Notwithstanding the arguments
advanced in this latter day against vaccination, the remembrance
of a few important statistic facts is all that is necessary to
fully appreciate the blessing which Jenner conferred upon
humanity. In the last century, besides the enormous mortality of
small-pox (it was computed that, in the middle of the last
century, 2,000,000 victims perished in Russia from small-pox),
the marks of affliction, blindness, deafness, etc., were plain in
at least one member of every family.
Asiatic cholera probably originated centuries ago in India, where
it is now endemic and rages to such an extent as to destroy
750,000 inhabitants in the space of five years. There is
questionable evidence of the existence of cholera to be found in
the writings of some of the classic Grecian and Indian authors,
almost as far back as the beginning of the Christian era. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries travelers in the East gave
accounts of this disease. Sonnerat, a French traveler, describes
a pestilence having all the characteristics of Asiatic cholera
which prevailed in the neighborhood of Pondicherry and the
Coromandel coast from 1768 to 1769, and which, within a year,
carried off 60,000 of those attacked.
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