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Privy Council, their Lordships have taken measures to ensure that no one shall
be permitted to exercise the functions of public vaccinator without competent
skill, acquired by actual practice of the operation, and have provided educational
stations, for the purpose. In addition to this, they have embodied in their
instructions, which are now binding on all vaccinators under contract, those
precautions which the largest experience has found to be useful, and have
recommended to the administrators of poor law relief throughout the country,
the adoption of such arrangements as are calculated to enable the vaccinator to
adopt the best methods, and above all, to employ only recent and liquid lymph,
derived from the most carefully selected sources.
It is a well established fact, that wherever vaccination is well performed,
prejudice disappears, and the operation becomes universal while in those
localities in which the necessary precautions are neglected, it as certainly becomes
unpopular, and can only be maintained by compulsion. Whence it may be
anticipated that by further improvements, the protection of the population from
small-pox may be rendered no less complete in England than it already is in
Sweden and Prussia, without having recourse to the arbitrary enactments, by
which the object is attained in those countries.
TABLE I.
Births, Deaths, and Public Vaccinations of Inhabitants of Paddington.
Population
in 1861.
Births.
Deaths.
Vaccinations.
St. Mary's
39,009
343
214
99
St. John's
36,798
178
112
92
St. Mary's Hospital
—
—
18
TABLE II.
Mortality per 10,000 of the Population during the Quarter ending September
28, of Children under Five Years, from preventible causes, in houses
inhabited by the poor, and in the rest of the Parish respectively, as compared
with the standard quarterly mortality from the same causes in the
most healthy districts of England.