“The leetlepox is nothing,” he declared with a majestic wave of the hand. “I have the remedy to cure, and the remedy to stop it;” and then he began to examine his patients.
He went from one to the other, nodding his head approvingly to some, and shaking his head seriously at others, and administering medicine to all. When the round was made, he came to me, whom he seemed to recognize as chief, saying:
“I cure him, and him, and him, and him,” pointing out the men as he spoke; “him and him and him I no cure.”
With a heavy heart I noticed that the three whom he had designated as beyond the reach of his healing powers were my own comrades. He now did what seemed to me a strange thing. He made every well man among us march up before him, and lancing a place in the arm he rubbed in a thick fluid which he took from a small vial in his case.
“You have not the pox now, or else have it light,” he explained. “My friend Doctor Jenner of London is what you call experimenting with it. Some day it will make him famous. He calls it vaccine.”
I now know he had vaccinated us—a common thing today, and a discovery which, as the Frenchman predicted, has made Doctor Jenner’s name well known the world over—but we had never heard of the process before, and could not appreciate its value then as we did a little later.
So droll was our new friend that he cheered our hearts; so well did he seem to understand the dread disease with which he battled that he inspired our confidence; so strong was his influence with the prison authorities that he secured from them whatever he felt his patients needed; so completely did he transform our prison life that it seemed as though the sun had come out from the thick clouds and was sending its healing beams upon us. The only sadness that came to me while he was with us was the death of the three comrades whose cases he had at the very outset pronounced incurable. Even then he did all he could to comfort me, and obtained permission from the officials for me to accompany them to and mark their graves.
Of the remainder of our crew three did not have the smallpox at all—William Goss, Richard Webber, and myself—due, Doctor Vignor said, to the great sores which formed upon our arms. The others had the disease, but so lightly they were scarcely indisposed.
“It’s the vaccine,” declared the physician.
“Then you should proclaim your remedy to the world,” I insisted.