The following relation was communicated to me by a gentleman of great credit. He was a merchant at St. Christopher’s in the West Indies, and in the making of sugar employed a great number of slaves. In one year, when the smallpox raged with more than ordinary violence in the neighbouring islands, with his own hands he inoculated three hundred of them, from five to sixty years of age, with such success, that not one of them died, though most of them were negroes. And whereas all the Americans suffer this distemper in a most terrible manner, yet experience shows, that it is much more dangerous when it attacks the natives of Africa.[52] Mead held positions which later and more exact inquiry rendered untenable. He would not allow that the pus of smallpox could communicate any disease but smallpox, _if_ taken from a proper subject--a condition that required supernatural assistance to fulfil. He maintained that inoculation generated true smallpox, and that as no one could have smallpox twice, therefore no one could have smallpox after inoculation, and that reports to the contrary were not credible. It now goes without saying that in this contention Mead was at fault, but at the time his confidence was not inexcusable; and whilst defending and recommending inoculation, he made admissions which fully justified those who resisted and condemned his counsels. Let us not forget that the following passage was published in 1747, and was the fruit of six-and-twenty years of experience in the best London practice. Thus Mead wrote-- It ought not to be omitted, that boils and swellings under the ears and in the arm-pits arise more frequently after the distemper procured by art than after that which comes of its own accord; for this reason, as I suppose, that the venomous matter is pushed forward with less force, which disadvantages Nature makes amends for in this way. Therefore all possible means are to be used to ripen such tumours of whatever kind they are: if this cannot be done, they must be opened by incision; and when all the matter is drawn out, the body must be purged by proper medicines, which are to be oftener repeated in this than in the natural disease.[53] How just are the judgments of Divine Order! These boils, swellings, and tumours, were the sequences of the violated harmony of the body--of the faithless anticipation, the meddling and muddling with its processes.