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Thus the following expression in Galt's "Annals of the Parish'' is justified—"My son Gilbert was seized with the smallpox and was blinded by them for seventeen days.''

Osler thinks the pesta magna of Galen was smallpox; Marcus Aurelius died of it.

England was by no means exempt, but it was not infection in the modern sense that Shakespeare meant when he wrote—

It is certainly not necessary to point out that the principle of vaccination has been one of wide application in modern medicine. Our word "vaccine'' testifies to this. A vaccine is a liquid, the result of bacterial growth, injected into a patient in order to render him immune from that particular disease which is caused by sufficient infection with the microorganisms in question, e.g., of typhoid fever or of plague.

He was painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, by Northcote and by Vigneron.

Antivaccinators constantly allude to calf-lymph as "filth''; if lymph is filth, then I am able to assure them that each one of them has about three liters of it in his own body.

Now and again, however, we have the sad spectacle of some one really well educated but apparently either ignorant of logic or desirous of wilfully misrepresenting facts. The Hon. Stephen Coleridge has an article in the June (1914) number of the Contemporary Review which is, to say the least of it, highly immoral in ethics and statistics.

I shall examine only that part of it bearing on vaccination. The statements are that in the last five recorded years, 58 persons died from smallpox vaccination (he means vaccination against smallpox), whereas in the same five years, 85 persons died from smallpox itself. The inference we are intended to draw from these figures is that to be vaccinated is nearly as fatal as to have smallpox itself.

Now this kind of argument is a very common one with statistically immoral persons, and is known as the suppression of the ratio. Before we can appreciate the fact that in five years 58 persons died after being vaccinated, we at least need to know the total number of persons who were vaccinated. If only 58 persons were vaccinated and they all died, then the mortality was 100 per cent., but if, as was practically the case, thousands of infants in Great Britain were vaccinated in five years, then if only 58 died after vaccination (although not necessarily in consequence of it) the mortality falls some thousands of a per cent. The suppression of the ratio, i. e., 58/many thousands is the deceit that is practiced.

Fifty-eight per year for five years, is 11.6 deaths per year of persons vaccinated: presumably these were infants: taking the birth-rate in England as 30 per 1,000 living, we may say that 900,000 infants were born; deduct 100,000 as not vaccinated, we have 800,000 infants vaccinated, of these 11.6 died after

being vaccinated, which is 0.0014 per cent. This is not much of a mortality from any cause; but using Mr. Coleridge's own figures, it is a splendid demonstration of the safety of infant-vaccination, the opposite of what he pretends it shows.

Mr. Coleridge proceeds to tell us that in five years 85 persons died of smallpox in Great Britain, i. e., an average of 17 persons per year. In other words 17 persons died of smallpox in a country with 30 million inhabitants, or 0.000056 per cent. of persons living, not a high mortality. And we strongly suspect, may we hope, that those 17 were persons who had not been vaccinated.

But in Pre-Jennerian days, 17 persons died of smallpox out of every 100 persons dying from all causes.

Mr. Coleridge's figures, properly and honestly interpreted, testify loudly to conclusions exactly the opposite of what he desires to insinuate; he has no doubt taken the statistics of the Registrar-General, but he has prostituted them.

Mr. Coleridge's paper could not be a better example of the art of concealing the causes of phenomena.

He exhibits the following table:
Deaths from smallpox per annum per a million living:

     

1862-1870	172.2
1871-1880	244.6
1881-1890	45.8
1891-1900	13.3
1901-1910	12.8

So that the table shows that since 1880 in Great Britain the deaths from smallpox per million per year have declined until they are only about 1/14th of their original number.

The natural inference from these figures, viewed in the light of the history of smallpox in Great Britain, is that compulsory vaccination has been steadily eradicating the disease; but this is not Mr. Coleridge's conclusion: He says it is due to the large number of persons who have refused to be vaccinated! This would be laughable if it were not really serious; it is sad and serious that a man of Mr. Coleridge's education and social position should so consistently mislead the uncritical readers of the Contemporary Review to whose pages he has unfortunately very free access. If Mr. Coleridge really believes these things he is either very stupid or very ignorant; if he knows them to be otherwise, but wilfully deceives the public, he is immoral. He suffers from the worst form of bias, the anti-scientific.