Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/379

Rh of its illustrious foundress will be rendered sacred by it to future ages. . . . She consecrated its first effects on the persons of her own fine children; and has already received this glory from it that the influence of her example has reached as high as the blood royal. It is a godlike delight she must be conscious of when she considers the many thousands of lives that will be saved every year after the general establishment of the practice—a good so lasting and so vast that none of those wide endowments and deep foundations of public charity that have made most noise in the world deserve at all to be compared with it." To understand how great the deliverance was, it should be known that then it killed one in seven of all that were born; it caused about one third of all the blindness in those pitiable victims, and it disfigured multitudes frightfully. Mrs. Croasdale, an English lady born early in this century, mentions in a recent book of reminiscences that in her childhood so many were "pitted" that a person with a smooth face was notable.

Notwithstanding this eulogy from a highly intelligent source, it is pretty certain that, like all those persons who are overmasteringly possessed with one idea, she was considered an unreasonable "crank." The very friend to whom she wrote the minute description of the process died of smallpox; and the Lady Mary's sister. Lady Mar, had that most precious of English aristocratic possessions—an only son. She offered to inoculate him, and promised to take him into her own house and care for him personally till he should be recovered; but the sister failed to be convinced, and the boy died in childhood of the disease.

People still remained so skeptical that Lady Mary used to take her little daughter into houses where people had been inoculated, and whose convalescence she was superintending, to prove her own immovable conviction of it as a protective measure.

At one time such unreasonable prejudices were excited that clergymen and physicians became violent anti-inoculators. Pamphlets appeared in which it was described as the outcome of "atheism, quackery, and avarice"; it was denounced from the pulpit as "an impious interference with the just and inscrutable visitations of God"; and Dr. Wagstaffe, of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, said that "posterity would marvel that a practice employed by a few ignorant women, among an illiterate and unthinking people, should have so suddenly been adopted by one of the politest nations in the world." That this was a narrow and unmerited piece of severity is shown by the facts that these "unthinking" people had discovered that there is a difference in the features of the disease in different cases—hæmorrhagic, confluent, discrete, etc.; that those artificially produced follow closely the character of the cases from which they are planted, each yielding "seed