compiled by disinterested persons who had no interest to serve by making the severity of small-pox large or small, gives an average of from 14 to 18 per cent.[1]
as the proportion of small-pox deaths to cases; and we naturally ask, How is it that, with so much better sanitary conditions and greatly improved treatment, nearly half the im vaccinated patients die, while in the last century less than one-fifth died? Many of the supporters of vaccination, snch as Dr. Gray ton (2nd Rep., p. 1856), have no explanation to offer. Others, such as Dr. Whitelegge (6th Rep., p. 533), believe that small-pox becomes more virulent periodically, and that one of its maxima of virulence caused the great epidemic of 1870–72, which, after more than half a century of vaccination equalled some of the worst epidemics of the pre-vaccination period.
It is, however, a most suggestive fact that, considering small-pox mortality per se, without reference to vaccination—the records of which are, as have been shown, utterly untrustworthy—we find the case-mortality to agree closely with that of the last century. Thus the figures given in the Reports of the Hampstead, Homerton, and Deptford small-pox hospitals at periods between 1876 and 1879 were, 19, 18*8, and 17 per cent, respectively (3rd Report, p. 205). If we admit that only the worst cases went to the hospitals, but also allow something for better treatment now, the result is quite explicable; whereas the other result, of a greatly increased fatality in the un vaccinated so exactly balanced by an alleged greatly diminished fatality in the vaccinated is not explicable, especially when we remember that this diminished fatality applies to all ages, and it is now almost universally admitted that the alleged protective influence of vaccination dies out in ten or twelve years. These various opinions are really self-destructive. If epidemic small-pox is now much more virulent than in the last century, as shown by the greater mortality of
- ↑ See Table J, p. 201, 3rd Report, and the Minority Report of the Roy. Comm., pp. 176–7.
