The strong objection to Inoculation was, that it diffused the disease generally which it was supposed to avert individually. Inoculators tried to minimise and deny the danger, but in vain; and nothing so contributed to the supersession of the practice by Vaccination as the expectation of escape from the artificially propagated disease. How extensive was that propagation, we leave the writer in the _Edinburgh Review_ of 1806 to describe--
The inoculated smallpox is an infectious disease, and those who take it naturally from an inoculated patient have it as violently as if they had been infected from a case of spontaneous disease; it is to all intents and purposes the natural smallpox again in them. Now, if it be considered that several hundred thousand persons have been annually inoculated in these Kingdoms for the last fifty years, it will be easy to calculate the immense addition that must have been made in that period to the cases of actual disease, and the increase of natural smallpox that may be supposed to have arisen from this constant multiplication of the sources and centres of infection.
Unless this culture and this traffic in smallpox throughout the United Kingdom be realised, the potent cause of the immediate and extravagant success of Vaccination will be left out of reckoning. When we are harassed, anxious and impatient under some course of conduct, our ears are open to any promise of relief; and it was to a generation so afflicted and so receptive that Jenner in 1798 made his revelation of the virtue of cowpox. No more need, said he, to inoculate with smallpox. Substitute cowpox; and whilst it will protect as effectually, it will inflict no injury and diffuse no infection. The revelation was received with acclamation, and within eighteen months of its delivery (without due experience, and without any warrant that could pass muster in the severe realm of science) the leading physicians and surgeons of London subscribed and published the following manifesto in the newspapers of 1800--
We, the undersigned physicians and surgeons, think it our duty to declare our opinion, that those persons who have had the Cowpox are perfectly secure from the infection of the Smallpox, provided this infection has not been previously communicated.