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8 Parish of Saint George the Martyr, Southwark.
fellows." The very efficiency of the remedy has brought about its neglect. The remembrance
of that disease so loathsome to sight and smell, and which presented such a mass of
hideous corruption as "is not met with this side the grave," is obliterated from the minds
of the present age, and forgotten. But let me for a moment bring before you small-pox as
it rages and spreads where vaccination has never been performed. Captain Butler, in his
interesting account of the "Great Lone Land" tells us that for some months previous to
his journey (May, 1871), this disease had swept from the Missouri through the Black-feet
Indians, and had ran the whole length of the North, passing from tribe to tribe, and "had left
in its track depopulated wigwams and vacant council-lodges: thousands (and there are not
many thousands all told) had perished on the great sandy plains that lie between Saskatchewan
and the Missouri. Of all the fatal methods of destroying the Indians which his white
brother has introduced into the "West, this plague of small-pox is the most deadly. The
history of its annihilating progress is written in too legible characters on the desolate
expanses of untenanted wilds, where the Indian graves are the sole traces of the red man's
former domination. Beneath this awful scourge whole tribes have disappeared, the bravest
and best have vanished, because their bravery forbade that they should flee from the terrible
infection, and, like soldiers in some square plunged through and through and rent with
shot, the survivors closed only the more despairingly together when the death-stroke fell
heaviest amongst them. It had commenced in the trading camp, then it had travelled on,
and everything had gone down before it—The chief and the brave, the medicine man, the
squaw, the papoose. The camp moved away but the dread disease clung to it,
and far over the plains the track was marked with the unburied bodies and bleaching bones
of the wild warriors of the west."

The most fatal disease of the zymotic class has been diarrhoea, although the deaths
from tnis disease are 8 less than in the preceding year. The deaths from choleraic diarrhoea
were two, the same as the year before. Whooping-cough follows next, to which were
attributed 45 deaths; then fever which caused 20 deaths. But the deaths from fever of
those who are removed to the hospital, are registered whore they die, and not in the district