the patients. Conceiving this fact to be admitted, as I presume
it must be by all who have carefully attended to the subject, may
I not ask whether it does not appear probable that the general
introduction of the smallpox into Europe has not been among the
most conductive means in exciting that formidable foe to health?
Having attentively watched the effects of the cow-pox in this
respect, I am happy in being able to declare that the disease
does not appear to have the least tendency to produce this
destructive malady.

The scepticism that appeared, even among the most enlightened of
medical men when my sentiments on the important subject of the
cow-pox were first promulgated, was highly laudable. To have
admitted the truth of a doctrine, at once so novel and so unlike
any thing that ever had appeared in the annals of medicine,
without the test of the most rigid scrutiny, would have bordered
upon temerity; but now, when that scrutiny has taken place, not
only among ourselves, but in the first professional circles in
Europe, and when it has been uniformly found in such abundant
instances that the human frame, when once it has felt the
influence of the genuine cow-pox in the way that has been
described, is never afterwards at any period of its existence
assailable by the smallpox, may I not with perfect confidence
congratulate my country and society at large on their beholding,
in the mild form of the cow-pox, an antidote that is capable of
extirpating from the earth a disease which is every hour
devouring its victims; a disease that has ever been considered as
the severest scourge of the human race!