The Small-Pox Epidemic

Abstract

THE present epidemic of Small-pox in London is the most destructive, we are told, that has occurred in London during the present century. This is a very painful disclosure, when it has been almost demonstrated that, of all contagious and epidemic diseases, it is the one over which man has the most control. It is a well-known fact that when persons have once had the small-pox they seldom or never take it again, and that the disease known as cow-pox is a modified form of small-pox, and that persons who have had this modified form of small-pox are as little liable to take this disease as those who have had the small-pox itself. This was the great discovery of Jenner, and the practice of vaccination has more than realised the hopes of its discoverer and his friends. Where vaccination has been carried out with energy, and communities by wise laws or individual action have seen that every child is duly vaccinated, there small-pox has not spread. It appears that where communities are all properly vaccinated, there, even if an isolated case of small-pox does occur, it has no pabulum to feed on, and it does not spread. It is only when the small-pox contagion is communicated to unvaccinated persons that the disease is set up, and has sufficient vitality to spread through a community. Forty-five millions of persons died in Europe from small-pox in the century preceding the introduction of vaccination, whilst it is calculated that it has not killed more than two millions of persons in Europe since the introduction of vaccination. In London, during the last century, one death in every fourteen was due to small-pox. Up to the present time in this century not more than one-fiftieth of the persons who have died in London have died of this disease Greater differences than even this have been observed in. some of the cities and towns of the Continent of Europe. At Trieste the deaths from small-pox have been seventy-five times less than before vaccination; in Moravia, twenty-one times less; in Silesia, twenty-nine times less; in Westphalia, twenty-five times less, and in Berlin, nineteen times less.* These instances might be indefinitely increased, but we are anxious to show to what extent this disease is really controllable.