It has been imagined that the cow-pox is capable of being
communicated from one person to another by effluvia without the
intervention of inoculation. My experiments, made with the design
of ascertaining this important point, all tend to establish my
original position, that it is not infectious except by contact, I
have never hesitated to suffer those on whose arms there were
pustules exhaling the effluvia from associating or even sleeping
with others who never had experienced either the cow-pox or the
smallpox. And, further, I have repeatedly, among children, caused
the uninfected to breathe over the inoculated vaccine 'pustules
during their whole progress, yet these experiments were tried
without the least effect. However, to submit a matter so
important to a still further scrutiny, I desired Mr. H. Jenner to
make any further experiments which might strike him as most
likely to establish or refute what had been advanced on this
subject. He has since informed me "that he inoculated children at
the breast, whose mothers had not gone through either the
smallpox or the cow-pox; that he had inoculated mothers whose
sucking infants had never undergone either of these diseases;
that the effluvia from the inoculated pustules, in either case,
had been inhaled from day to day during the whole progress of
their maturation, and that there was not the least perceptible
effect from these exposures." One woman he inoculated about a week
previous to her accouchement, that her infant might be the more
fully and conveniently exposed to the pustule; but, as in the
former instances, no infection was given, although the child
frequently slept on the arm of its mother with its nostrils and
mouth exposed to the pustule in the fullest state of maturity. In
a word, is it not impossible for the cow-pox, whose ONLY
manifestation appears to consist in the pustules CREATED BY
CONTACT, to produce ITSELF by effluvia?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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