PROFESSOR WOLCOTT GIBBS,
President of the National Academy of Sciences, Emeritus Rumford Professor and Lecturer on the Applications of Science to the Useful Arts at Harvard University.
THE
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY.
JUNE, 1900.
PREVENTIVE INOCULATION. (I.)
By Dr. W. M. HAFFKINE.
DIRECTOR-IN-CHIEF, GOVERNMENT PLAGUE RESEARCH LABORATORY, BOMBAY.
It was due to certain particularly favorable circumstances that the first ideas on preventive inoculation were gathered from observations on smallpox patients. Such circumstances were presumably the following:
a. It is a disease which attacks epidemically, in a short time and within a small area, large numbers of people, thus permitting of easy comparisons and suggesting conclusions from the facts observed.