Among sanitary matters, the propagation of modified small-pox by inoculation was the foremost question in the practical politics of the parish vestry. For this form of small-pox, introduced to forestall the natural visitation of the disease, persons would come distances from the rural districts to the towns--about as the moderns go abroad to take the baths--to pass through the process, and their presence in the town was sometimes objected to. On one occasion we find the Royston Vestry assembled for the purpose of "considering the improper way practised by several people (not parishioners of Royston) having their families inoculated for the small-pox, and remaining in the town during their illness, and the impropriety of the surgeons encouraging such proceedings. Agreed that the surgeons be waited upon with a request that they will not in future inoculate any person in their own houses unless such person so inoculated be removed in a proper time." In 1788 this old question of inoculation brought together the largest attendance at any Vestry in Royston for a century, excepting perhaps that upon Church rates in later years. This Vestry was held in the Parish Church "for the purpose of taking into consideration and finally settling the business respecting the small-pox and the inoculating the poor of the town at the parish expense." Whereupon, says the old record, "The parish divided upon the question and there appeared twenty-five for inoculating the parish at the parish expense, and seventeen against it. It is therefore ordered," &c. In fifteen years the inoculating majority had disappeared, for in 1803 upon the question of small-pox _versus_ cow-pox, a meeting was held to consider "whether a general inoculation with the _cow-pox_ should immediately take place in this town, which was agreed _nem. con._" At the end of the century we thus see that the question of a small-pox prophylactic was wavering between the monstrous assumption that everybody must necessarily have small-pox, and had better set about it, and the milder notion of vaccine as an antidote, if the real thing should come. The old custom of variolation had not been discarded, and the experience of the Gloucestershire milkmaids had not crystalized into the form of vaccination to be handed down by Jenner. At the beginning of the century we find this item:-- "Order'd that there is no necessity for a General Inoculation, there being no small-pox in the town (except in the Pest House), and that the Overseers are hereby order'd to suspend the Business of a General Inoculation _either with the Cow or Small-Pox_."