Hints from the Health Department. Leaflet from the archive of the Society of Medical Officers of Health. Credit: Wellcome Collection, London
Report upon the public health and sanitary condition of the Parish of St. Mary, Battersea during the year1896
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between the fatality of Small-Pox in the case of the vaccinated
and the unvaccinated, which have been suggested by those who
deny that it is due to vaccination. It has been said, and this is
the main argument employed, that the unvaccinated are mostly
to be found in the poorer and more neglected classes of the
population, who would on that account be constitutionally weaker,
and less able to resist an attack of Small-Pox, and to escape a
fatal result. Speaking generally, this may be to some extent
true, though it is not so at all times and in all places. There are
facts stated in the reports we have so often quoted, especially
those relating to Warrington, Dewsbury, Leicester, and Sheffield,
and in the evidence with reference to the last-named town, which
seem to show that the explanation suggested cannot be the correct
one. In the report on the Warrington epidemic, as we shall see
immediately, it is expressly stated that the vaccinated ana
unvaccinated were of the same class, and lived in the same houses
and in the same manner. Moreover, the persons admitted into
the Homerton and Fulham Hospitals were for the most part,
whether vaccinated or unvaccinated, of the pauper class, or of
the class immediately above it. It is not conceivable that in this
section of the population the presence of vaccination or its
absence should indicate so marked a difference of constitutional
strength as to account for the difference of Small-Pox fatality
which we are now considering. It is further to be observed that,
taking the statistics of the six towns, in the case of the vaccinated
aged 1.10 the fatality was 2.8 per cent., in the case of the
unvaccinated of a similar age it was 30.3 per cent., whereas in
the case of those over 10 years the fatality in the case of the
vaccinated was 5.4 per cent., in the case of the unvaccinated 34.3.
It will be seen, therefore, that the disparity in the death-rate of
those classed as vaccinated and unvaccinated was greater nearer
the date of vaccination than it was at a later period. The same
phenomenon is observable in the hospital statistics. We do not
think it possible, then, to accept the suggestion that there were
more of the poor in the unvaccinated than in the vaccinated class
as a sufficient explanation of the contrast we have been