Upwards of six thousand persons have now been inoculated with the virus of cow-pox, and the far greater part of them have since been inoculated with that of smallpox, and exposed to its infection in every rational way that could be devised, without effect.

It was very improbable that the investigation of a disease so analogous to the smallpox should go forward without engaging the attention of the physician of the Smallpox Hospital in London.

Accordingly, Dr. Woodville, who fills that department with so much respectability, took an early opportunity of instituting an inquiry into the nature of the cow-pox.  This inquiry was begun in the early part of the present year, and in May, Dr. Woodville published the result, which differs essentially from mine in a point of much importance.  It appears that three-fifths of the patients inoculated were affected with eruptions, for the most part so perfectly resembling the smallpox as not to be distinguished from them.  On this subject it is necessary that I should make some comments.

When I consider that out of the great number of cases of casual inoculation immediately from cows which from time to time presented themselves to my observation, and the many similar instances which have been communicated to me by medical gentlemen in this neighbourhood; when I consider, too, that the matter with which my inoculations were conducted in the years 1797, ’98, and ’99, was taken from some different cows, and that in no instance any thing like a variolous pustule appeared, I cannot feel disposed to imagine that eruptions, similar to those described by Dr. Woodville, have ever been produced by the pure uncontaminated cow-pock virus; on the contrary, I do suppose that those which the doctor speaks of originated in the action of variolous matter which crept into the constitution with the vaccine.  And this I presume happened from the inoculation of a great number of the patients with variolous matter (some on the third, others on the fifth, day) after the vaccine had been applied; and it should be observed that the matter thus propagated became the source of future inoculations in the hands of many medical gentlemen who appeared to have been previously unacquainted with the nature of the cow-pox.

Another circumstance strongly, in my opinion, supporting this supposition is the following:  The cow-pox has been known among our dairies time immemorial.  If pustules, then, like the variolous, were to follow the communication of it from the cow to the milker, would not such a fact have been known and recorded at our farms?  Yet neither our farmers nor the medical people of the neighbourhood have noticed such an occurrence.