View report page

47
and he was instrumental in suppressing 8 disorderly houses
(of which one had to be cleared twice).
The epidemic prevalence of Small-pox in the East of
London, in the latter part of the year 1870, and its subsequent
dissemination throughout the Metropolis, made it
essential that steps should be taken here to arrest its progress
as far as possible.
It is a well-known fact in medicine that there are
certain contagious febrile diseases of limited duration,
which, as a rule, occur only once in a lifetime, or in
regard to which an attack is in a very high degree protective
against any subsequent attack. It is not pretended
that every person, who has suffered from an attack
of one of these diseases, never under any circumstances
suffers from a second attack of the same disease; for it is
quite certain that now and then the same person has one
of these affections two or three, or even a larger number of
times, and perhaps dies of his last attack, and that there
is, in every case, a tendency for the protective influence to
diminish in some degree with the lapse of years; but it
is thoroughly well established that the great majority of
persons who have had one attack of one of the diseases
referred to never do (however much they may be exposed
to its contagion) experience a second attack; and that of
the comparatively small number of persons who have the
disease a second time, the great bulk have it then in a
mild or modified form. The more important of the diseases
here referred to are—typhus fever, scarlet fever, measles,
small-pox, chicken-pox, and hooping cough.
It is Jenner's great merit to have proved that the