“It is incredible!”
It is incredible simply because the facts of smallpox are persistently overlooked. Here is proof of the incredible in a statement carefully prepared by Cross of the ages of the 530 who died in the Norwich epidemic—
| Under two | years of age, | 260 |
| Aged from | two to four years, | 132 |
| ” | four to six years, | 85 |
| ” | six to eight years, | 26 |
| ” | eight to ten years, | 17 |
| ” | ten to fifteen years, | 5 |
| ” | fifteen to twenty years, | 2 |
| ” | twenty to thirty years, | 2 |
| ” | thirty to forty years, | 1 |
| —– | ||
| 530 |
It will be said, as a matter of course, that if these children had been vaccinated they would not have perished; but the answer is that at this day the chief mortality of smallpox is among the vaccinated young, in whom the whole virtue of the rite may be supposed to abide fresh and efficient. Cross was an enthusiastic vaccinator, but he allows, with due excuses, that the vaccinated minority contributed a certain quota to the sick and the dead, and that the ill repute of vaccination caused many in their terror to resort to variolation, and thus to incur and diffuse the mischief of which they stood in dread. Some old women and a druggist were, he says, responsible for four or five hundred of these creations of smallpox during the epidemic, “each of which became a centre of contagion.”
Age, I said, constituted the chief protection from smallpox, but good houses and good fare formed another line of defence. “The effects of the Norwich epidemic were confined almost exclusively,” says Cross, “to the very lowest orders of the people.” Moreover, he observes—
The disease was often aggravated, and made to assume its worst characters, by the most injudicious treatment. The prejudiced and most ignorant being the principal sufferers, the prescriptions of old women were more listened to than the advice of medical men. A practice kept up by tradition among the poor of the city for above a century was revived, in spite of all remonstrance, as follows—
“At the commencement, to set the object before a large fire and supply it plentifully with saffron and brandy to bring out the eruption; during the whole of the next stage to keep it in bed covered with flannel, and even the bed-curtains pinned together to prevent a breath of air. To allow no change of linen for ten or more days, until the eruption had turned; and to regard the best symptom to be a costive state of the bowels during the whole course of the disease.”
Such were the means by which the horrors of the epidemic were aggravated. The old nurses triumphed not a little in having an opportunity of showing their skill after it had been so long unexercised; nor was it often easy, among the deluded persons in whose families this affliction occurred, to persuade or compel them to adopt a different plan of treatment.
Cross described several cases in which unquestionable vaccination had been followed by unquestionable smallpox. In one instance, a girl of eleven years of age, correctly vaccinated in both arms, perished of malignant smallpox, whilst her unvaccinated brother, six years of age, recovered from a severe attack. Such cases in 1819 were treated as exceptional, but they have long passed into the category of matter-of-course, and ceased to excite observation or surprise.