I do not mean to insinuate that exposure to cool air, and
suffering the patient to drink cold water when hot and thirsty,
may not moderate the eruptive symptoms and lessen the number of
pustules; yet, to repeat my former observation, I cannot account
for the uninterrupted success, or nearly so, of one practitioner,
and the wretched state of the patients under the care of another,
where, in both instances, the general treatment did not differ
essentially, without conceiving it to arise from the different
modes of inserting the matter for the purpose of producing the
disease. As it is not the identical matter inserted which is
absorbed into the constitution, but that which is, by some
peculiar process in the animal economy, generated by it, is it
not probable that different parts of the human body may prepare
or modify the virus differently? Although the skin, for example,
adipose membrane, or mucous membranes are all capable of
producing the variolous virus by the stimulus given by the
particles originally deposited upon them, yet I am induced to
conceive that each of these parts is capable of producing some
variation in the qualities of the matter previous to its
affecting the constitution. What else can constitute the
difference between the smallpox when communicated casually or in
what has been termed the natural way, or when brought on
artificially through the medium of the skin?
After all, are the variolous particles, possessing their true
specific and contagious principles, ever taken up and conveyed by
the lymphatics unchanged into the blood vessels? I imagine not.
Were this the case, should we not find the blood sufficiently
loaded with them in some stages of the smallpox to communicate
the disease by inserting it under the cuticle, or by spreading it
on the surface of an ulcer? Yet experiments have determined the
impracticability of its being given in this way; although it has
been proved that variolous matter, when much diluted with water
and applied to the skin in the usual manner, will produce the
disease. But it would be digressing beyond a proper boundary to
go minutely into this subject here.
At what period the cow-pox was first noticed here is not upon
record. Our oldest farmers were not unacquainted with it in their
earliest days, when it appeared among their farms without any
deviation from the phaenomena which it now exhibits. Its
connection with the smallpox seems to have been unknown to them.
Probably the general introduction of inoculation first occasioned
the discovery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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