These Bills are founded on the ignorance or skill of old women, who are the searchers in every parish, and their reports (very often what they are bid to say) must necessarily be very erroneous. Many distempers which prove mortal, are mistaken for the smallpox, namely, scarlet and malignant fevers with eruptions, swinepox, measles, St. Anthony’s fire, and such like appearances, which if they destroy in three or four days (as frequently happeneth) the distemper can only be guessed at, yet is generally put down by the searchers as smallpox, especially if they are told the deceased never had them.[34] Massey, in the same spirit of good sense, objected to generalisations about smallpox from the Bills of Mortality, as if all who died were slain by the disease and by nothing else. There ought to be no comparison [he said] between sick people, well regimented with diet and medicine, and those who have no assistance, or scarcely the necessaries of life. The miserable poor and parish children make up a great part, at least one-half of the Bills of Mortality; to confirm this I have examined several yearly bills, and I find that the out-parishes generally bury more than the ninety-seven parishes within the walls, and the parish of Stepney singly, very near as many as the City of London yearly; this sufficiently shows what little help and care are taken of the poor sick, which so much abound in all those places.[35] Of course there lurks a fallacy in all statistics of disease wherein conditions of life are not discriminated. Whether patients survive or die from any zymotic ailment depends upon their breed, their circumstances, their habits, and their medical treatment and nursing--all essential particulars, yet difficult to define and register on a large scale. It would appear that in sound constitutions, and with fair treatment, smallpox in 1721 was by no means deadly, whilst in bad constitutions, and with exposure and neglect, it was extensively fatal. Yet of these differences, little account was taken by the Inoculators, and the malady was measured and discussed as though it were something uniform like water or gold. Massey in one year had 49 cases of smallpox and one death; in Stepney an equal number of cases might have shown a mortality of 20 or 30 per cent.; whilst Dr. Nettleton reported that of 1245 cases in Halifax and adjacent towns in Yorkshire, there died 270, or about 22 per cent.[36] One of Massey’s fears in relation to inoculation was the risk of poisoning the blood with more than smallpox. He was not disinclined to experiment with “duly prepared children infected with smallpox by inspiration,” for then-- They will run no hazard of being infected by a leprous, venereal, or scrofulous taint that may, for aught we know, be transplanted by inoculation.[37]