Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1721, Maitland had gone down to Hertford, where smallpox would seem to have been more rife than elsewhere, and had done several inoculations. In the family of a Quaker, near Hertford, an infant of two and a half years developed no more than twenty pustules, which lasted only three or four days; but six domestics of the house, four men and two maids, “who all in their turn were wont to hug and caress this child whilst under the operation and the pustules were out upon her” (Maitland), caught natural smallpox in varying degrees of severity, some of them having a narrow escape, while one of the maids died.

The question that people were really anxious about was the immediate risk to the inoculated; and as there were occasional fatalities, especially to the age of childhood, inoculation made little progress. In the first year of its trial in England it was done on the greatest scale by Dr Nettleton, of Halifax, whose practice remains for more particular notice. Apart from his cases, which numbered sixty-one, the following are all that were known in England from the month of April, 1721, to the end of 1722[880]:

ByMr Amyand, surgeon, London 17
"Mr Maitland, surgeon, London and elsewhere 57
"Dr Dover, London 4
"Mr Weymish, London 3
"Rev. Mr Johnson, London 3
"Dr Brady, Portsmouth 4
"Messrs Smith and Dymes, Chichester 13
"Mr Waller, Gosport 3
"A woman at Leicester 8
"Dr Williams, Haverfordwest 6
"Two others near Haverfordwest 2
"Dr French, Bristol 1

The inoculations in all England in 1723 reached the considerable total of 292; but in 1724 they were no more than 40, being distributed among the various operators as follows:

Amyand, London 11
Maitland, London 4
Pemberton, London 3
Cheselden, London 1
Pawlett, London 1
Howman and Offley, Norwich 3
Beeston, Ipswich 3
Lake, Sevenoaks 3
Goodwin, Winchester 1
Mrs Ringe, Shaftesbury 2
Skinner, Ottery St Mary 6
Tolcher, Plymouth 2

In the next two years, 1725-26, Amyand and Maitland had respectively 66 and 37 cases in London, the other known cases in London being 30. Maitland had also 16 cases in Scotland. Sir Thomas Lyttelton had 4 at Hagley. All the known cases in those two years, including Nettleton’s at Halifax, came to 256, with four deaths of somewhat conspicuous persons. In 1727 the inoculations fell to 87, and in 1728 to 37. The total in eight years was 897, with 17 deaths. For the next ten or twelve years none were heard of in Britain. The check, however, was only temporary. The practice revived, extended among the rich, at length reached the common people in some counties, and gave rise to important developments of scientific doctrine. The greater these developments the more interesting the origins, which we shall now examine.

The popular Origins of Inoculation.

Six years before the Greek inoculation was tried in London, Kennedy, the travelled Scot, had compared the Constantinople practice with one that he knew of in his native country: “So also in some parts of the highlands of Scotland they infect their children by rubbing them with a kindly pock.” This indigenous Scots practice was confirmed by Professor Monro, the first, of Edinburgh, in 1765:

“When the smallpox appears favourable in one child of a family, the parents generally allow commerce of their other children with the one in the disease; nay, I am assured that in some of the remote highland parts of this country it has been an old practice of parents whose children have not had the smallpox to watch for an opportunity of some child having a good mild smallpox, that they may communicate the disease to their own children by making them bedfellows to those in it, and by tying worsted threads wet with the pocky matter round their wrists.”

And, to make it clear that this was not the same as the method afterwards used of procuring the smallpox, he adds that the latter was not known in Scotland until Maitland introduced it, in 1726[881]. In Wales the curious practice of buying the smallpox was found to be indigenous[882]. One young woman in a village near Milford Haven testified in 1722 that, some eight or nine years before, she had bought twenty pocky scabs of one in the smallpox, and had held them in her hand, with the result that she sickened with the infection in ten or twelve days and had upwards of thirty large pustules in her face and elsewhere—at least ten more than she had bargained for. A schoolboy of Oswestry, who had since become an attorney and must have known the nature of an affidavit, bought, as he positively affirmed, for three-pence of a certain lady twelve pustules of smallpox (at a farthing each), and rubbed the matter into his hand with the back of his pocket-knife; a sore remained on the hand as well as pockpits in his face.