View report page

21
reported. Many of these cases—about 77—were removed to the
Asylums Hospital by the Union medical officers.
I need not repeat what has been so often stated in regard to
the importance of vaccination and re-vaccination. The law
enforces infantile vaccination, but as the families of the poorer
class so frequently change their residences a number of infants
escape the supervision of the vaccination officers by removing
out of their districts, and so remain unvaccinated. Re-vaccination
is comparatively very little attended to, yet its preventive
efficacy may be truly said to be absolute. This may be well
illustrated by reference to a report of Dr. Collie, of the Metropolitan
Asylum District Board, wherein it is stated that during
five months that the Small Pox was treated, 100 persons were
engaged in attendance upon the sick; all these persons, with
two exceptions, were re-vaccinated, and they all, with the exceptions
referred to, although exposed to the infection in its most
concentrated form, escaped the disease. The exceptions referred
to were a kitchenmaid and a stoker. But the appointment of
these persons had not been reported to the medical superintendent,
and, as a consequence, they were not re-vaccinated, and
both contracted Small Pox. The same result has occurred in
the experience of later years on a much larger scale. No age is
exempt from Small Pox, where proper protection has not been
obtained, for one person died of it at 80.
The cases occurring in this parish were almost invariably
single, and scattered. It will be noticed that the number of
cases occurring in the upper, or least crowded wards, was nearly
double that in the lower, or most densely populated wards;
and I cannot avoid attributing this to the proximity of the
former wards to that portion of Islington Parish in which the
disease prevailed to an enormous extent. The number of cases
of Small Pox occurring in Clerkenwell was very nearly the same
as that in the Holborn district— rather less. I have no returns
of the St. Luke's parish, but if the above suggestion is correct,