century, was the first to add to what had previously
been written, that a person can have small-pox
only once. These Arabian physicians and
philosophers represented in their time to Europe
the science of the world. They professed that they
had for small-pox so extraordinary a remedy
that, though nine pustules had come out when
it was administered, it would prevent the
appearance of a tenth. They generally suffered
tor their knowledge. Averroes, a portly many-
witted man, who could write love-songs as well
as study mathematics, was once set by his
sovereign bareheaded at the gate of a mosque,
where all who entered might spit in his face. In those
days it was not altogether to a man's advantage
to be well informed.

The first case of small-pox recorded in Europe
was that of Elfrida, daughter of Alfred the
Great. Elfrida's grandson also died of this
disease. Between the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, small-pox was spread over Europe by the
Crusaders: who won for themselves small-pox
and leprosy, if they got nothing else, by their
adventures in the East. In the reigns of our
two first Edwards, small-pox in England was
described by Gilbert and by John of Gaddesden,
whose reputation Chaucer celebrates. John of
Gaddesden, in his "Rosa Anglica," blends poetry
with physio. He was a thriving genius, who
got "good money from the barber surgeons"
for a confection of tree frogs, and he was the
first Englishman employed as Court physician.
We are told how he treated the king's son when
sick of small-pox. It is hard to say whether
poetry or physic had inspired him, for his order
was that the patient should be wrapped in
scarlet, and that everything about the bed
should be of a red colour. This, he says, made
the prince recover, without having so much as
one mark on his face.

The Spaniards took small-pox from Europe to
America. It depopulated Mexico, by the
annihilation of three millions and a half of people;
they "perished in heaps," says Prescott. It was,
as it always has proved, especially fatal among
the dark-skinned races. A million of people
(the whole native population) perished out of
Hispaniola by the disease that was more
murderous than war and famine. Still, in the
sixteenth century, entire races of men were
destroyed by it in the Brazils. It spread through
Peru, sweeping away all the Indians and
mulattoes in the cities of Potosi and De la Paz; it
left the country desolate, and the mines were
for a long time deserted. In North America, of
twelve millions of Red men, six died by the sword,
bayonet, and whisky; the other six by small-pox.
A translation of the Bible having been made
for the Six Nations, by the time it was finished
there was not one left to read it, the whole
nation having died of small-pox. The terrible
disease devastated Siberia, Greenland, and
Labrador, and made for three years a silent desert
of the capital of Thibet. It killed two millions
in a single year in Russia, and at Constantinople
it destroyed one half of those on whom it seized.
In France and Sweden, a tenth of the deaths
were by small-pox; in England, a fourteenth. It
was small-pox, said Sir Gilbert Blane, that had
blinded two in three of the applicants for relief
to the Hospital for the Indigent Blind.
Bernoulli believed that this disease swept away
fifteen millions of human beings in every quarter
of a century. In Europe alone it destroyed in
a single century forty-five millions. As all
climates were alike to it, so were all ranks. It
shattered the constitution of our famous
William the Third, destroyed his father, his mother,
his wife, his uncle, and his two cousins.

Such were the terrors of the disease concerning
which Lady Wortley Montague, wife of our
ambassador at Constantinople, wrote in the year
seventeen hundred and seventeen, in a letter
from Turkey, "The small-pox, so fatal and so
general amongst us, is here entirely harmless
by the invention of Engrafting, which is the
term they give it. Every year thousands undergo
the operation, and the French ambassador says
pleasantly, that they take the small-pox here by
way of diversion, as they take the waters in
other countries. There is no example of any
one who has died of it, and you may believe I
am well satisfied of the safety of this experiment,
since I intend to try it on my dear little son. I
am patriot enough to take pains to bring this
useful invention into fashion in England."  Four
years afterwards, she had her daughter publicly
inoculated in this country. One year after that
preliminary experiments upon six condemned
criminals in Newgate having proved satisfactory,
two children of Caroline, Princess of Wales, were
inoculated. But the new practice met with
strong opposition, and in that same year the
Reverend Edward Massey preached that Job's
distemper was the confluent small-pox, which he
took from inoculation by the devil, who thus
ranked as the father of inoculators.

It is a certain truth that the disease of small-pox
introduced by puncture through the skin, is
less fatal than the same disease when taken
through infection of the air. Where one in five
or six died of the natural disease, there died but
one in fifty—at the Inoculation Hospital only
three in a thousand—of those upon whom it was
thus engrafted. But to the nation at large
inoculation was a scourge. It protected the
inoculated person at the risk of all his
neighbours; for, however mild the course of the
disease in his own person, he became, while
suffering from it, a centre of infection. Mild cases
of small-pox were artificially multiplied among
persons, many of whom never would have fallen
in the way of natural infection; by these it was
communicated naturally to others who would
have escaped, and the whole mortality from
small-pox which before inoculation had been
seventy-four in a thousand, rose to ninety-five
in a thousand after the introduction of that
practice. Instead of a fourteenth, it became a
tenth of the English population that now died
of the disease, while the number increased at
the same rate of those who recovered with the
loss of one or both eves, with impaired
constitutions and disfigured features.