In short, nothing can be more unfounded than the assumption in literature, popular and professional, that Maitland and Montagu were confronted by a crowd of howling fanatics over whom they triumphed as light over darkness. Marvellous is the imbecility wherewith biographers and historians reproduce the fables of any inventive predecessor. I shall now proceed to show that the practice of inoculation introduced by Cotton Mather to New England, and by Maitland to England, collapsed in a few years under stress of the mischiefs and fatalities which attended it; that it was revived in a subsequent generation; that it proved a curse wherever practised; and that finally it was abandoned with execration in the Western world. FOOTNOTES: [25] _Letters and Works of Lady M. W. Montagu_, Vol. i. p. 468, edition 1861. [26] _Ibid._ Vol. ii. p. 161. [27] _A Short and Plain Account of Inoculation._ By Isaac Massey. London, 1724. [28] _Letter to Mr. Maitland._ By Edmund Massey. London, 1722. [29] _A Short and Plain Account of Inoculation_, p. 1. [30] _Ibid._ p. 21. [31] _Letter to Dr. Jurin._ By Isaac Massey. London, 1723. [32] _Letter to Dr. Freind._ By W. Wagstaffe, M.D., F.R.S., one of the physicians of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. London, 1722. [33] _A letter to Caleb Cotsworth, M.D._ By James Jurin, M.D. London, 1723. [34] _Letter to Dr. Jurin._ London, 1723. [35] _Ibid._ [36] _Mr. Maitland’s Account of Inoculating the Smallpox Vindicated._ London, 1722, p. 20. [37] _Letter to Dr. Jurin_, p. 12. [38] Jurin’s _Yearly Account of Inoculation_, p. 13. [39] _Letter to Mr. Maitland in Vindication of the Sermon against Inoculation._ London, 1722. CHAPTER V. COLLAPSE OF INOCULATION. We sometimes fetch from afar what is to be found at our own doors; and thus it was with inoculation. No sooner was the great Eastern preventive advertised than it was said--Why, it is nothing more than a practice common in Wales and the Highlands of Scotland! Perrot Williams, M.D., and Richard Wright, surgeon, of Haverfordwest, communicated to the Royal Society[40] that the people in Pembrokeshire had practised inoculation “time out of mind.” They either scraped the skin thin or pricked it with pins, and then rubbed in pus from a smallpox patient. This they called “buying the smallpox,” as it was customary to pay something for what was fancied to be “good matter.” The Welshmen gave the same account of the practice as the Turks--there was no danger, no mishaps, and certain security from smallpox. In Scotland it did not appear that the skin was scraped, but worsted threads saturated with pus were tied round the wrists of children to whom it was desired to communicate the disease.[41]