Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/576

566 {|
 * width=200 |Death rate of people of subjoined ages
 * width=150 |Per million of each age of the vaccinated class.
 * width=150 |Per million of each age of the unvaccinated class.
 * All ages
 * 90
 * 3,350
 * Under twenty years
 * 61
 * 4,520
 * Under five years
 * 40
 * 5,950
 * }
 * Under five years
 * 40
 * 5,950
 * }
 * }

Statistics of this sort might be piled mountains high; but they mean nothing and they count for nothing with the prejudiced. It is well to remember at times that any agency and influence operating at any one moment upon large masses of human beings of both sexes and of all ages has to bear its percentage of damage and death. The killed on the day of the passing of the funeral cortege of Queen Victoria, the fatality attending ocean and railway travel, even the victims of the awful fire-tragedies lately occurring in Paris and New York, which shocked every reader of the public press, have not deterred men and women of ordinary common sense from going to fairs, sleeping in hotels, or crossing the continent by rail or the ocean steamer. Vaccination of every member of any community, including men, women and, in particular, infants will, without any question, be followed by untoward results in a proportion of cases. The mere statistics of common accidents and ordinary disease account for a large part of the list in the relatively slender catalogue of vaccination accidents. Men, women and children perish annually from the stings of bees, from the bites of flies, from the prick of a pin, and from the accidental impaction of a bit of food in the larynx. Lately a physician reported a disease not due to vaccination. An infant was brought by appointment to his office in order to be inoculated, but the physician chanced to be called away from the city, and the date of the trifling operation was postponed for a week. In that week the child developed symptoms of syphilis, which would probably have been laid to the account of the vaccination if the latter had been performed.

It has been said that if the modern tourist could be transported to the streets of London in the eighteenth century, before the general adoption of the practice of vaccination, he would be immensely astonished, not so much by the quaintness of the dress and the speech of the people, by the aspect of their shops, and by the odd-looking vehicles on their streets, as by the extraordinary number of pock-marked faces he would encounter on every hand. Even as early as the year 1778, the officers of foreign troops on American soil wrote back to their countrymen in the old world that the American women were surpassingly beautiful and were very ’seldom pock-marked.' Macaulay, describing the distress in London in 1694, wrote as follows: "That disease over which science has since achieved a succession of glorious and beneficent victories was then the most terrible of all the ministers