Page:Thirty-five years in the East.djvu/48

8 advice, and looked upon the event as a punishment from heaven. In another village, not far from the above-mentioned, I had to attend a whole family of eight persons, old and young, who were vaccinated all at the same time. After eight days, upon calling on them, I found a young man of about twenty years of age, in agony, in consequence of confluent small-pox, which eruption had taken place on the evening of the vaccination. He was the only person in the house on whom the vaccination had failed, on account of the man having carried on his shoulders a dead body that was infected with the natural small-pox ; thus the lymph failed, by the counter-agency of the contagion. The rest of the family enjoyed excellent health, and were saved through the medium of vaccination.

There is an opinion prevalent, that vaccination will only keep off the small-pox for a period of twenty years. I was (if I am not mistaken) vaccinated in my native country, in the year 1800, with such an excellent lymph (not crust), that I treated a great many cases of small-pox, such as lately occurred in the years 1848 and 1849, at Lahore, without being affected by the disease myself, and that without having been a second time vaccinated. Nevertheless, if the second or third vaccination is of no use, it does no injury to the constitution. In one year I got from English physicians, lymph of quite different qualities, some from Umbala, and some from Delhi ; the former was of a good quality, but the latter was of a very bad one, as the pustules sprang rapidly up and vanished in a very short time ; neither was the areola of them red enough, which accounted for many of those whom I vaccinated catching the small-pox.I therefore discontinued to vaccinate with the matter from Delhi, after I had received some of a better quality from Umbala.

At Tripoli, I met with the then new Governor Barber, who although of very low birth, had managed to get possession of the fortress, and afterwards of the town itself, by fraud and cunning. He was a short-necked man, thickset, inclined to apoplexy (Habitus apoplecticus),