who, while practising as physicians, devoted much time and labor to the study of natural history; such men as Benjamin Smith Barton, David Hossack, Jacob Bigelow, Richard Harlan, John D. Godman, Samuel George Morton, John Collins Warren, Samuel L. Mitchill and J. Ailken Meigs.  He gave an immense impetus in Great Britain to the study of morbid anatomy, and his nephew, Matthew Baillie, published the first important book on the subject in the English language.

Before the eighteenth century closed practical medicine had made great advance.  Smallpox, though not one of the great scourges like plague or cholera, was a prevalent and much dreaded disease, and in civilized countries few reached adult life without an attack.  Edward Jenner, a practitioner in Gloucestershire, and the pupil to whom John Hunter gave the famous advice:  “Don’t think, try!” had noticed that milkmaids who had been infected with cowpox from the udder of the cow were insusceptible to smallpox.  I show you here the hand of Sarah Nelmes with cowpox, 1796.  A vague notion had prevailed among the dairies from time immemorial that this disease was a preventive of the smallpox.  Jenner put the matter to the test of experiment.  Let me quote here his own words:  “The first experiment was made upon a lad of the name of Phipps, in whose arm a little vaccine virus was inserted, taken from the hand of a young woman who had been accidentally infected by a cow.  Notwithstanding the resemblance which the pustule, thus excited on the boy’s arm, bore to variolous inoculation, yet as the indisposition attending it was barely perceptible, I could scarcely persuade myself the patient was secure from the Small Pox.  However, on his being inoculated some months afterwards, it proved that he was secure."(8) The results of his experiments were published in a famous small quarto volume in 1798.(*) From this date, smallpox has been under control.  Thanks to Jenner, not a single person in this audience is pockmarked!  A hundred and twenty-five years ago, the faces of more than half of you would have been scarred.  We now know the principle upon which protection is secured:  an active acquired immunity follows upon an attack of a disease of a similar nature.  Smallpox and cowpox are closely allied and the substances formed in the blood by the one are resistant to the virus of the other.  I do not see how any reasonable person can oppose vaccination or decry its benefits.  I show you the mortality figures(9) of the Prussian Army and of the German Empire.  A comparison with the statistics of the armies of other European countries in which revaccination is not so thoroughly carried out is most convincing of its efficacy.

     (8) Edward Jenner:  The Origin of the Vaccine Inoculation,
     London, 1801.

     (*) Reprinted by Camac:  Epoch-making Contributions to Medicine,
     etc., 1909.—­Ed.

     (9) Jockmann:  Pocken und Vaccinationlehre, 1913.