Report on vaccination and its results, based on the evidence taken by the Commission during the years 1889-1897.

  • Great Britain. Royal Commission on Vaccination.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report on vaccination and its results, based on the evidence taken by the Commission during the years 1889-1897. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    139/512 (page 127)
    in mind that both classes lived in the same towns, were of similar ages, and suffered in the same epidemics, it is im- possible to believe that there was nothing to distinguish the two classes from one another. 218. The relation of the fatality of the vaccinated to that of the unvaccinated class is not precisely the same in each of the towns. One would not expect it to be so on any hypothesis, but in every case the fatality in the unvac- cinated class was very large. The fatality in the unvac- cinated class was smallest at Leicester, where, as we have already indicated, the fatality generally was less than in the other towns ; even there the fatality in the unvaccinated class under ten was 14 per cent., whilst there was not a single death amongst the vaccinated class of that age. 219. The conclusion, then, is surely irresistible that some circumstance must have existed distinguishing the class selected as vaccinated from that selected as unvaccinated, and which rendered it less liable to suffer fatally from smallpox. The only condition which regulated the distribu- tion of the cases into the one class or the other was the presence or absence of vaccination. Whatever mistakes may have been made in erroneously including persons in the one class or the other, it cannot be doubted that the great majority of the one class were vaccinated, whilst the great majority of the other class were unvaccinated. Unless, then, some circumstance existed other than the presence or absence of vaccination, which distinguished the two classes and could account for the remarkably different smallpox fatality which characterised them, it would be only reasonable to attribute this difference to vaccination. We will consider presently the causes which have been suggested, other than vaccination, as an explanation of the phenomenon we have been considering. 220. The evidence afforded by the experience in these towns does not stand alone; the same phenomenon of a higher fatality amongst the unvaccinated than the vaccinated had been previously observed.