Page:The New Method of Inoculating for the Small-Pox - Benjamin Rush.djvu/7

This page has been validated.

[3]

The

New Method

of

Inoculating for the Small-Pox.

Gentlemen,

IT must afford no small pleasure to a benevolent mind in the midst of a war, which daily makes so much havoc with the human species, to reflect, that the small-pox which once proved equally fatal to thousands, has been checked in its career, and in a great degree subdued by the practice of Inoculation.

It is foreign to my purpose to deliver to you the history of this art, and to mark the various steps that have attended its progress to its present state of improvement. We have yet to lament the want of uniformity and of equal success in the practice of it among physicians. A great number

of