r this investigation is a matter of mere
curiosity, or whether it tends to any beneficial purpose? I should
answer, that notwithstanding the happy effects of Inoculation, with
all the improvements which the practice has received since its first
introduction into this country, it not very unfrequently produces
deformity of the skin, and sometimes, under the best management,
proves fatal.

These circumstances must naturally create in every instance some
degree of painful solicitude for its consequences. But as I have
never known fatal effects arise from the Cow-pox, even when impressed
in the most unfavourable manner, producing extensive inflammations
and suppurations on the hands; and as it clearly appears that this
disease leaves the constitution in a state of perfect security from
the infection of the Small-pox, may we not infer that a mode of
Inoculation may be introduced preferable to that at present adopted,
especially among those families, which, from previous circumstances
we may judge to be predisposed to have the disease unfavourably? It
is an excess in the number of pustules which we chiefly dread in the
Small-pox; but, in the Cow-pox, no pustules appear, nor does it seem
possible for the contagious matter to produce the disease from
effluvia, or by any other means than contact, and that probably not
simply between the virus and the cuticle; so that a single individual
in a family might at any time receive it without the risk of
infecting the rest, or of spreading a distemper that fills a country
with terror. Several instances have come under my observation which
justify the assertion that the disease cannot be propagated by
effluvia. The first boy whom I inoculated with the matter of Cow-pox,
slept in a bed, while the experiment was going forward, with two
children who never had gone through either that disease or the
Small-pox, without infecting either of them.

A young woman who had the Cow-pox to a great extent, several sores
which maturated having appeared on the hands and wrists, slept in the
same bed with a fellow-dairy maid who never had been infected with
either the Cow-pox or the Small-pox, but no indisposition followed.

Another instance has occurred of a young woman on whose hands were
several large suppurations from the Cow-pox, who was at the same time
a daily nurse to an infant, but the complaint was not communicated to
the child.

In some other points of view, the inoculation of this diseas