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desirable organisms, and as a fact under present methods it is
so pure, that there is no danger of any other disease being
inoculated.
Who is likely to know whether vaccination inoculates
disease? Is it not the medical practitioners? Yet I venture
to say there is no class more careful to have themselves and
their families well vaccinated than the medical profession.
I have not the least doubt that if the re-vaccination of
contacts and others had not been carried out, the epidemic, in
spite of hospital isolation and disinfection, would still have
been raging, and instead of affecting 2 per 1,000 of the population
would have decimated it. The only effective alternative
to vaccination is quarantine of contacts as practised at
Leicester, and I fancy the people of Woolwich prefer vaccination
to being imprisoned in their own homes.
14. Hospital Isolation.—All the cases notified were removed
to the Asylums Board's Small-pox Hospitals with two exceptions.
One of these was a mild case which had been mistaken
for Chicken-pox, and was effectively isolated and nursed at
home; no other case occurred in the house or neighbourhood.
The other was a case which I notified myself, but which was
so mild that I was not prepared to take the responsibility of
insisting on removal. There were three non-vesicular papules,
coming after two or three days slight malaise and in a house
where a child had a well marked attack of Small-pox.
Owing to the pressure on the Hospital accommodation at
the early part of the epidemic, many patients were discharged
when the vesicles had not completely desquamated. No
secondary or return cases however occurred to my knowledge,
from which I should be inclined to infer that the later
desquamation of Small-pox vesicles is not highly infectious.