UNVACCINATED DEATH-RATES.
Our contention does not end here. Such is the prejudice in favour of vaccination that a bad case of smallpox is assumed to be an unvaccinated case. Over and over again has it been proved that vaccinated patients dead of smallpox have been registered as unvaccinated, their death being taken as evidence of the absence of the saving rite. Again in severe smallpox, when vaccination marks are invisible, the sufferer is frequently set down as unvaccinated. Dr. Russell, of the Glasgow Hospital, relates that patients entered as unvaccinated, showed excellent marks when detained for convalescence. Had they died, they would have gone to swell the ranks of fearful examples.
It is thus that the high death-rates of the unvaccinated are accounted for, the framers of hospital reports appearing to vie with each other in extravagance. We are continually adjured in the newspapers to confess our folly and repent, because 40 or 60 or 80 per cent. of the unvaccinated have perished in this or that hospital because unvaccinated. To us such statistics have fraud written on their face, and the more they are sworn to, the more unscrupulous do their vendors reveal themselves. When all were unvaccinated last century, the hospital death-rate of smallpox ranged about 18 per cent. Now we are asked to believe that death-rate has doubled, trebled, quadrupled, and for no other reason apparently than to make for the glory of vaccination.