Such was the memorable Norwich epidemic. However dreadful, it was in no wise extraordinarily dreadful. If the death-rate was raised for a single year, it would be reduced in subsequent years, and the average rate recovered that accorded with the common obedience of the community to the laws of health. In Nature consequences are equal, and any temporary aberration is in the long run compensated for. If vaccination could have kept smallpox from Norwich, the citizens would have had in some other form the measure of disease that pertained to their way of life.
We might, moreover, inquire, whether to escape an epidemic, severe as that of 1819, it would have been economical to put 40,000 people through the pains and perils of vaccine fever. Why should a universal affliction be incurred to avert a partial one?—an affliction confined to the young of the lower orders. The vaccination of Norwich from 1801 to 1819 would have cost far more sickness and death than did the smallpox of the same years. In short, if vaccination had conferred the immunity claimed for it, the price of the salvation would have been in prodigious excess of its value.
FOOTNOTE:
[268] A History of the Variolous Epidemic which occurred in Norwich in the year 1819, and destroyed 530 Individuals; and an Estimate of the Protection afforded by Vaccination, and a Review of Past and Present Opinions upon Chickenpox and Modified Smallpox. By John Cross, Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. London, 1820. Pp. 296
[CHAPTER XXXIV.]
SMALLPOX DISPLACED AND REPLACED.
DR. WATT’S DISCOVERY—GLASGOW, 1813.
Addressing the House of Commons in 1878, Sir Thomas Chambers said, “You cannot show that Vaccination has reduced deaths, or saved a single life. There may be no Smallpox, but the disappearance of Smallpox is by no means equivalent to a reduction of mortality.” M.P.’s were astonished and incredulous; but ignorantly. The fact is incontestable; and Dr. Robert Watt of Glasgow had the signal distinction of detecting and setting it forth in the year 1813.[269]
Watt was writing a treatise on Chincough, otherwise Whooping Cough, and in the course of his work made a careful examination of the registers of death in Glasgow to ascertain how far it was true “that the disease was more fatal some years than others; that it was more dangerous at a particular age; and that the female sex suffered more from it than the male;” and, from the outset of his investigation, “was struck with the immense numbers carried off yearly by the Smallpox.” He might well be struck; for Glasgow was a rare place for Smallpox, as appears from the following statement compiled from Watt’s Tables—
Deaths in Glasgow for Ten Years, 1783-1792.