Dimsdale had plans for the systematic inoculation of Russia, but they resulted in little. Catharine’s purpose was sufficiently served in the display she had made; and possibly she came to consider Dimsdale an appendage of that deceiver Voltaire, whose busts, that had adorned her saloons and corridors, were by her orders thrown into the cellars when the French revolution opened her eyes to the consequences of French philosophy. In perusing the literature of inoculation, nothing impresses a reader, enlightened by sanitary science, so much as the manner in which smallpox was regarded as something like hail or lightning that might be averted, but could not be prevented. So far, I have not met with even a hint in that literature that smallpox was either induced by unwholesome modes of life, or that it could be avoided by wholesome modes. In conjunction with this blindness was the amazing assumption of the inoculators, that every one inoculated was to be placed to their credit as saved from smallpox; as if (granting inoculation to be prophylactic) smallpox was ever a universal epidemic, and as if multitudes did not pass through life without smallpox before inoculation was heard of. The true problem to be set and solved in all epidemics, whether of influenza or smallpox, is why some are susceptible and some insusceptible, and whether it is not practicable so to modify conditions as to carry over the susceptible to the ranks of the insusceptible. FOOTNOTES: [64] Humphries’s _Life of General Putnam_, p. 151. [65] These letters of Benjamin Waterhouse, M.D., Professor of Physic at Cambridge, Mass., appear in Haygarth’s _Plan to Exterminate Smallpox_. London, 1793. [66] _The History of the Smallpox._ By James Moore. London, 1815. P. 288. [67] _Diderot and the Encyclopædists._ By John Morley. Vol. ii. p. 114. [68] Dimsdale: _Tracts on Inoculation_. CHAPTER IX. INOCULATION SUPERSEDED AND SUPPRESSED. The illusory character of human testimony is graphically illustrated in the case of inoculation. Suppose an inquirer wished to ascertain the ratio of deaths to inoculations, he would be completely bewildered. We have seen what Dr. Buchan wrote-- In the natural way, one in four or five generally dies of smallpox; but by inoculation not one of a thousand. Nay, some can boast of having inoculated ten thousand without the loss of a single patient. John Birch, an eminent London surgeon, said-- Not one in three hundred dies of inoculation in the general irregular mode of proceeding, and not one in a thousand among observant practitioners; and if the inoculated patient die, he dies of smallpox and of nothing but smallpox.[69] In the _Edinburgh Review_, October, 1806, we read--