[1138] “Observation on Smallpox as it has occurred in London in 1825.” Med. and Phys. Journ. Feb. 1826, p. 117.
[1139] Med. and Phys. Journ. 1826, p. 122. “The general voice of the public satisfactorily showed that the upper ranks of society suffered during the past year from smallpox much less than the lower.”
[1140] Gregory, Report on the Smallpox Hospital, 4 Dec. 1825.
[1141] Farr, in the First Report of the Registrar-General (1839, p. 100), said: “It may be safely asserted that the parish clerks registered little more than half the deaths that occurred within the limits of the London bills of mortality.” Outside the limits of the bills there were large parishes, such as St Pancras, Marylebone, Kensington and Chelsea, which had large mortalities from smallpox in the first years of registration.
[1142] Tables in Murchison’s Continued Fevers of Great Britain.
[1143] Med. Chir. Trans, XXIV. 15. His other papers are: “Cursory Remarks on Smallpox as it occurs subsequent to Vaccination,” ibid. XII. 324; and “Notices of the Occurrences at the Smallpox Hospital during the year 1838,” ibid. XXII. 95. He contributed the treatise on Smallpox to Tweedie’s Library of Medicine, I. 1840, and indicated his final opinions (which are interesting) in his Lectures on the Eruptive Fevers, 1843.
[1144] Kenrick Watson, “Medical Topography of Stourport and Kidderminster.” Trans. Prov. Med. and Surg. Assoc. II. 195.
[1145] John Roberton, “On the Increasing Prevalence of Smallpox after Vaccination.” Lond. Med. Gaz. 9 Feb. 1839, p. 711. Roberton had been a warm supporter of the Jennerian method from as early a date as 1808, when he was resident in Edinburgh, and again in his book on The Mortality of Children, in 1827. The above cited paper is somewhat satirical, the disappointing facts of it being referred to the Island of Barataria. His conclusions are (p. 713): (1) “It is not fact, but conjecture, that the protective power of cowpox gradually ceases in the human system. (2) It is not fact, but conjecture, that a person successfully re-vaccinated is less liable to smallpox than he was before. (3) To affirm that, when re-vaccination fails in individuals, they are thereby proven to be secure from smallpox, is conjecture.”
[1146] Cowan, “On the Mortality of Children in Glasgow,” Glas. Med. Journ. V. (1831), p. 358, does not give Cleland’s figures, but says: “No bills of mortality except those for the Royalty in the Glasgow Courier are in existence for the period from 1812 to 1821”; and again: “Finding that the suburbs were excluded, and the Calton being the burying-place in which the greatest number of children are interred, I thought it needless to insert any tabular view of the deaths by measles since the date of Dr Watt’s tables.” Watt could have made no tables if he had not gone direct to the sixteen MS. volumes of burial registers, including those of the Calton.
[1147] J. C. Steele, Glas. Med. Journ. N. S. I. 60: “From 1812 to 1835 it is much to be regretted that no record of the deaths from smallpox has been kept for even a limited period.”