Vaccination reduced the deaths from Smallpox in London to 10 per week; but after the Inoculators had been making their clamours, the applicants for Vaccination diminished, and the deaths soon rose to 100 per week.
Now can effrontery itself deny that the introduction of Vaccination was the sole cause of reducing the fatality on the Smallpox list?
Thus one in ten being vaccinated, smallpox was reduced throughout the unvaccinated 9-10ths; and as soon as the vicarious operations dropped, up went the rate of mortality! Nor was Hill singular in this persuasion. He cited his friend Dr. Lettsom as writing to him, 25th March, 1806—
Vaccination was gradually lessening the mortality in 1804, when about the middle of 1805 false reports against Vaccination gained very general credit, and Vaccination was nearly suspended; the consequence was the death of 1286 children in four months (September to December) or ten every day, each of whom might now have been alive had the blessing of Vaccination been accepted.
And again I find Lettsom wrote to Moseley, November, 1808—
The increase of births and decrease of deaths has added 3000 lives annually to the population of London during the period that Vaccination has been practised.
Talk evidently sincere, and widely repeated, but with how little consideration for truth!
To return to Moseley. He was not the man to endure Hill’s aggression submissively, and in a pamphlet entitled An Oliver for a Rowland,[174] he made a terrific reprisal. The public were delighted with it, and in the course of a few months it ran through ten editions. Hill was generally regarded as a clerical mountebank, with more impudence than piety, and to see him knocked over, kicked, and rolled in the mire, was sport that carried many sympathisers. Moseley’s opening address gives the key to the whole performance—
Rowland,—I bought your pamphlet, entitled Cowpox Inoculation Vindicated, dated the 25th of March, 1806.
I paid a shilling for it. Rowland,—it is not dear. The same quantity of folly, falsehood, and impudence, could not have been bought for twice the money of any other Cowpoxer from the Ganges to the Mississippi.