An inquiry on the subject of vaccination : addressed to the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society / by Benjamin Ridge.

  • Ridge, Benjamin
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An inquiry on the subject of vaccination : addressed to the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society / by Benjamin Ridge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    with the most accurate particulars as to the age of the subject when Vaccination was performed j cases unaccompanied with such particulars being of no importance. Secondly.—Cases of the occurrence of small-pox, under what- ever circumstances, in children under a year old, specifying their exact age. [I have for a long time doubted the liability of infants to imbibe the small-pox miasma, or to generate the disease within themselves while at the breast, or at any time before cutting their eight incisors and four bicuspidati, unless under extraordinary circumstances, such as exposure to filthy exhalations and effluvia, or contact with dirty, diseased parents. I have never met with the case of an infant affected with small- pox when not vaccinated, where ordinary care and cleanliness were observed; though I have looked for such cases diligently since the discovery of the new structures above mentioned. The fact that infants are born with small-pox at the time when the parents are suffering under that disease has no bearing on the question.] Thirdly.—Cases where rashes or eruptions of any kind have occurred after Vaccination, with such particulars as can be ascer- tained relative to the age and appearance of the virus employed. Fourthly.—What rules or criteria practitioners have followed in reference to the choice of the vesicle made use of to propagate the disease. Lastly.—That any information upon these or any analogous topics which gentlemen may be enabled to contribute be received and collated; and that the Registrar-General be solicited to co-operate. From the mass of valuable matter which might be thus collected, the Society might, between the closing of the present and the opening of their next session, bring a useful amount of physiological and statistical information to bear on the subject. In connexion with the observations in the preceding para- graphs I may be allowed to close with a remark from Dr. Jenner's Third Treatise, p. 41. The scepticism that appeared even among the most en- lightened of medical men, when my sentiments on the important subject of the cow-pox were first promulgated, was highly laudable. To have admitted the truth of a doctrine at once so novel and so unlike anything that ever had appeared in the annals of medicine, without the test of the most rigid scrutiny, would have bordered upon temerity; but now, when that scrutiny has taken place, not only among ourselves but in the first professional circles in Europe, and when it has been uniformly found in such abundant instances that the human frame, when once it has felt the influence of the genuine cow-pox in the way that has been