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
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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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    To offer the benefit of gratuitous vacci¬ nation to the poorer classes, is an effort of political munificence which will so obviously compensate* itself by the lives it preserves to the public, that I shall not dwell upon its re¬ commendation, To effect it in those parts of our country where fortunately the practi^ tioners of medicine are numerous, or even in those distant districts where they are less frequent, appears to be an article of minute expense, compared with the object to be attained by it, and of easy execution. I shall proceed to a question more difficult in its nature, and less popular perhaps in its execution—whether it be proper, consti¬ tutionally and legally considered, that the Legislature should interpose to restrict or re¬ gulate the practice of variolous inoculation. That the natural small-pox is a disease not less loathsome than it is infectious, we know from its history, since first it spread con¬ tagion over the globe: we trace it in the
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