fatal before Vaccination was discovered; indicating, together with the diminution of fevers, the general improvement of health then taking place."*

The decrease of smallpox towards the close of the century, says Dr. Farr, was due to "the general improvement of health then taking place;" but to what was that improvement due? No marked improvement had been effected in the sanitary arrangements of Londonwhy then this change for the better? My answer is, that a great alteration was in progress in the popular diet.

Dr. George Cheyne, in his famous Essay of Health and Long Life, published in 1724, says

There is no chronical distemper whatsoever more universal, more obstinate, and more fatal in Britain, than the Scurvy taken in its general extent.

And more than fifty years afterwards, in 1783, we have Dr. Buchan bearing similar testimony

The disease most common to this country is the Scurvy. One finds a dash of it in almost every family, and in some the taint is very deep.

It is scarcely necessary to cite authority for what was so generally known and confessed; but in this question of smallpox and its prevention we have to deal with many who appear to be destitute of any historic sense; who argue as if what Englishmen are to-day, they always were; and who contend that as there was more smallpox in London before Jenner than since Jenner, therefore Jenner must be the cause of the diminution. necessary to condescend to such feeble folk.

It is

The cause of the general scorbutic habit of the people was widely recognised by medical men, and Buchan merely repeated their common opinion in saying—

A disease so general must have a general cause, and there is none so obvious as the great quantity of animal food devoured by the natives of this island. As a proof that Scurvy arises from this

* Article, "Vital Statistics: Epidemics," in M'Culloch's Statistical Account of the British Empire.

cause, we are in possession of no remedy for that disease equal to the free use of vegetables.*

Cheyne said much the same at the earlier date. He complained that the upper classes gorged themselves with animal food, and slaked their thirst with wine, "which is now [1724] become common as water, and the better sort scarce ever dilute their food with any other liquor." Beer had the place of wine among the middle and lower orders. In the words of Buchan

The English labourer lives chiefly on bread, which being accompanied with other dry, and often salt food, fires his blood and excites an unquenchable thirst, so that his perpetual cry is for drink. He adds

If men will live on dry bread, poor cheese, salt butter, broiled bacon, and such like parching food, they will find their way to the alehouse-the bane of the lower orders, and the source of half the beggary in the nation.

Were we to say that the diet of the English for the greater part of last century consisted of Bread, Beef, and Beer, we should not go far wrong. The London bread was then, as now, poor stuff; "spoiled," says Buchan," to please the eye, artificially whitened, yet what most prefer, and the poorer sort will eat no other." Whenever it could be obtained, beer was the beverage that went with bread, and was drank by young and old. Salt beef and mutton, bacon, salt fish, and butchers' offal completed the dietary of the multitude. The feeding of the poor in hard seasons exercised the beneficent severely, for the baker's bill often went far to exhaust the working-man's earnings.

It was easy to recommend the rich to get rid of their scurvy by a resort to vegetable food, but to the poor with their obstinate prejudices, shiftlessness, and ignorance, such a recommendation was a sort of mockery. Deliverance, however, came in a form recommended by pleasantness and economy, namely, in the potato. It is true the tuber had been known long before, but not as

* Domestic Medicine. Chap. Ivi. Concerning the Diet of the Common People.

an article of free and ordinary consumption. Toward the middle of the century it was discovered that potatoes could be grown cheaply in large quantities, and supply and demand developed together. Women and children especially rejoiced in the new food, whilst the benevolent exulted in the liberal accession to the poor man's fare. It became a point of duty with Lord and Lady Bountiful to recommend the culture and consumption of potatoes everywhere; and to see how far the substitution of potatoes for bread had extended early in the nineteenth century, we need only refer to the pages of Cobbett, who denounced the change with unwearied virulence as a degradation of humanity. Certainly potatoes are inferior to bread in nutritive value, but in food we have to look for more than mere nutriment; and the general use of the potato went far to purify and ameliorate the blood of the English people.

The appearance of the potato as a cheap constituent of common fare, was an argument wherewith Jenner endeavoured to allay apprehensions, that, having stopped smallpox, there would soon be more mouths than food to fill them. To Dunning he wrote, 10th February, 1805—

I have often urged the following argument when too numerous a population has been thrown in my teeth, as one of the ill effects likely to attend vaccination. Who would have thought a century ago, that providence had in store for us that nutritious and excellent vegetable, the potato-that ready made loaf, as it were, which is prepared in higher perfection in the garden of the cottager than in the highly manured soil of the man of opulence.

And again to Worthington, 25th April, 1810—

What a gift from Heaven was this extraordinary vegetable-a ready made loaf; reserved, too, till the hour when population, in these realms at least, began first to increase; and then coming we scarcely know how. Away with Malthus and his dreary speculations! The skies are filled with benevolence, and let population increase how it may, let us not distrust and suppose that men will ever pick the bones of each other.*

Nor was the change in the people's diet limited to the introduction of the potato; with it came tea. Of course

* Baron's Life of Jenner, vol. ii. pp. 348 and 410.

we know that tea was drank in England long ere George III. was King, but it was in his days that tea came into popular use. Here again we may refer to Buchan, who was strongly opposed to the innovation. He wrote

It is said the inhabitants of Great Britain consume more tea than all the other nations of Europe together. The higher ranks use tea as a luxury, while the lower orders make a diet of it. The lowest woman in England must have her tea, and the children generally share it with her. The mischiefs occasioned by tea arise chiefly from its being substituted for solid food, and had I time to spare, I think it could not be better employed than in writing against the destructive drug. Its use will induce a total change in the constitutions of the people of this country. Indeed, it has gone a great way towards effecting that evil already.

What Buchan had not time to do, Cobbett subsequently did, and some of his most racy patches of vituperation were applied to tea and tea-drinkers. In Bacon, Bread and Beer, according to Cobbett, consisted the strength of the English working-man, whilst tea and potatoes he held in abomination.

To this partial substitution of potatoes and tea for salted animal food and malt liquor, we may justly attribute the reduction of the scorbutic habit of the people, and that improvement of health which were coincident with the close of last century and were continued into the present. What every student of vital statistics has to remember is, that conditions have to be identical to yield identical results. The lives of the majority of the English people last century, and notably so in London, were hard and sordid to a degree which in these times is difficult to realise. Their sanitary conditions have been indicated, and I would now enforce the observation, that they were ill fed and insufficiently fed; consequently their diseases were malignant, and smallpox not unfrequently scarred deeply its scorbutic victims. Wherefore to run a parallel between the Londoners of the 18th century and the English of the 19th in the matter of smallpox, and to ascribe any difference between them to Jenner's specific, is to display ignorance that is inexcusable, or craft unscrupulous.

PART II.-VACCINATION.

CHAPTER I.

JENNER'S EARLIER YEARS.

THE Competent biographer, it is said, must be an admirer of his subject, for only so far as he sympathises can he understand. Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. But I neither propose to write a Life of Jenner, nor do I believe it essential to insight to sympathise where compelled to reprobate. In Jenner's case we have to deal with an accident rather than with a vigorous personification of evil. It was his fate to have a happy (or unhappy) thought, adapted to the humour and practice of his time, which was immediately caught up and carried to world-wide issues. In himself, he was as ordinary a character as was ever thrust into greatness. For the mischief of his thought, some of his contemporaries were as responsible as himself-some, indeed, more blameworthy. With Bishop Butler I may ask, "Why may not whole communities be seized with fits of insanity, as well as individuals?" and with him aver, "Nothing else can account for a great part of what we read in history." The common mind passes at times into unwholesome conditions, wherein the words of Paul are exemplified, "For this cause shall God send them a strong delusion, that they should believe a lie."

Edward Jenner, the son of a clergyman, was born at Berkeley, Gloucestershire, on 17th May, 1749. After the usual education of a youth of his class, he was apprenticed to Mr. Ludlow, surgeon and apothecary, of Sodbury, near Bristol; and on the completion of his time (1770) was sent to London, where he resided for two years with Dr. John Hunter, who increased his