The public seem scarcely to understand what Vaccination means. The vaccine lymph taken from a child is nothing more than what has passed from a smallpox patient through a cow. In 1856-58 I took an active part in inoculating seventeen cows with smallpox, producing in three cases vaccine lymph, and from these the world has been supplied. Thus, as asserted, has Inoculation been revived, and Jenner’s specific set aside. When Dimsdale had Russian nobles to operate upon, he tried to mollify the smallpox by passing it through healthy children. Cows have now taken the place of children, and the virus in its passage from arm to arm may still further be reduced in virulence, when it does not take up fresh malignities such as syphilis; but it is inoculation with smallpox all the same. FOOTNOTES: [69] _Serious Reasons for Uniformly Objecting to the Practice of Vaccination._ By John Birch. London, 1806. [70] _Birmingham Medical Review_, January, 1874. [71] The facts are set forth in _Vaccination Tracts_, No. 14, p.7. [72] _Life of John Walker, M.D._ London, 1831, p. 326. [73] Letter of Poor Law Commissioners, 20th August, 1840. [74] _Lectures on Eruptive Fevers._ London, 1843, p. 39. [75] _Ib._, p. 93. CHAPTER X. AS TO THE PREVALENCE OF SMALLPOX IN THE 18TH CENTURY. The exact truth as to the prevalence of smallpox in the 18th Century is not attainable; vital statistics were undeveloped; and in the absence of precision the imaginative revel. M.D.’s and M.P.’s shut their eyes, tilt their noses skyward, and prophesy concerning the frightful ravages, and the salvation wrought by the revered and immortal Jenner. Any extravagance, as to the ravages, or as to the salvation, is accepted as laudable zeal for humanity. “Decimation” is a favourite word in this connection without any sense of its definite meaning. “What family before 1800 ever escaped decimation from smallpox?” asks Dr. Granville. “Smallpox decimated the country in olden times,” says Dr. Chavasse; “it ravaged like a plague, whilst Inoculation caused the disease to spread like wild-fire;” adding as a sequence, “Vaccination is an important cause of our increasing population.” In the same temper, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn described an unvaccinated infant as “a centre of contagion;” and as the folly of the great is intensified in the little, Mr. Bompas, Q.C., informed the electors of Marylebone, that “a person not vaccinated is like a flaming fire-brand among the people.” Thus the infants of last century were “centres of contagion;” the adults were “flaming fire-brands;” whilst England was “decimated” with smallpox diffused like wild-fire by inoculation. What a picture of 18th Century England painted by Rant and illuminated by Delirium!