Quarantine, inoculation, improvement of living and sanitary conditions,
the use of drugs and medicines of all sorts other than vaccination, have
no effect whatever upon either the spread or the fatality of the
disease. The author, when State Health Officer of Oregon, saw the
disease break out in a highly-civilized, well-fed, well-housed
community, and kill eleven out of thirty-three people attacked, just as
it would have done in the "Dark Ages." Not one of the cases that died
had been vaccinated; and, with but one exception (and in this the proof
of vaccination was imperfect), every vaccinated case recovered.
Vaccination will usually protect for from five to ten years; then it is
advisable to be re-vaccinated, and in six to eight years more, another
vaccination should be attempted. This third vaccination will usually not
"take," for the reason that two successful vaccinations will usually
protect for life.
Unexpected as it may seem, vaccination is not only a preventive of
smallpox, but a cure for it. The reason being that _vaccinia_, the
disease resulting from successful vaccination, being far milder than
smallpox, runs its course more quickly,--taking only two days to
develop,--while smallpox requires anywhere from seven to twenty days to
develop after the patient has been infected, or exposed. So, if anyone
who has been exposed to smallpox is vaccinated any time within a week
after exposure, the vaccine will take hold first, and the patient will
have either simple vaccinia, with its trifling headache and fever, or
else a very mild form of smallpox.
Some persons object to having children deliberately infected with even
the mildest sort of disease; but this is infinitely better than to
allow, as was the case before vaccination, from one-fourth to one-fifth
of them to be killed, twenty-five per cent of them to be pock-marked,
and ten per cent of them to be blinded by this terrible disease. So far
as any after-effects of vaccination are concerned, careful investigation
of hundreds of thousands of cases has clearly shown that it is not so
dangerous as a common cold in the head.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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