Notes suggested by the Franklin-Heberden pamphlet of 1759 / by Henry K. Cushing.

  • Cushing, Henry K. (Henry Kirke), 1827-1910
Date:
[1904]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes suggested by the Franklin-Heberden pamphlet of 1759 / by Henry K. Cushing. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    one of five, were also successfully operated upon in the spring [278] of 1722. The Princess now influenced Sir Hans Sloane, the Court physician, to wait upon the King (George I), for his assent. His Majesty concurring, the Princesses Anne and Caroline were, on the 19th of April, 1722, inoculated, under the di- rection of Sir Hans, a year after the operation on Lady Mary's daughter. But 845 persons in all England, were inoculated in the eight years following the example given by Lady Mary, and of these 17 died, nearly one in fifty. Hence we may judge of the slow and struggling development of the practice, and that the operators had not yet attained to the supposedly safer ways of the oriental performers. Even the learned Heberden, 30 years later, was in grave fault in his pamphlet directions. He says every one would desire to be inoculated from as healthy a person as he could, and then strangely adds, though I believe the health of the person from whom the matter in taken is of very little consequence; it is of none whether he had a good or bad sort, whether he had few or many. This (279) contrasts badly with the old woman who comes with a nut shell of the matter of the best small pox. By 1740 the practice had become nearly obsolete in Eng- land, but favorable accounts coming from the West Indies and both Americas a new impetus was given it. The planters and other slave holding iolk of the new world had largely adopted it to preserve their costly slave property from sick- ness, blindness and death from the scourge, so virulent with the dark skinned races. The Carmelites, and Friars of other orders in Portuguese and Spanish America, had introduced the practice, with great advantage, in the Indian races. In 1746 the small pox hospital of London was founded to extend the practice among the city poor, and to sequester them, while ill, from the people at large. In 1754, the influential College of Physicians of London declared its full approbation of the practice, and in 1759 we have found large hearted Dr. Heberden invoking Frank- (9>