To conclude, I beg this small treatise may be considered only as an imperfect sketch drawn up in haste; but if it should be approved of, and her Imperial Majesty be pleased to command me to enter into farther particulars, I will employ my utmost endeavours to render it more perfect, and also assist in the execution of any part of what has been therein proposed.
A short estimate of the number of those who die of the natural Small Pox, with a view to demonstrate the advantages that may accrue to Russia, from the practice of inoculation.
It is needless to expatiate upon the havock which the Small Pox makes in most parts of the known world: probably there is not a country, city, or smaller community, which has not experienced its devastations in its turn. The very idea of it is insupportable; but its real effects, in places unapprised and unacquainted with the proper treatment and remedies against it, are not less general and fatal than the plague itself.
Though this fact is generally allowed, yet many, I think, are ignorant of the immense loss mankind sustains by this distemper. It may not be amiss therefore to shew, from well attested accounts, the proportion of persons who die of the natural Small Pox: for which purpose it will be necessary to chuse some country or city where an exact register of the births and deaths, as well as an accurate list of diseases, is regularly kept.
Dr. Jurin, secretary to the Royal Society in London, carried this into execution in 1722, soon after Inoculation had been introduced into England, being desirous of shewing the different effects of the natural and inoculated Small Pox.
I shall not here insert all that was published by this ingenious author, as the whole may be found in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, under Nᵒ 374. The following extract will be sufficient for my present purpose.
The Doctor for forty-two years selected from the Bills of Mortality in London, such as died there of the Small Pox and other distempers. His observation may appear perhaps somewhat extraordinary: nevertheless he makes it plain, that out of 1000 infants, 386 die under two years of age, which is considerably more than one third. He then deducts such as he supposes die of the diseases natural to infancy; and afterwards proceeds to demonstrate, that if the whole bulk of mankind be taken at the age of two years, the eighth part will die of the natural Small Pox; and that of such as have it in the natural way, one in five or six dies.
With respect to my own calculations on this subject, I endeavoured to find out whether the Small Pox proved equally fatal after the time mentioned by the Doctor. With this view, before I left England, I procured the Bills of Mortality of the City of London for the last thirty-four years, excepting two, which could not be found. Of these I made a table, which I have added at the end of this treatise. I was surprized to find the number for these thirty-two years past tally so exactly with the observations made by Dr. Jurin.
On examining the table it appears, that within these last thirty-two years 760,098 persons have died, and of those 268,529 have been infants under two years of age, which agrees with Dr. Jurin’s calculation, in being rather more than one-third of the whole.