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.

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    did not also influence the records of the other deaths. On the other hand, its value is very largely lessened by the fact that the ratio is determined and influenced by circumstances affecting other diseases and not smallpox itself. It may, however, be trusted so far as to show that the ratio during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was very high, and, on the whole, higher during the eighteenth than during the seventeenth century. Further, if we assume, as we have probably the right to do, that the total death-rate was during those centuries very high, as compared, for instance, with the present time, we may infer that the death-rate from smallpox was very high, and the disease either very fatal or very prevalent. 43. The Bills give no information whatever about the number of persons attacked by the disease, and therefore teach us nothing as to the fatality of the disease,—that is to say, the proportion of deaths to the number of cases attacked. We learn, however, by the incidental statements of various authors, that the fatality varied very much in different years,—that is, in different epidemics. An epidemic was often spoken of as being either mild or malignant; in some epi- demics, though many might be attacked, the proportion of those who died was small; in others the disease proved fatal to a large number of those attacked. 44. Although from 1728 onwards the Bills give the ages at death, the numbers have not been analysed so as to show the age incidence55 of the smallpox mortality, that is to say, the relative mortality at different ages. And the Bills furnish no data for determining how such influences as those of station in life, sanitary conditions, and other circumstances affected the mortality. 45. These Bills of Mortality form, as we have said, by far the most complete source of our knowledge of small- pox in England in past times; but it must be borne in mind that in respect to any contagious disease like smallpox the conditions of London were peculiar. The population was to a marked extent a moving one ; a large number of