I here, without reserve, communicate to the public.
The small-pox, in its mild and distinct state, is seldom, except among persons of distinction, an object of the care of physicians in London, out of hospitals. They are most frequently consulted in the worst state of the worst kind of the disease; when it is of too considerable a magnitude to admit of much as it is well known relief from the medical art that the averting the danger attendant upon the maturation and decline of the small-pox, depends very much upon its treatment during the febrile and eruptive state of it. The vexations and discouragements which the excellent Sydenham met with, in. his practice in the confluent small-pox, mortified him not a little, and occasioned him to say, in his letter[1] to Dr. Cole, Quâ de causâ accedente insuperabili τῶν πωλλῶν prejudicio, bene mecum agi putarem, si nunquam deinceps ad variolis laborante accerserer.
Within these last ten years, there have died of the small-pox, in the compass of the bills of mortality only, twenty-three thousand three hundred and eight persons.[2] Had this num-
