The Mother's Manual of Children's DiseasesWest, Charles
Science
The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases
West, Charles
Pediatrics -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.
6th. That in either case it is expedient that vaccination be performed
within the first three months after birth, so as to avoid the irritation
of teething which is unfavourable to successful vaccination, and also
because the disposition to those skin diseases which vaccination tends
to aggravate is never so considerable before the age of three months as
it becomes subsequently.
Even when vaccination fails to protect against small-pox it tends to
produce a modified and so much milder form of the disease, that while
one patient died out of every two in the Homerton Small Pox Hospital who
had the disease naturally, the deaths were only one in four of those who
had been imperfectly vaccinated, and one in forty-three of those whose
arms bore evidence of perfectly good and successful vaccination.
The influence of previous vaccination often scarcely shows itself in the
stage which precedes the appearance of the eruption of small-pox, the
fever being often just as intense, and the general symptoms just as
severe as in the unmodified disease. The difference, however, becomes at
once obvious with the appearance of the rash. The pocks are always much
fewer than even in mild small-pox, sometimes even not more than twenty.
They never attain above half the size of the ordinary small-pox
pustules; they run their course and dry off in half the time, and
consequently the dangerous fever which accompanies their development in
the natural disease is almost or altogether absent in the vast majority
of instances.
If vaccination did no more than this it would be hard to overestimate
its value, or to praise as it deserves the merit of its discoverer.
=Chicken-Pox= is an ailment of such slight importance that it would
scarcely call for notice if it were not that the resemblance of the
eruption to that of small-pox sometimes leads to its being mistaken for
that disease.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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