Licence: In copyright
Credit: Dr. Walter Robert Hadwen's works. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.
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![3° reported and remedied since the epidemic. According to a statement by the Medical Officer of Health there was greater sanitary activity in 1897 than for ten years past. A new supply of good water has been obtained; and the main sewer, which extends throughout the entire length of the principal portion of the smallpox district, has been taken up and re-laid at a lower level, so as to allow a better fall for the side streets, which, with other sewer improvements, has cost thousands of pounds. Thus is proved the utter worthlessness of Dr. Coupland ;s white-washings and laboured excuses on behalf of Gloucester Officialdom, WHY GLOUCESTER SUFFERED. I cannot better conclude my criticism than by quoting the unexpectedly frank statement of Dr. Coupland on page 9, where he says:— In almost all respects [unvaccinated] Leicester suffered much less than either Dewsbury or Gloucester; Ihe disease in that town hardly ever assumed the true proportions of an epidemic, its mortality scarcely affected the death- rate for the year, and the attack rates of every period of life, and amongst the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike, were below the mean of the three places taken together. Now, in one particular, without a doubt, Leicester does enjoy an advantage over either Dewsbury or Gloucester, and that is in respect to it- sanitary government. Thus Dr. Coupland himself answers the question why unvac- cinated Gloucester had a smallpox death-rate of over 21 per cent., while still more unvaccinated Leicester had a death-rate of only 5. It will take more than all the sophistry of Dr. Coupland to explain away this pregnant fact, or to get rid of the moral it conveys. In less than another fifty years, his Report on the Outbreak of Smallpox in the City of Gloucester will have been placed among the curiosities of exploded fallacies, to rank with the literature on The Touch for the King's Evil and Joanna Stephen's Cure for Stone. Gloucester provided material for the settlement for ever of the vaccination question, and for the exposure of the folly of the superstitious cowpox rite, which Jenner adapted a century ago from the folk-lore of the dairymaids of its county. With the inexhaustible resources of the Royal Commission at his command, Dr. Coupland might have done a service on behalf of the children of this country, and on behalf of long-suffering conscientious men and women the world over, which would have brought honour to his name, and have yielded him from the hearts of his countrymen and women a far richer reward than any he may have gleaned from the coffers of the State. He has lost his opportunity. In the service of an empirical creed, and under the plea of obeying instructions, he has compiled a tissue of absurdities and contradic- tions which degrade the name of Science, and cover his conclusions with ridicule and reproach.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21361691_0318.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
