Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/575

Rh would seem scarcely necessary to appeal to statistics at this late hour of the scientific day. But surely so long as we have the poor with us, we shall have with them a class of men whose minds are so curiously constituted that they will select for study the nether side of the social fabric, the weakness of the best of governments, and the minor defects in the character of the world's heroes.

Even as late as the month of April in the first year of the new century one of the largest and most widely read of the daily papers of the country published over the name of a well-known anti-vaccinationist a statement apparently made in good faith to the effect that vaccination counted more victims than smallpox, and that the practice was a relic of barbarism, asking that a halt be called upon the passage of compulsory laws looking to the protection of the people by any such measures. These singular protests against the operation of the most beneficent of life-saving devices will probably be repeated so long as there is a law on any statute book. Their starveling and distorted figures, garnered from the refuse heaps of mortality, must ever and again furnish forth the tables on which these purblind reasoners rely. They close their eyes to the latest signal victory of science in this field. The Island of Porto Rico, according to the report of Surgeon-General Hoff, in the year 1896 harbored no fewer than three thousand cases of smallpox. Imagine a State of the Union of similar size exposed to such an extent to the ravages of the disease! After the establishment, however, of a government vaccine-farm, "eight hundred thousand natives were vaccinated, at a cost of about four cents for each individual, with the result that by October, 1899, no case of smallpox was known either to the military or civil authorities anywhere in the island." This was a fine illustration of the carrying of 'the white man's burden.' Porto Rico bombarded us with a filth-germ and in revenge we made her clean!

In the year 1867 vaccination was made compulsory for school children in the city of Chicago, and for twenty years after there was practical immunity from smallpox for this important class of the population; while the police of the same city, exposed to every form of infectious disease in their surveillance of its several districts, since vaccination was made compulsory also for them, have never developed a case of the disease.

Dr. Buchanan, medical officer of the local government board (England), in 1881 prepared a table of comparative smallpox death rates among Londoners, vaccinated and unvaccinated respectively, for the fifty-two weeks ending May 29, 1881, calculating that the vaccinated persons of all ages living in London, in the twelve months concerned, were 3,620,000, and the unvaccinated of all ages 190,000 in number. This table reads: