Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/346

326 uncle's knife," cried the nephew of a famous operator of this period. The operation lasted an hour, after which leeches were applied to prevent fever. After a night of agony, the victim was bled in the arm, more leeches were applied, until, twenty-nine hours after the first shock, death mercifully released the patient. It is small wonder that many preferred to suffer long-drawn-out pain and disease rather than submit to the torture of the knife! Under surgeon, physician and apothecary were an army of dentists, midwives, &c., all more or less ignorant and uncertificated. The new century found vaccination growing in popularity among the cultured classes, together with a consequent decrease of small-pox, but it was not made compulsory till 1840.

But if disease was imperfectly understood, if surgery was handicapped without the help of anæsthetics, and infant mortality was high, yet the population was increasing by leaps and bounds. Indeed, nothing like it had ever been known before. The first census, taken in 1801, showed Great Britain with over nine million inhabitants. Twenty years later it had risen to above fourteen million. In the whole preceding two hundred years it had only risen about