MR. WHEELER’S RESEARCHES.
Fatal cases of smallpox are confluent cases, and in confluent cases vaccination marks rarely show up so as to answer to Marson’s description of marks distinct, foveated, dotted, or indented, with a well, or tolerably well-defined edge. And in this matter our acute and industrious friend, Mr. Alexander Wheeler, has explored the records of the Smallpox Hospitals, and proved that vaccination marks many or vaccination marks few have no influence whatever on the character or issue of smallpox. As Mr. Wheeler shows, the classification of smallpox into discrete and confluent is the only clue to the right estimation of the fatality of the disease. Smallpox in the discrete form, that is, when the pustules are distinct and separate, is not dangerous when uncomplicated with other disease, the overwhelming majority of patients recovering, vaccinated or unvaccinated. The contest between life and death is waged among the confluent cases, where the pustules are so close that they run together; and it is on these confluent cases, and the conditions and antecedents of the sufferers, that attention should be concentrated. There is a third form of smallpox, the malignant, chiefly confined to persons of irregular life, which is almost invariably fatal, and, as vaccinators themselves allow, vaccination in malignant smallpox affords no odds to its victims.