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144
increase in the mortality from which is at the present day
charged against vaccination. Before doing so, it will be well to
enquire whether infant mortality has shown an increase during
the period into which we are enquiring. Vaccination is, in the
vast majority of cases co-incident in point of time with this stage
of life. If, then, it is the parent of other diseases, and has substantially
augmented the number of deaths due to them, we
should expect to see some effect produced on infant mortality as a
whole, yet it is clear that the mortality of infants in the first year of
life, as measured by the proportion of their deaths to births, has
not increased at all during the times when infant vaccination has
been increasing. The figures show that from 1838 to 1842 the
annual infantile death-rate to one thousand births was 152; from
1847 to 1850 it was 154 ; in the million births in Leicester on the
one hand, and in England and Wales on the other. The
Registrar-General has supplied us with the means of comparing
the deaths in the period 1863-1867 with those in the period 18831887.
We have already seen that the latter years were marked
by a great decrease in the practice of vaccination amounting at
last to a practical disuse of it. If vaccination were, to any
serious extent, a cause of syphilis, we should have expected to
see some evidence of it in these comparative records of the
mortality of infants under one year of age. Yet we find that
whereas in England and Wales there was as between the former
period and the latter an increase in the infant mortality from
syphilis in England and Wales of 24.7 per cent, only, the increase
between the same periods in Leicester was no less than 69.3 per
cent. This does not, of course, imply any connection between
the disuse of vaccination and the increase of infantile syphilis.
It does, however, conclusively rebut the argument of those who
seek to connect the increase of mortality from syphilis with the
practice of vaccination.
It has been observed that the comparison is made between
Leicester, which is an urban population, and the whole of England
and Wales, which would comprise a large rural population. This