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London last century, whether from the indiscriminate practice of
inoculation or from habitual indifference which permitted smallpox
to run riot with little, if any, restriction, the great bulk of
persons suffered from small-pox in childhood, and acquired such
protection as an attack of small-pox affords. The deaths from
small-pox each year were chiefly those of young children or new
comers, who were exposed to the constant sources of infection
always kept going, and to the effects of which they had not been
rendered immune.
Thus the matter stood, when in January, 1799, cow-pox
was discovered in a dairy in the Gray's Inn Lane, London, and
attracted the attention of the leading medical men in town, and
became the subject of experiments on a large scale by Drs.
Woodville and Pearson at the small-pox Hospital.
Woodville published the results of his experiments in May,
1799, and Pearson in March of the same year distributed the
hospital lymph to some 200 practitioners at home and abroad.
This was the starting point of the practice of "vaccination";
for Jenner had lost his strain of lymph. Woodville's cases merit
careful attention, as from their number and detail, and from the
fact that he had submitted nearly all of them to the variolous test
within three months of their "vaccination," and found they
resisted it, they produced a profound impression on the mind of
the public and the profession. In July, 1800, thirty-three of the
most eminent physicians and forty distinguished surgeons of the
metropolis signed a declaration to the effect that "those persons
who have had the cow-pox are perfectly secure from the future
infection of the small-pox, and that the inoculated cow-pox is a
much milder and safer disease than the inoculated small-pox."
(Morning Herald, July 19th, 1800.)
Thus, Mr. Marson records 3,094 cases of post-vaccinal smallpox
treated by him at the Highgate Hospital between 1836 and