Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 February 1899 — Before Vaccination. [ARTICLE]

Before Vaccination.

Before the introduction of vaccination, now admirably supplemented by isolation, smallpox was never localized, and it was always with us. No one was safe from it, and there was a German proverb to the effect that love and smallpox were the two things from which no one could hope to escape. Trustworthy estimates fix the annual death rate from smallpox in England during the latter part of the eighteenth century at the proportion of 3,000 to every 1,000,000 persons living, which would mean, with our present population, a death rate from this cause alone approaching 100,000 a year. Even if this estimate is much too large, there can, be no question as to the enormous difference between then and now. It is going too far to say with Mr. Hutton that “smallpox, in spite of all the fuss made about it, is pretty nearly as extinct as the plague,” for though preventive measures keep it within an extremely narrow compass, we have seen how readily it may revive. In .the year 1890 there were only 16 deaths from this disease registered in the whole of England. Westminster Review. "