[895] Ibid. fol. 43. The City Remembrancer, 1769, a work claiming to be Gideon Harvey’s, says that in the Great Plague of London, 1665, some low persons contracted the French pox of purpose to keep off the infection of plague.
[896] Inquiry how to prevent the Smallpox, Chester, 1785:—“No care was taken to prevent the spreading; but on the contrary there seemed to be a general wish that all the children might have it.” Cited from Mr Edwards, surgeon, of Upton, near Chester. Again (Sketch of a Plan, &c., 1793, p. 491), “They neither feared it nor shunned it. Much more frequently, by voluntary and intentional intercourse, they endeavoured to catch the infection.”
[897] History of Physic, Lond. 1725-26, II. 288. This was written at a time when the novelty of inoculation had passed off, and may be taken as Freind’s mature opinion. Douglass, of Boston, writing in 1730, implies that Freind’s objections had been overcome; which may mean no more than he says in general: “Yet from repeated tryals the Anti-Inoculators do now acknowledge that inoculation, generally speaking, is a more easy way of undergoing the smallpox.” Condamine, in his French essay of 1755, counts Freind among the original supporters of inoculation, and ridicules the opposition to it. Munk, in citing the title of Wagstaffe’s Letter to Dr Freind showing the danger and uncertainty of Inoculating the Smallpox (London, 1722), omits the words “to Dr Freind,” at the same time describing the pamphlet as “specious.” There seems no reason to doubt that Freind shared Wagstaffe’s views.
[898] Hecquet, of Paris, who is supposed to have been the original of Dr Sangrado in ‘Gil Bias,’ gave the following reasons against inoculation (Raisons de doutes contre l’Inoculation): “Its antiquity is not sufficiently ascertained: the operation rests upon false facts: it is unjust, void of art, destitute of rules: ... it doth not prevent the natural smallpox: ... it bears no likeness to physic, and savours strongly of magic.”
[899] James Jurin, M.D., Account of the Success of Inoculation, 1724, p. 3.
[900] G. Baker, M.D., Oratio Harveiana, 1761, p. 24.
[901] Sloane, Phil. Trans. XLIX. 516.
[902] They are given in Maitland’s Vindication, 1722, and in one of Jurin’s papers.
[903] In regard to the last of them, when Frewen in 1759 was controverting the fancy of Boerhaave and Cheyne that smallpox might be hindered from coming on in a person exposed to contagion by a timely use of the Aethiops mineral, he said there was a fallacy in the evidence, because many persons ordinarily escape smallpox “who had been supposed to be in the greatest danger of taking it.” Huxham also pointed out that a person might be susceptible at one time but not at another, or insusceptible altogether; and the elder Heberden wrote: “Many instances have occurred to me which show that one who had never had the smallpox may safely associate, and even be in the same bed with a variolous patient for the first two or three days of the eruption without any danger of receiving the infection.” William Heberden, sen., M.D., Commentaries on Disease, 1802, p. 437.
[904] Dr James Jurin was educated at Cambridge, and elected a fellow of Trinity College. He became a schoolmaster at Newcastle, where he also gave scientific lectures. Coming to London, with a Leyden medical degree, he devoted himself to the Newtonian mathematics and was made one of the secretaries of the Royal Society, Newton being the president. He was one of the original physicians of the new hospital founded in the Borough by Guy, the rich bookseller. He made a fortune by medical practice, and was elected president of the College of Physicians a few weeks before he died. In medicine his name is associated with the inoculation statistics, the idea of which, as well as most of the substance, he got from Nettleton, and with “Jurin’s Lixivium Lithontripticum,” or solvent for the stone, the idea of which belonged originally to Mrs Johanna Stevens, and was sold by her to the State for five thousand pounds on the 16th of June, 1739, the prescriptions having been made public in the London Gazette of 19th June. On the 15th of December, 1744, Jurin was called to see the Earl of Orford (Sir Robert Walpole), who was suffering from stone, either renal or vesical. He began administering his alkaline solvent, “four times stronger than the strongest capital soap-lye,” and during the six weeks of his attendance had given his patient thirty-six ounces of it. Horace Walpole made him angry by arguing on the medicine: “It is of so great violence that it is to split a stone when it arrives at it, and yet it is to do no damage to all the tender intestines through which it must first pass. I told him I thought it was like an admiral going on a secret expedition of war with instructions which are not to be opened till he arrives in such a latitude.” (Letters of Horace Walpole, Cunningham, I. 339.) His services were at length dispensed with, and the earl, whose case was probably hopeless before, died in a few weeks. A war of pamphlets followed, Ranby, the serjeant-surgeon, maintaining that the patient had “died of the lixivium.” Mead, also, expressed himself strongly upon the attempt to use a modification of Mrs Stevens’s solvent.