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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    enactment been exercised;1 but the amendment of the law as to the registration of vaccination was such as to render it, in every union, less likely that the obliga- tion to be vaccinated would be evaded. 131. The records kept under the Vaccination Act of 187 r, and tabulated by the Local Government Board, show the amount of primary vaccination, performed within a certain period of birth, of children whose births were registered in England or Wales during the years 1872—1893. The following table (p. 76) gives the figures. From these figures it may be inferred that, as regards those children whose births were registered during each of the years 1872—1883, the proportion primarily vaccinated remained practically the same. The effect of the opposition to the practice of vaccination, which in some parts of the country has grown of recent years (though to some extent, at all events, it has existed in England during the whole period now dealt with), is shown by the gradual diminution of the proportion primarily vaccinated in the case of children whose births were registered in England or Wales during each of the ten years 1884—1893. The diminution of this proportion did not, of course, necessarily result at once in a diminished proportion of the population who had, at some time in their lives, been vaccinated. 132. The materials before us do not allow us to make any numerical statement of the proportion, as time went on, during the period 1838—1894, of the population of England and Wales who had at some time been vaccinated. So far as we can judge of the effect of the efforts made during that period to extend the practice of vaccination, the proportion of the population who had at some time been vaccinated has steadily grown, though with no even rate of increase, during the years from 1840 onwards, down to a recent date at all events. The rate of increase was greater in 1853 and the few years immediately following it than in previous years, and again expanded still more considerably in the years from 1868 to 1872, and perhaps in some few succeeding years. 1 Q. 3i-5-