The vaccine contest, or, Mild humanity, reason, religion, and truth, against fierce, unfeeling ferocity, overbearing insolence, mortified pride, false faith, and desperation : being an exact outline of the arguments and interesting facts, adduced by the principal combatants on both sides, respecting cow-pox inoculation; including a late official report on this subject by the Medical Council of the Royal Jennerian Society / by William Blair.

  • Blair, William, 1766-1822.
Date:
1806
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The vaccine contest, or, Mild humanity, reason, religion, and truth, against fierce, unfeeling ferocity, overbearing insolence, mortified pride, false faith, and desperation : being an exact outline of the arguments and interesting facts, adduced by the principal combatants on both sides, respecting cow-pox inoculation; including a late official report on this subject by the Medical Council of the Royal Jennerian Society / by William Blair. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    formed that a similar fatality has been experienced in several other parts of the United Kingdom. SURGEON.—This melancholy truth is easily explained. The last quarterly Report of our Royal Jennerian Society, (read Dec. 4, 1805.) has hit upon the true physical cause of so deplorable a cala - mity ; viz. the contagion of small-pox, disse- minated BY MEANS OP THE RENEWED AND GREATLY INCREASED PRACTICE OF INOCULATION FOR THIS dreadful disease. It may clearly be proved, from the yearly bills of mortality in this metropolis, that a greater number of persons have annually died in London of the small-pox since the use of inoculation than before ! The calculation has been taken on a large scale, for the period of eighty or a hundred successive years ; from which it is evident, on an average, that there are at least seventeen (some reckon even so many as twenty-one) deaths from small-pox in every thousand who die, more than there were before the practice of variolous inoculation ! So that if we allow eighty-nine deaths by small-pox, out of every thousand who have died in London, since the practice has been introduced ; there was a much smaller proportion than this, not less than seventeen in a thousand, before the use of inoculation : and so lamentable a fact can be explained only by admitting, that the partial inoculation of small-pox (for it never was universal) keeps up a perpetual source of conta- gion in the air, which infects those who might other- wise have escaped the disease through life. The