. Vaccinia or cow-pox is a disease affecting’ milch cows and marked by an erujDtion on the ndder and teats. The disease can be communicated from the cow to man. Dairy- men and maids engaged in milking cows affected with cow-pox are apt to have sores of a special kind on their hands or elsewhere, the development of the sores being frequently accompanied by febrile symptoms. There can be no doubt that, in a certain number of cases at all events, such sores are the local manifestations of cow-pox ; the virus from the eruption on the cow being introduced into some scratch or other imperfection in the skin of the milker, and there ]3roducing its local effects, accompanied more or less by general symptoms. 13. In the treatise to which reference has been made, Jenner records in the first place a number (19) of cases in which a person who had accidentally taken cow-pox from the cow, had never had smallpox and appeared incapable of taking that disease ; the insusceptibility being shown on the one hand by the failure to contract the disease after ample exposure to contagion, snch as nursing and attending to or even sleeping with persons suffering from smallpox, and on the other hand by the fact that when the person in question was inoculated with the matter of smallpox in the manner then nsnal (the matter being tested as to its efficiency on susceptible persons) the inoculation failed to excite smallpox. In the course of the inoculation practice it had been observed that Avhen the operation was performed npon a person who had already had smallpox, either naturally or by inoculation, the wound of inoculation, instead of developing as it did when the operation was successful in a person who had not had the smallpox, into a vesicle and so into a pustule with the variolous characters (the development being accompanied by febrile symptoms and, save in exceptional cases, by the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28062620_0017.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
