View report page

15
The number of Licensed Slaughterhouses visited were 104,
Cow houses 95, and Bakehouses 221, in all of which the usual
Periodical cleansing and whitewashing was enforced, and many
other improvements effected.
The Epidemic of Small Pox which commenced in London in the
summer of 1870, and was at its height in the autumn of 1871,
but which I am happy to say is now, whilst these pages are
patting through the press, (Sept. 1872) almost entirely extinct;
has been one of the most alarming and expensive epidemics
that have visited the country for a century. The cost in a
pecuniary sense has been great; but it is nothing as compared
to the cost of human life, and I trust that the lessons
taught by this Epidemic will not be forgotten; of all the Zymotic
Contagious Diseases, this is the most loathsome; but at the same
time I know of no Disease that can be made so preventible
as this— by intent compulsory vaccination, and re-vaccina-
tion, after the age of puberty of all classes of the community: it
was to the neglect of this sanitary measure that we may attribute
the sad sacrifice we have had of both life and money.
A very Vauable report has just been issued by the Managers of
the Metropolitan Asylum District, which affords to my mind the
strongest confirmation of the value of vaccination as a means, if
not of preventing the disease, of preventing death from Small Pox.
The report would occupy too much space for me to quote at any
length, however, one paragraph relating to re-vaccination is so
valuable that I have inserted it.
The necessity of re-vaccination when the protective power of
the primary vaccination has to a great extent passed away, cannot
be too strongly urged. No greater argument to prove the
efficacy of this precaution can be adduced than the fact that out
of upwards of 14,800 cases received into the Hospitals only 4
will authenticate cases were treated in which re-vaccination has