London's Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports 1848-1972
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Hints from the Health Department. Leaflet from the archive of the Society of Medical Officers of Health. Credit: Wellcome Collection, London
Kensington 1888
[Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Kensington]
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117
Sary to say anything; hut the pertinacity with which some
misguided persons still decry the most beneficent of medical
discoveries shows no sign of abatement, and as their teaching
is calculated to prejudice the general public against the wise
compulsion authorized by law, I do not hesitate to refer again
to the pregnant proofs of the efficacy of vaccination, as a protection
against small-pox, contained in the annual report for
1881 of the Medical Officer to the Local Government Board,
not long since re-published. Dr. Buchanan refers, in the first
place, to the relative mortality from small-pox in the vaccinated,
and in the unvaccinated, inhabitants of London, which formed
the subject of a Memorandum which he submitted to the
Board in June, 1881, and from which I extract the following
Table:—
| Death rate of people of subjoined ages. | Per million of each age of the vaccinated class. | Per million of each age of the unvaccinated class. |
|---|---|---|
| All ages | 90 | 3,350 |
| Under 20 years | 61 | 4,520 |
| Under 5 years | 40½ | 5,950 |
Dr. Buchanan's further remarks went to show the great
reduction in small pox mortality in children under ten years of
age, a limit which in 1881 embraced the period within which
vaccination had been efficiently compulsory. In children under
10 the deaths from this disease in 1881 were a hundredfold
more numerous among the unvaccinated than among the vaccinated;
or, to put it in another way: If the vaccinated children
had died at the same rate as the unvaccinated, not 125 deaths,
but more than 12,000 would have happened, and if the mortality