Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/354

 judgment and ample experience entitle both his facts and opinions to great weight.

1. Concerning protection. 1. In a large tenement-house in East Third Street were nine German families. An unvaccinated child was taken sick with small-pox, and the case was kept secret until the child died. All the other people in the house were vaccinated except one family consisting of parents and three children. The parents did not believe in vaccination and persistently refused it for their children. All three children had small-pox and two died. No other cases occurred in the house.

2. The inmates of No.—East Eleventh Street were exposed to small-pox. The vaccinators found three babies whose parents refused to have them vaccinated. Within three weeks all three children died of the disease. There were no other cases in the house.

3. No.—St. Mark's Place. Three cases of small-pox had already occurred in the house. The inspectors found three unvaccinated children, but vaccination was refused. The two eldest children took the disease; the youngest was already dying of marasmus. No other cases occurred.

4. At No.—Tenth Avenue was a concealed case of small-pox already of twenty-one days' duration. He had been vaccinated in infancy, but not since. He died before he could be removed. His wife and four children had been successfully vaccinated just before the husband took sick, and, though they had all slept in the same room with this fatal case of small-pox twenty-one nights, not one of them took the disease.

Cases of this character, where the unvaccinated were selected and attacked by the disease, while the vaccinated, though equally exposed escaped, could be multiplied almost without limit. Here is one from the inspector's own experience:

Small-pox was in a tenement-house of eighteen families. Most of the inmates submitted to vaccination, but two children were found upon one floor and three upon another whose parents refused to allow it, though repeatedly urged. Within a short time all five of these children had the disease and three died. The parents of the three unvaccinated children had a fourth child who had been successfully vaccinated at school, and for which she received a severe beating at the hands of her father. This child, although sleeping in the same room with those who were sick and dying of the disease, entirely escaped.

No more striking examples of protection afforded by vaccination could exist than that furnished by placing infants on the first day of their vaccination in a small-pox hospital, filled with patients in every stage of the disease. This was frequently necessary during the epidemic, where the mother was attacked, and the infant must accompany her to the hospital; and, says the inspector, "not a single instance has occurred where the infant so exposed has contracted the