Inoculation as an art of giving the smallpox to persons in health, who might otherwise have lived many years, and perhaps to a very old age without it, whereby some unhappily come to an untimely death.[29] He objected to the exaggerated dangers of smallpox wherewith the Inoculators operated on the public fears, and appealed to his own experience in Christ’s Hospital-- Where there are generally near 600 children, the nurseries at Ware and Hertford constantly filling the places of those who go off. It hath sometimes happened that great numbers have been down of the smallpox, and ’tis but seldom that the House is free, or not long so: yet I daresay, and Sir Hans Sloane, I presume, will say so too, that in twenty years there have not died above five or six at most of the distemper, and in the last eight years there died but one.[30] So lightly did he regard the peril of smallpox to the young that he delivered this challenge-- Suppose that twenty-five Bluecoat Hospital boys at a medium, one year with another, taken ill of the smallpox. Suppose we likewise, that the Inoculators take out of the several wards, yearly, as they find them, twenty-five boys, which are inoculated. Quere, What the difference of success? I solemnly protest that if this could be put in practice, I would lay two to one against the inoculated. For, as I have said before, we have lost but one smallpox patient these nine years [writing in 1723] although 1800 children have been in the House during that time, and I declare to have met with no unequal success in other families amongst children about the same ages (that is between 8 and 15) where I have been concerned, and I doubt not but many of the Learned Faculty, as well as some others of my profession, can say as much from their own experience and observation.[31] To appreciate Massey’s contention on this point, we have to remember that smallpox is the designation of a disease of many degrees of intensity; a consideration which Dr. Wagstaffe, another opponent of inoculation, thus enforced-- There is scarcely, I believe, so great a difference between any two distempers in the world, as between the best and worse sort of smallpox, in respect to the dangers which attend them.... So true is that common observation, that there is one sort in which a nurse cannot kill, and another which even a physician can never cure.[32] Of course the Bills of Mortality were appealed to in evidence of the extent and fatality of smallpox; and as it is matter of common belief that prior to inoculation and Jenner (there is always a haze about the date) people were mown down with smallpox, it may be worth while reviving the table of relative mortality in London during the first twenty-two years of the 18th century.