The nation that will again make this an ideal will produce a finer race of men, and other things equal, will excel in all that makes a people great.
EDWARD JENNER AND VACCINATION
BY PROFESSOR D. FRASER HARRIS, M.D., D.Sc.
DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY, HALIFAX, N. S.
WE are so exceedingly apt to take our blessings as a matter of course that at the present time a large number of us have quite forgotten, and some of us have never known, what a terrible disease smallpox is and from how much suffering national vaccination has saved us. But even many of us, who may not be included amongst those who know nothing of smallpox, do come within the group of those who know next to nothing of the life and work of Dr. Edward Jenner. A number of persons think he was Sir William Jenner, physician to Queen Victoria.
An infectious or communicable disease is one caused by the admission of some form of living matter into the body of a human being or of a lower animal. All diseases are clearly not communicable in the sense that they are due to the presence of living things. Indigestion, for instance, I can not communicate to my neighbor, however serious my dietetic indiscretions.
Now, while the actual microorganisms causing many of the infectious diseases have been discovered in these recent days through the agency of the microscope—one of science's most valuable gifts to suffering humanity—a few diseases undoubtedly infectious have, even up to the present time, not had their microorganic causes discovered. Smallpox or variola is one of these. The term variola is from the Latin varus, a pimple.
The name Small Pox, which first occurs in Holinshead's "Chronicle" (1571), was given to this disease to distinguish it from the Great Pox or syphilis, the French disease, or Morbus Gallicus which attained the proportions of an epidemic in Europe about 1494. The expression "The Pox" in the older medical literature always refers to the Lues Venereal The word "pox" is the plural form of pock; the spelling "pox" is phonetic; "pocks" is the correct form.[1]
[1] Thus the following expression in Galt's "Annals of the Parish" is justified—"My son Gilbert was seized with the smallpox and was blinded by THEM for seventeen days."
Smallpox is unquestionably a highly infectious or communicable disease, and in the language of a past day, there is a virus or poison which can pass from the sick to the unaffected; when this transference occurs on a large scale we speak of an epidemic of smallpox. As Sir William Osler truly says, "It is not a little remarkable that in a disease, which is rightly regarded as the type of all infectious maladies, the specific virus still remains unknown." The same, however, is true of the common diseases of scarlatina, measles and chickenpox. Of some diseases, the virus is a bacillus or coccus, excessively minute fungi recognizable only under the microscope; but the bacteriologists are now beginning to speak of viruses so impalpable that they, unlike ordinary bacteria, can go through the pores of a clay filter, are filter-passers, that is are of ultra-microscopic dimensions. Some authorities conjecture that the virus of variola belongs to the group of filter-passers. The virus of smallpox, however, is very resistant and can be carried through the air for considerable distances; it clings for long periods to clothes, books, furniture, etc.