But it will be pointed out that inoculators of the more reasonable sort admitted a certain mortality from the practice. It is so; but the admission was unavoidable. Inoculation communicated smallpox, and there was no evasion of the fact that occasionally the malady assumed a severe form, and the patient died. For such mishaps, however, there were always excuses. The patient was not in a suitable condition of body; he had been eating improperly; he had caught cold; and so on. There remained, nevertheless, the sequelæ of Inoculation, which were just as persistently denied as are those of Vaccination, although there were always clear-sighted observers who maintained that it was impossible to infect the blood with a complex organic virus, and that it should exhaust its effects in a single and definite issue. We all remember how we used to be assured with contemptuous emphasis that it was utterly impossible to communicate Syphilis by Vaccination, and that assertions to the contrary were the fables of ignorance and malice; yet, we see that what was fabulous a few years ago, is now accepted as medical matter-of-fact. Nowhere is scepticism so useful as among physicians; for whenever they protest most, suspect most.
With the close of the 18th Century, Inoculation with smallpox to avert smallpox was accepted as sound practice throughout England. Its safety and efficiency were extolled by medical writers in terms curiously identical with those applied to Vaccination. The objectors were few, and for pious rather than physiological reasons; and the question that exercised practical and benevolent minds was how to universalise the remedy, which, on account of its troublesome accompaniments, was chiefly confined to the upper and middle classes. On this point it may be well to cite the words of Dr. Haygarth of Chester, who, in a letter to the Council of Health of Geneva, dated 10th February, 1792, thus sets forth the position of affairs--
In Chester, and, I believe, in most of the large towns of England, the casual smallpox is almost constantly present. _All the children of the middle and higher ranks of our citizens are inoculated in early infancy._ The populace, very generally regarding the distemper as inevitable, neither fear nor shun it; but much more frequently by voluntary and intentional intercourse, endeavour to catch the casual infection. All the difficulties of our Smallpox Society in Chester proceeded from this strange delusion and perversity of disposition. With us the smallpox is seldom or never heard of except in the Bills of Mortality; but there its devastation appears dreadful indeed.