past twenty years. From
1866 to 1869, 140,000 persons died in the Presidencies of Bombay and
Calcutta, and several years later, from 1873 to 1876, 700,000 died from
this disease. China, Japan, and the neighboring countries are
frequently visited with small-pox, and nearly all the inhabitants of
Corea are said to bear evidences of the disease. In the Marquesas
Islands one-fourth of the inhabitants had fallen victims to the disease
since 1863. It was first introduced into the Sandwich Islands in 1853,
and it then carried off eight per cent of the natives. Australia,
Tasmania, New Zealand, and the Fiji Archipelago have to the present day
remained exempt from small-pox; although it has been carried to
Australia in vessels, rigorous quarantine methods have promptly checked
it. On the American continent it was believed that small-pox was
unknown until the conquest of Mexico. It has been spread through
various channels to nearly all the Indian tribes of both North and
South America, and among these primitive people, unprotected by
inoculation or vaccination, its ravages have been frightful.

That small-pox a disease so general and so fatal at one time--has,
through the ingenuity of man, in civilized communities at least, become
almost extinct, is one of the greatest triumphs of medicine.

Inoculation was known in Europe about 1700, and in 1717 the famous
letter of Lady Montagu from Adrianople was issued, containing in part
the following statements:--

"The small-pox, so fatal and so general amongst us, is here entirely
harmless, by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give
it. There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform
the operation every autumn in the month of September, when the great
heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their
family has a mind to have the small-pox; they make parties for this
purpose, and when they are met, the old woman comes with a nut-shell
full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what vein
you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer her
with a large needle, and puts into the vein as much matter as can lie
upon the head of her needle, and after that binds up the little wound
with a hollow shell, and in this manner opens four or five veins."

Soon after this letter Lady Montagu had her son inoculated in Turkey,
and four years later her daughter was to be the first subject
inoculated in England. Sh