BOOK V
SMALL-POX, ONE OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST SCOURGES
CHAPTER XII
MEASURES ADOPTED FOR THE CONTROL OF SMALL-POX
I. Inoculation
About the year 922 of the present era the Arabian physician Rhazes wrote and published (in MS.) the earliest known report of the malady now called Variola or Small-Pox. From this fact the inference should not be drawn that the disease first came into existence in the time of Rhazes, for it can scarcely be doubted that it had already existed in the East for ages before the period mentioned. Since the thirteenth century it has appeared repeatedly in epidemic form in widely separated countries, causing, especially among the eastern nations, a fearful mortality. Sydenham, the great English physician, succeeded during the seventeenth century in devising a method of treatment that in some degree diminished the mortality of this affection, at least in Great Britain. It was, however, in no sense a preventive procedure, and the spread of small-pox continued unchecked until Jenner, in 1796, introduced vaccination; and even then the efficiency of this method was not promptly acknowledged by the Medical Profession; indeed, several years had to elapse before even the best London physicians, the men who possessed the most complete facilities for ascertaining the whole truth with regard to Jenner and his new method, became convinced that a great and most efficacious protection against small-pox had at last been found. In the meantime—that is, for almost half a century—the procedure known as “inoculation” was accepted by the upper classes of the community in all parts of Europe as affording the maximum amount of protection attainable against the disease.
There were in Europe, during the last half of the eighteenth century, two physicians—Baron Thomas Dimsdale, an Englishman, and Dr. Théodore Tronchin, of Geneva and Paris—who obtained considerable celebrity as inoculators.
The first-named, Baron Thomas Dimsdale, was born in 1712 and began to practice his profession in 1734 at Hertford, twenty-four miles north of London. Already as early as in 1741 he had acquired so great a reputation for his success, both in performing the operation and in carrying the patient safely through the resulting infection,—that is, through the attack of small-pox thus artificially produced,—that he was sent for to inoculate first the Czarina of Russia, then the Grand Duke Paul, and subsequently the children of many of the first families of the Russian Empire. Shortly after his return to England he was made a member of the Royal Society, and at a still later date the city of Hertford chose him as their representative in the House of Commons. In 1781, on the occasion of his second visit to Russia, he inoculated the Czar Alexander and the Grand Duke Constantine. His death occurred on December 30, 1800.