Dimsdale had plans for the systematic inoculation of Russia, but they resulted in little. Catharine’s purpose was sufficiently served in the display she had made; and possibly she came to consider Dimsdale an appendage of that deceiver Voltaire, whose busts, that had adorned her saloons and corridors, were by her orders thrown into the cellars when the French revolution opened her eyes to the consequences of French philosophy.
In perusing the literature of inoculation, nothing impresses a reader, enlightened by sanitary science, so much as the manner in which smallpox was regarded as something like hail or lightning that might be averted, but could not be prevented. So far, I have not met with even a hint in that literature that smallpox was either induced by unwholesome modes of life, or that it could be avoided by wholesome modes. In conjunction with this blindness was the amazing assumption of the inoculators, that every one inoculated was to be placed to their credit as saved from smallpox; as if (granting inoculation to be prophylactic) smallpox was ever a universal epidemic, and as if multitudes did not pass through life without smallpox before inoculation was heard of. The true problem to be set and solved in all epidemics, whether of influenza or smallpox, is why some are susceptible and some insusceptible, and whether it is not practicable so to modify conditions as to carry over the susceptible to the ranks of the insusceptible.
FOOTNOTES:
[64] Humphries’s Life of General Putnam, p. 151.
[65] These letters of Benjamin Waterhouse, M.D., Professor of Physic at Cambridge, Mass., appear in Haygarth’s Plan to Exterminate Smallpox. London, 1793.
[66] The History of the Smallpox. By James Moore. London, 1815. P. 288.
[67] Diderot and the Encyclopædists. By John Morley. Vol. ii. p. 114.
[68] Dimsdale: Tracts on Inoculation.