A letter to the Right Honourable Spencer Perceval ... on the expediency and propriety of regulating by Parliamentary authority the practice of variolous inoculation, with a view to the extermination of the small-pox.

Date:
1807
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to the Right Honourable Spencer Perceval ... on the expediency and propriety of regulating by Parliamentary authority the practice of variolous inoculation, with a view to the extermination of the small-pox. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    who are inoculated, except it should appear proper to the Legislature to adopt, in its wisdom, some measure by which those who still, from terror or prejudice, prefer the b small-pox to the vaccine disease, may, in thus consulting the gratification of their own feelings, be prevented from doing mis¬ chief to their neighbours.” It is from this passage, expressed with a modesty and a propriety that confer addi- y tional authority on the measures it suggests, that the observations to which your atten¬ tion is thus called particularly apply; nor will they. Sir, it may be hoped, be the less acceptable to the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, from leading him to retrace some paths of our ancient law, which the change of circumstances has rendered less obvious, if not quite forgotten, and to reconsider princi¬ ples of public policy, and humane precaution, which dignified those ages of our ancestors, which, instead of gratefully applauding as wise, we so frequently pity as barbaroua.
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