Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 1.djvu/99

 and the baneful fruits of that system were seen in the bills of mortality. Since that time the subject has attracted the attention of the faculty, and the most eminent men have not thought it beneath them to dedicate their talents to the elucidation of its difficulties. The beneficial consequences of this change have evinced themselves in the more successful management of children, both in health and disease, and a gradual decrement in the rate of infant mortality. Every friend of humanity, too, will hail with satisfaction the influence which the practice of vaccination has had in curtailing the mortality of the first years of life. If the Jennerian discovery has not always prevented the small-pox, it has, at any rate, diminished its frequency and fatality. By its means, many thousands of lives are annually saved in this country alone, nor is it manifest that any other disease is superinduced by it. The frequent cutaneous deformities, swellings, blindness, lameness, &c. incidental to variola, have never been known to follow the cow-pox. Nor is it very evident that the substitution of a milder for a more malignant disease, has materially altered the character of other diseases, though it has by some been thought that the cow-pox is capable of hybridising with other cutaneous diseases, so as to give rise to new eruptions; by others, that it has diminished the number and modified the appearance of the old ones. Certain it is, that when vaccination is performed on a child labouring under any cutaneous malady, however slight, such as chaps and sores behind the ears, or on any other part, it not infrequently fails in producing its full and salutary effects. It