The Retrospect of Medicine (Volume 63); Being a Half-Yearly Journal, Containing a Retrospective View of Every Discovery and Practical Improvement in the Medical Sciences (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tyrannical master, defying all our efforts to control it; and hence there are many large towns already sewered which will not accept this vehicle notwithstanding its plausible show of convenience.?Medical Press and Circular, Feb. 15, 1871, p. 131. 8.?AN ANALYSIS OF 800 CASES OF SMALL-POX, OBSERVED DURING THE PRESENT EPIDEMIC IN THE HAMPSTEAD SMALL-POX HOSPITAL. By Dr. Grieve, Medical Director to the Hospital. [The 800 cases were admitted between the 1st of December, 1870, and the 18th of February, 1871. It must be borne in mind that the cases were selected from amongst a number of milder cases, and that the mortality was consequently rather high.] As to vaccination. Of the 800, 591 were vaccinated and 209 were not. Amongst the vaccinated are included only those upon whose arms some kind of marks could be distinguished. And this large ratio of unvaccinated cases may help to account for the high general mortality. When we come to examine the relative proportions of vaccinated to unvaccinated admitted at different ages, the result tends to shake one's belief in the commonly accepted doctrine that liability to small-pox decreases with advancing age, While under ten years of age the unvaccinated admitted are to the vaccinated as 2 to 1, between ten and twenty the proportion is more than reversed, and the vaccinated are as 4 to 1 to the unvaccinated, which becomes 5 to 1 between twenty and forty, and 9 to 1 over forty years of age. The number of unvaccinated shows a regular diminution in advancing periods: below ten there were 103 admitted; between ten and twenty, 46; between twenty and forty, 56; over forty, 4. I believe that very few unvaccinated people reach forty without having had an attack of small-pox, and that this accounts for the duninished mortality amongst ...