[CHAPTER XXVIII.]
INTRODUCTION OF VACCINATION TO THE UNITED STATES.
Leaving England for awhile, let us see how it fared with vaccination in some other countries.
As before observed, the introduction of vaccination to practice is sometimes described, as having been a labour of difficulty, a strife with prejudice, a victory of light over darkness; but there was nothing in reality answering to such magniloquence. The battle was won for vaccination by variolation, for which it was exhibited as a harmless and more efficient substitute. Unless the entrance of vaccination into the place of variolation be recognised, its quick and easy triumph is inexplicable. A novelty that King George and Queen Charlotte, the Prince of Wales, and the Royal Dukes accepted without hesitation or reserve, could not in the nature of things have required the exercise of much intelligence. Any serious resistance proceeded from the variolators, who considered their craft in danger when parsons, women, and tradesmen were approved of as vaccinators by Jenner himself. Such opposition to vaccination as is common at this day was not possible in the early years of the present century. We know that health is the best defence of health, and that illness is proof of ill-living; but, to our forefathers, illness was a mysterious dispensation to be encountered with submission, relieved by prescriptions, magical and natural. Hence not only dull Royalty was involved in the cowpox craze, but men of science like Davy, Wollaston, and Darwin, with the whole troop of men of letters, of whom Sir Walter Scott may be taken for spokesman. Describing Queen Caroline in “The Heart of Midlothian,” he says—
The lady had remarkably good features, though somewhat injured by Smallpox, that venomous scourge, which each village Æsculapius (thanks to Jenner) can now tame as easily as his tutelary deity tamed the Python.
For credulity thus expressed there was large excuse. What else, indeed, could one in Scott’s position have been expected to believe? It was only through the hard disenchantment of experience that vaccination did not prevent smallpox, nor mitigate its severity, nor was in itself harmless, that the early delirium abated, and a less rabid persuasion supervened.
The wave of conviction spread from England over the world, and nowhere was the substitution of vaccination for variolation welcomed more enthusiastically than in New England. As Boston led the way in 1721 in the practice of smallpox inoculation, so from Boston in 1800 was announced the project for the extermination of smallpox by cowpox. But ere advancing farther, it may be well to say a word about Boston smallpox.
Boston was an extremely unhealthy town. For fifty years, from 1701 to 1750, the births were exceeded by the deaths. In a population of about 15,000, the annual death rate ranged from 30 to 70 per thousand. There were epidemics of fever and of smallpox; the latter occurring in general at intervals of ten years, when large numbers died, the smallpox as usual displacing other forms of fever, but nevertheless raising the mortality of the year. The most deadly outbreak of smallpox was that of 1721, the year in which Cotton Mather and Zabdiel Boylston introduced variolation. The mortality of that year was 1102, of which 884 were ascribed to smallpox. In 1752 there was an extraordinary epidemic, but how much of its prevalence was due to circumstance and how much to contrivance, it is impossible to divine. Here are the figures, which are of singular interest—
Boston in 1752. Population 15,684.
| Had Smallpox. | Died. | Were Variolated. | Died in con- sequence of Variolation. | |
| Whites, | 5060 | 470 | 1985 | 24 |
| Blacks, | 485 | 69 | 139 | 6 |
| —— | —– | —— | — | |
| Total, | 5545 | 539 | 2124 | 30 |