Page:History of Corea, ancient and modern; with description of manners and customs, language and geography (1879).djvu/331

SBCALLPOX. 305 of which are barred against all ; sometimes for even ten daya On the first visit, congratulations are usually accompanied with presents. When the child is one year old, a great feast is pro- vided, swine slain, rice prepared, and all friends invited. These guests all give presents, — some clothing, some money. Age i» reckoned as among the Chinese : — the year in which he is bom^ is the child's first ; and he is two years old on the next calendar year, even if it begins when the child is only two days old. Only when he begins to speak does he get his first name, by which ha is known up till marriage, when he assumes or receives a second, which he retains all his life, — he choosing a third, by which he is known among his friends ; — in all this, the Coreans follow the Chinese customa As in China, the mortality among infants is veiy great, smallpox especially causing dreadful havoc; for a very large proportion become the subjects of this foul disease, — ^the greater part of those attacked succumbing. Innoculation, however, is said to have been known and practised for many centuries. It is effected in a most peculiar way, sufficient to shock more than maternal sensibility; for the matter taken off a smallpox patient is put up the nostril and left to adhere to it, thus saving the use of a lancet, so painful to the mother's heart The richer people give a liquid medicine ; but in either way the pox appears on the third day after the administration of the medicine, whether that has been put up the nostril or down the throat Nine tenths of the innoculated live, Le., the proportion of deaths and life is reversed by the presence or absence of innoculation. There can, we think, be little doubt that clean houses, pure water, and untainted air, are beyond comparison the best preservation against smallpox, as against any other infectious fever or disease ; and we have often thought that the greater attention paid to sanitary questions has been the real cause of the infrequency of dangerous smallpox attacks in Britain. But the facts here adduced, together with the experience of China, tell in favour of innoculation, much more of vaccination; for neither in China nor in Corea is any attention given to sanitary measures^ u