The antagonism of vaccination to the so-called designs of Providence was loudly asserted. One Dr. Squirrel on this head maintained that “Providence never intended that the vaccine disease should affect the human race, else why had it not, before this time, visited the inhabitants of the globe? Notwithstanding this, the vaccine virus has been forced into the blood by the manufacturing hand of man, and supported not by science or reason, but by conjecture and folly only, with a pretence of its exterminating the smallpox from the face of the earth.” Again, he denounces “the puerility and the impropriety of such a conduct, viz., of introducing vaccination with a boasted intention not only to supplant, but also to change and alter, and, in short, to prevent the established law of nature. The law of God prohibits the practice; the law of man, and the law of nature, loudly exclaim against it.” Inoculation had been just as bitterly denounced as “dangerous,” “sinful,” “diabolical,” in numerous sermons and medical treatises, when it was introduced, less than a century before this. No more striking evidence of the beneficial results which attended vaccination, even in Jenner’s lifetime, could be given than those which attended its introduction into Vienna, where smallpox had prevailed severely for centuries. The average number of persons who died at Vienna in each of the first five years of this century was about 14,600: of these eight hundred and thirty-five died of smallpox in the year 1800. Vaccination being introduced and extensively adopted, the number of deaths from smallpox fell to one hundred and sixty-four in 1801, to sixty-one in 1802, to twenty-seven in 1803, while in 1804 only two persons died, and these deaths were not occasioned in Vienna, one being that of a boatman’s child who caught the disease on the Danube, and the other a child sent to Vienna from a distant part of the empire already infected. Yet so long was the practice of vaccination before it spread to an equal extent in England, that nine hundred and fifty deaths occurred from smallpox in London in the last three months only of 1805. Wherever he might happen to be, Jenner offered to vaccinate gratuitously all poor persons who applied to him at fixed times. The people of one parish, in the neighbourhood of Cheltenham, held back, while the adjacent parishes accepted the new practice to a large extent. But in one particular year the people of the reluctant parish arrived in large numbers to claim vaccination for their children. On inquiry it appeared that smallpox had been among them, causing many deaths, while those of their neighbours who had been vaccinated escaped. Yet it was not this potent argument which had been most influential, but the fact that the cost of coffins and burial for those who had died of smallpox became alarming to the parish officials, and they were moved to urge the people authoritatively to be vaccinated, and so save the parish expenses.