Volume 1

History and pathology of vaccination / by Edgar M. Crookshank.

  • Edgar Crookshank
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: History and pathology of vaccination / by Edgar M. Crookshank. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    likewise be perform’d with a lancet. The custom is to run the needle transverse and rip up the skin a little, that there may be a convenient dividing of the part, and the mixing of the matter with the blood more easily perform’d; which is done either with a blunt stile or an ear-picker. The wound is cover’d with half a walnut shell or the like concave vessel, and bound over, that the matter be not rub’d off by the garments ; which is all removed in a few hours. The patient is to take care of his diet. In this place, the custom is to abstain wholly from flesh and broth for twenty or twenty-five days. This operation is performed either in the beginning of the winter or in the spring. . . It was observ’d in a year when the common Small Pox was very mortal, that those by incision were also attended with greater symptoms. Of fifty persons, who had the incision made upon them almost in the same day, four were found in whom the eruption was too sudden, the tubercles more, and symptoms worse. There was some suspicion that these four had caught the common Small Pox before the incision was made. It is enough for our present purpose that there was not one but recovered after the incision; in these four the Small Pox Came near the confluent sort. At other times the inoculated are distinct, few, and scattered; conunonly ten or twenty break out; here and there one has but two or three, few have 100. There are some in whom no pustule rises, but in the places where the incision was made, which swell up into purulent tubercles; yet these have never had the Small Pox afterwards in their whole lives, tho’ they have cohabited with persons having it.” Another account of the Byzantine method of inoculation was published by Dr. Pylarini,’^ who described the operation as it was performed in his presence upon four sons of a Greek nobleman, by an old woman who had long practised inoculation. The Pylarini, Phil. Trafis., 1716, vol. xxix., p. 393.
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