How illiteracy should affect inoculation, he left to conjecture. He apparently forgot that the practice was derived from people who made no pretence to literature, and whose efficiency and success were, moreover, set forth as warrant and encouragement for English imitation.
In 1775 a Society was formed for General Inoculation, and an hospital was opened for the purpose at Battle Bridge, on the site of what is now the Great Northern Railway station, King’s Cross. Dr. Lettsom, a popular Quaker physician, issued an appeal on behalf of the enterprise, and having invoked Dr. Dimsdale’s approval, a lively controversy ensued between the brethren—personal rather than profitable. Dimsdale disapproved of indiscriminate inoculation: he was ready to inoculate the whole world, but systematically, and under strict safe-guards. He pointed out that whatever might be the advantage to the individual, unless the inoculated patient was rigorously secluded, he would diffuse the disease from which he sought to be delivered, and that the price of his life might be the destruction of many. Dimsdale’s warnings were, however, slightly regarded, and inoculation was pursued with criminal recklessness. As Pascal observes, of all the faculties given to man, the most awful in its consequences is the power of standing amid a number of facts, and seeing such as we please to see, and being blind to the rest.
Specially remarkable in connection with the smallpox of last century was the exaggerated terror expressed for it by professional inoculators, and the little real terror manifested by the multitude. It was by no means the most fatal of diseases, nor was it a large factor in the common mortality. Wherever we test the matter by unbiased contemporary evidence, we find the outcry factitious: the dreadful and desolating malady from which Jenner delivered his country is merely a fiction continued by the vaccinators from the inoculators. For proof let us turn to the evidence of Dr. Alexander Monro, Professor of Medicine and Anatomy in the University of Edinburgh. The Faculty of Medicine in Paris had appointed a commission to inquire into the advantages of inoculation, which in the course of duty applied to Monro, who in response produced and published in 1765 An Account of the Inoculation of Smallpox in Scotland. He reported that from the introduction of the practice by Maitland in 1726, there had been 5554 inoculations effected in Scotland with 72 fatalities; that is to say about 140 annually with deaths 1 in 78, according to the confession of the inoculators themselves. Monro further stated that the practice was disliked in Scotland as “a tempting of Providence,” an unwarrantable risk of life for an uncertain advantage. Our present interest, however, is in the statistics of deaths from smallpox in Edinburgh for a series of twenty years thus adduced by Monro.
| Burials | From | Burials | From | ||
| from all | Smallpox. | from all | Smallpox. | ||
| Diseases. | Diseases. | ||||
| 1744 | 1345 | 167 | 1754 | 1215 | 104 |
| 1745 | 1463 | 141 | 1755 | 1187 | 89 |
| 1746 | 1712[63] | 128 | 1756 | 1316 | 126 |
| 1747 | 1200 | 71 | 1757 | 1267 | 113 |
| 1748 | 1286 | 167 | 1758 | 1001 | 52 |
| 1749 | 1132 | 192 | 1759 | 1136 | 232 |
| 1750 | 1038 | 64 | 1760 | 1123 | 66 |
| 1751 | 1241 | 109 | 1761 | 903 | 6 |
| 1752 | 1187 | 147 | 1762 | 1305 | 274 |
| 1753 | 1105 | 70 | 1763 | 1160 | 123 |
| ——— | —— | ——— | —— | ||
| 12,709 | 1256 | 11,613 | 1185 |
Here we have a piece of valid experience with every advantage to the smallpox terrorist: for Edinburgh last century was a city contrived as if for the generation and perpetuation of smallpox. The population of 55,000 was lodged thickly in flats, in houses of many storeys, closely built in lanes and courts—a population densely compacted as any in Europe, with arrangements for cleanliness indescribable, at this day perhaps incredible. Yet in conditions so propitious to smallpox, we see before us the total outcome during a series of twenty years; and reprehensible as the result may appear to contemporary sanitarians, who hold, and rightly hold, that all zymotic diseases are preventible, yet it affected Monro with no anxiety or dismay: nor does the rate of mortality of old Edinburgh contrast unfavourably with that of the modern city. The case of Edinburgh, however, serves to show that in all cases when we hear of the ravages of smallpox before Jenner appeared as deliverer, our policy is to insist firmly upon the production of special and adequate evidence: it is monstrous that the assertions of common quacks, whether inoculators or vaccinators, should pass into tradition and be accepted as unquestionable verity.
We have, moreover, to observe that the mortality from smallpox in Edinburgh was infantile mortality: for as Monro testified—
The inhabitants of Scotland generally have the smallpox in their infancy or childhood; very few adults being seen in this disease. Whether this is owing to any particular constitution of the air, or of the people, or to the disease not being so much dreaded as to cause any to fly from the place where it is, or to the great intercourse which must be among the inhabitants of the towns, of which several, nay, many families enter to their houses by one common stair, while in the villages the peasants are generally assistant to their neighbours of whose family any is sick, it is not now necessary to inquire.
Not only were the habits of the people contributory to the diffusion of eruptive disorders, but likewise their food, of which oatmeal was the staple, whilst vegetables were few, fruit rare, and tea unknown. Hence many maladies had free course; and as Dean Ramsay relates, a girl on her arrival at Mrs. Betty Muirheid’s boarding-school in the Trongate, Glasgow, when asked whether she had had smallpox, replied, “Yes, mem, I’ve had the sma’pox, the nirls [measles], the blabs [nettle-rash], the scaw [itch], the kink-host [whooping-cough], the fever, the branks [mumps], and the worm [toothache].”