[1012] Huxham, Ulcerous Sore-throat, 1757.
[1013] Gent. Magaz. 1751, Supplement, p. 577. See also June, 1751, p. 244, and letter of “Devoniensis,” ibid. 1752, p. 159. The subject had been raised by Corbyn Morris in his Observations on the past growth and present state of London, and was discussed, from an actuary’s point of view, by Dodson in Phil. Trans. XLVII. (Jan. 1752), p. 333.
[1014] The weekly average deaths for eight weeks of September and October is 30·5 from two to five years and 11·1 from five to ten, which are about half the average at each age period during the maximum prevalence of smallpox.
[1015] W. Black, M.D. (Observations Medical and Political on the Smallpox, etc. London, 1781, p. 100) says: “I am induced by various considerations to believe that whatever share of smallpox mortality takes place in London amongst persons turned of twenty years of age, is almost solely confined to the new annual settlers or recruits, who are necessary to repair the waste of London, and the majority of whom arrive in the capital from twenty to forty years of age.”
[1016] Maddox, bishop of Worcester, preaching a sermon in 1752 for the Smallpox and Inoculation Charity, enforced his pleading by relating the recent case of “a poor man sick of this distemper, of which his wife lay dead in the same room, with four children around her catching the dreadful infection, but destitute of all relief, till they found some in that too narrow building which now importunately begs your compassionate bounty to enlarge its dimensions.”
[1017] The Gent. Magaz. Sept. 1752, p. 402, contains a long letter to refute the very prevailing notion among many people that there is very little occasion for doctors and apothecaries in smallpox, but that a good nurse is all the assistance that is usually wanted. “Whence this notion took its rise I cannot conceive, unless it was from the disease being visible, so that every one who has been at all used to it knows it when they see it.”
[1018] This was an argument used in the first writings on Inoculation, so as to prove the real hazard of dying by the natural smallpox. Thus, Maitland in his Vindication of 1722, which Arbuthnot is said to have had a hand in, deducts a quarter of the annual London deaths before he begins to estimate the ratio of smallpox among them, for the reason that eight out of nine infants who die in their first year are “non-entities” quâ smallpox, other causes of death having had the priority (p. 19). Jurin used the same argument for the same purpose in his Letter to Caleb Cotesworth, M.D., 1723, p. 11: “It is notorious that great numbers, especially of young children, die of other diseases without ever having the smallpox”; and again, “very young children, or at most not above one or two years of age,” including the stillborn, abortives and overlaid, chrisoms and infants, and those dead of convulsions. “It is true, indeed, that in all probability some small part of these must have gone through the smallpox, and therefore ought not to be deducted out of the account”; but he does deduct 386 in every 1000 London deaths before he estimates the ratio of smallpox deaths, which so comes out 2 in 17.
[1019] Percival, Med. Obs. and Inquiries, V. 1776, p. 287; population in Phil. Trans. LXIV. 54.
[1020] Haygarth, Inquiry how to prevent the Smallpox, 1784.
[1021] Haygarth, Sketch of a plan to exterminate the Natural Smallpox. Lond. 1793, p. 139.