Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/570

560 which there may be slight sensations of chilliness and possibly moderate fever, the disease actually not preventing the patient from attending to his or her usual vocation, the end is reached, and without the occurrence of eruptive symptoms. These cases are sufficiently common, and the proof of the reality of the variolous process in one class, where the patient afterward is not capable of receiving disease in an epidemic, is substantiated by the proofs furnished by another class of cases, in which, for example, a pregnant woman, having suffered no more than in the instance cited, later brings into the world a child covered with unmistakable symptoms of the disease.

From the extreme of benignancy illustrated in such a group of cases to another in which symptoms are exhibited of a severity just short of the pronounced features of classical smallpox, there is every gradation and not a few excursions to the one side or the other of oddity and apparent caprice. In the late epidemic, physicians were often at sea respecting the nature of the disease, because, perhaps, after a regular onset of classical and threatening symptoms, there followed an almost absurd abortion of the morbid process, which in twenty-four hours or more lost every menacing feature; or the eruptive phenomena failed to develop the characteristic fluting or puckering of the vesico-pustules known technically as 'umbilication'; or the peculiar odor of the disease was lacking; or the mouth failed to exhibit symptoms; or the progression of the eruptive phenomena from point to point of the body-surface was not according to rule.

The question of the influence of vaccination upon the victims of the epidemic and others aroused special interest. It was claimed in many of the localities where the disease prevailed that the vaccinated and unvaccinated suffered alike; and hence that vaccination did not protect. It was further claimed that in some cases vaccination had been effective in those who were convalescent from the new disease. And thus blunders innumerable complicated the question, the answer to which was of the highest moment to the welfare of the commonwealth. The disease was variously called 'Cuban itch,' 'Porto Eico scratches,' 'Cuban measles,' 'chicken-pox,' 'Porto Rican chicken-pox,' 'Spanish measels,' etc. These popular names constituted the jargon of the ignorant. There are no maladies in Cuba, Porto Rico or Spain recognized by any such terms or others like them.

Greed is among the most potent of human motives, and it must be admitted that in the presence of the late epidemic, among those who were ignorant of its nature, there were to be found others who preferred to close their eyes to the facts. Merchants did not care to suffer the paralysis of their local trade which usually is wrought by the panic that flees before a pestilence. Editors of papers in the smaller towns were unwilling to spread the news to their immediate rivals in the