One rarely hears any explana ation given for this increasing demand for exemption, but it is very simple. The average parent has already too much to trouble about to worry over a disease he or she has never seen, Measles, scarlet fever, bronchitis, and whooping cough, are enough childish ailments to guard against and cure, and they are always with us. But there is one other trouble that nearly every adult in a working class neighbourhood has seen, and that is a baby whose mild attack of "cow-pox," the natural and desired outcome of vaccine ation, has developed, through inattention, uncleanliness, or some other reason into some septic trouble or erysipelas. All the mothers around will see this baby and its mother will ascribe the trouble to vaccination. Very little counteracting propaganda is done and if exemptions are easy to obtain the mothers in the neighbourhood will become antivaccinationists to a woman. The dogmatic and dictatorial attitude of the medical profession to the layman on any medical subject has also done not a little to antagonize the average half educated man and 75 p.c. of the working classes believe that doctors advocate vaccination because of the fee they get for performing it.
Another reminder of the dreaded scourge that is now very rarely seer in British streets is a person with a pock-marked face. And yet in some of the old 17th and 18th century medical books smallpox was regarded as being such an inevitable visitation and its course so little amenable to treatment that no cures or amelioratives offered for it. The books confined themselves to remedics for the pitted faces of its victims. As the medical treatises of to-day
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.