Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/332

Mortality from Smallpox in Rhode Island before and after General Gratuitous Vaccination and Compulsory Vaccination of School Children.

BEFORE.
Five-year Periods.	Popula­tion.	Mortality from smallpox.
1863–'67	184,965	44
1868–'72	217,353	48
1873–'77	258,239	46
AFTER.
Five-year Periods.	Popula­tion.	Mortality from smallpox.
1878–'82	276,531	7		Or a proportion to population of 5 deaths after to 100 before.
1883–'87	304,284	3
1888–'92	345,506	4

 

Deaths from Smallpox in Massachusetts, by Decades.

Ten-year Periods.	Deaths.
1863–'72	2,375
1873–'82	922
1883–'92	51

 

Previously to 1872 there had been an almost universal neglect of vaccination, and the idea of compulsory vaccination had not come into people's minds. The great epidemic of 1872, which swept around the world and destroyed thousands of lives, had the effect of rousing people to the value and practice of vaccination. Still, the factory towns, which were ever receiving fresh relays of the unvaccinated from Canada—especially the paper-mill towns, with rags from all over the world—would every now and again have an outbreak. At last stringent laws were passed at the instigation of the Board of Health for the vaccination of school children, and self interest accomplished the work in factories with such obvious good results that now a stringent State law aids in producing the result shown in the smallest of the three lines.

 

There is no need to recite how the States whose situation exposes them to cholera and yellow fever have, through their boards, provided themselves with all the means of enforcing necessary quarantine, and with the best disinfecting apparatus known to science, the mere possession of which has put old-fashioned panics to flight. Alas for Georgia! She stands forth a dismal foil to the above, and a dark object lesson. When yellow fever smote her second commercial town in 1893, her former State Board had been abolished and there was no organized authority. The Brunswick epidemic ought to silence the rivalries among doctors