SMALLPOX IN ENGLAND.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3155, 8 August 1881, Page 4

SMALLPOX IN ENGLAND.

No less than 44,000 persons died in England from smallpox during the three years 1870-72. A writer in the Modern Review recently quoted these figures as a proof that yaccinution was an inefficient preventive, bin he was replied to by a reviewer in the Spectator as follows : —" He (of the Modern Review) ia clearly ignorant of the fact that a hundred years ago the smallpox mortality of London alone (with its then population of under a million) was often greater in a six months' epidemic than that of the 20,000,00 of England and Wales is now in any whole year ; that the average number of deaths by smallpox was estimated at eight per cent, of the total mortality of the country ; that of the then enormous mortality of children under 10 years of age the mortality by smallpox constituted one-half; that white' it is now the exception to hear of a case of smallpox in tbe persons or families of one's friends, or even wider acquaintances, it was then exceptional for anyone, in whatever rank of life, to attain middle age without having been the subject of its attack • that 'seaming' and 'pitting' of the face were then so common that it was estimated that one out of every three persons met in the street showed traces of it; that for a ' professional beauty ') to have her face disfigured by smallpox was an incident often introduced into the novels, and tales of 'the period' ; and that loss of sight by that disease was then co frequent that at least one-third of the inmates of blind asylums, ■within my own time, owed their privation to it." There are very few of the great improvements made in the lot of mankind which are able to quote so vast and clear a body of evidence in their favor as stands to 'the credit of vaccination.