Although it has not been in my power to extend the inquiry into
the causes and effects of the variolae vaccinae much beyond its
original limits, yet, perceiving that it is beginning to excite a
general spirit of investigation, I think it of importance,
without delay, to communicate such facts as have since occurred,
and to point out the fallacious sources from whence a disease
imitative of the true variolae vaccinae might arise, with the
view of preventing those who may inoculate from producing a
spurious disease; and, further, to enforce the precaution
suggested in the former treatise on the subject, of subduing the
inoculated pustule as soon as it has sufficiently produced its
influence on the constitution. From a want of due discrimination
of the real existence of the disease, either in the brute or in
the human subject, and also of that stage of it in which it is
capable of producing the change in the animal economy which
renders it unsusceptible of the contagion of the smallpox,
unpleasant consequences might ensue, the source of which,
perhaps, might not be suspected by one inexperienced in
conducting such experiments.
My late publication contains a relation of most of the facts
which had come under my own inspection at the time it was
written, interspersed with some conjectural observations. Since
then Dr. G. Pearson has established an inquiry into the validity
of my principal assertion, the result of which cannot but be
highly flattering to my feelings. It contains not a single case
which I think can be called an exception to the fact I was so
firmly impressed with--that the cow-pox protects the human body
from the smallpox. I have myself received some further
confirmations, which shall be subjoined. I have lately also been
favoured with a letter from a gentleman of great respectability
(Dr. Ingenhousz), informing me that, on making an inquiry into
the subject in the county of Wilts, he discovered that a farmer
near Calne had been infected with the smallpox after having had
the cow-pox, and that the disease in each instance was so
strongly characterized as to render the facts incontrovertible.
The cow-pox, it seems, from the doctor's information, was
communicated to the farmer from his cows at the time that they
gave out an offensive stench from their udders.
Some other instances have likewise been represented to me of the
appearance of the disease, apparently marked with its
characteristic symptoms, and yet that the patients have
afterwards had the smallpox. On these cases I shall, for the
present, suspend any particular remarks, but hope that the
general observations I have to offer in the sequel will prove of
sufficient weight to render the idea of their ever having had
existence, but as cases of spurious cow-pox, extremely doubtful.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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