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Question

med_cat: (Default)
Could anybody here provide any info or direct me to any sources regarding quarantine for and treatment of smallpox in Victorian England?

Thank you very much,
Cat

Comments

Aug. 1st, 2009 05:13 pm (UTC)
What decade?
med_cat: (Default)
Aug. 1st, 2009 05:18 pm (UTC)
Whichever ones you have! Say from 1850 onwards?

Thanks,
Cat

Edited 2009-08-01 05:18 pm (UTC)
Aug. 2nd, 2009 03:03 pm (UTC)
www.victorianlondon.org has at least a little on smallpox (under Diseases --> Smallpox) and there were a bunch of articles if you search "smallpox" using the search feature.
med_cat: (Default)
Aug. 2nd, 2009 05:56 pm (UTC)
Thanks so much!

Cat
med_cat: (Default)
Aug. 2nd, 2009 06:32 pm (UTC)
Thanks; they did have some useful info from Cassell's Household Guide :)

And I was very intrigued to find that there were anti-vaccination protesters even at that time! How very little things change...

Thanks again,
Cat
Aug. 2nd, 2009 08:27 pm (UTC)
Wow, that is really interesting! I'm glad the link could be of help :)
med_cat: (Default)
Aug. 2nd, 2009 08:52 pm (UTC)

Here's the passage :)

There is nothing grander, and yet nothing more simple, nothing more beneficent in the whole history of medicine than vaccination, and nothing can be more unreasonable than the prejudice which it is attempted just now to create against it. If it occasionally gives activity to an eruptive tendency in a child, this is of slight importance, compared with the awful eruption of small-pox from which the child is saved, involving the risk, be it remembered, of permanent disfigurement, of blindness, and other consequences. It should also be explicitly stated that small-pox is followed by eruptions much more frequently, and much more troublesome, than in the case of vaccination. As regards the risk of transmission of serious disease from one child to another, it is so rare as never to have been seen by many surgeons of great experience; and even if this peril has to be incurred, it is by no means so great as that of the loathsome disease from which it saves. Driven from every other stronghold, the anti-vaccinationists have tried to show that while small-pox has been prevented by vaccination other diseases have in consequence become more rife. Well, there is no proof of this. It is a baseless piece of assumption, and even if there was any ground for the idea, most people would prefer anything to small-pox. To object to be saved from small-pox because you may incur some other disease, would be about as reasonable as to refuse to be saved from a railway collision, because you might at some future day sprain your ankle in getting out of an omnibus. On the whole, nothing can be more unreasonable than the objection to be vaccinated. It is not only unreasonable, but it is selfish, for an unvaccinated person is apt to get small-pox and may then convey a dreadful disease to others. Twenty persons have been known to get the small-pox from one person recovering from it. In the light of these facts, it is clear that all persons should submit cheerfully, nay, thankfully, to the Compulsory Vaccination Act, and have their children vaccinated. Not only so, all wise persons will be revaccinated, at least once in their lifetime, and have their children revaccinated as they grow up to maturity.
Aug. 2nd, 2009 11:20 pm (UTC)

Re: Here's the passage :)

Ooh, interesting! Thanks :)
med_cat: (Default)
Aug. 3rd, 2009 12:28 pm (UTC)

Re: Here's the passage :)

You're welcome!