It may be said that the practice of inoculation met with no active resistance in England during the last thirty years of last century. How widely and deeply it extended it would be difficult to determine. The probability is, that the mass of the population was untouched, and that inoculation was limited to the upper and middle classes, and to the lower so far as they came under the immediate influence of those above them. We have, perhaps, an index to the condition of affairs in Dr. Wm. Buchan’s _Domestic Medicine_, first published in 1769, which ran through eighteen editions, amounting to 80,000 copies, in the author’s life-time. It is not uncommon to refer contemptuously to Buchan, but his work was the production of a man of vigorous good sense with faith in the good sense of his readers--a book creditable to the author and to the people who appreciated him. Buchan was an inoculator, a zealous advocate of inoculation, and earnestly laboured to universalise the practice. In the _Domestic Medicine_, ed. 1797, he wrote-- No discovery can be of general utility while the practice of it is kept in the hands of a few. Had Inoculation been practised by the same kind of operators in our country as in the countries from which we derived it, it had long ago been universal. The fears, the jealousies, the prejudices, and the opposite interests of the Faculty are, and ever will be, the most effectual obstacles to the progress of any salutary discovery. Hence it is that Inoculation never became in any manner general in England till taken up by men not bred to physic. Consistently with this opinion, Buchan strongly advocated domestic practice, saying-- They know very little of the matter, who impute the success of modern inoculators to any superior skill, either in preparing the patient or communicating the disease. Some of them, indeed, from a sordid desire of engrossing the whole practice to themselves, pretend to have extraordinary secrets or nostrums for preparing persons for inoculation, which never fail of success. But this is only a pretence calculated to blind the ignorant and inattentive. Common-sense and prudence alone are sufficient both in the choice of the subject and management of the operation. Whoever is possessed of these may perform this office for his children whenever he finds it convenient, _provided they be in a good state of health_. This statement is not the result of theory, but of observation. Though few physicians have had more opportunities of trying inoculation in all its different forms, so little appears to me to depend on those generally reckoned important circumstances, of preparing the body, communicating the infection by this or the other method, etc., that, for several years past, I have persuaded parents and nurses to perform the entire operation themselves.