The decline of adult smallpox in eighteenth-century London: a commentary.

Urban inoculation and the decline of smallpox mortality in eighteenthcentury citiesa reply to <fc>R</fc>azzell<link href=#ehr12112-note-0002/>

Smallpox was probably the single most lethal disease in eighteenth-century Britain but was reduced to a minor cause of death by the mid-nineteenth century due to vaccination programmes post-1798.While the success of vaccination is unquestionable, it remains disputed to what extent the prophylactic precursor of vaccination, inoculation, reduced smallpox mortality in the eighteenth century. Small...

The decline of adult smallpox in eighteenth-century London1

Smallpox was probably the single most lethal disease in eighteenth century Britain, but was a minor cause of death by the mid-nineteenth century. Although vaccination was crucial to the decline of smallpox especially in urban areas from the beginning of the nineteenth century, it remains disputed the extent to which smallpox mortality declined before vaccination. Analysis of age-specific change...

"A tissue of the most flagrant anomalies": smallpox vaccination and the centralization of sanitary administration in nineteenth-century London.

Histories of smallpox and vaccination are both varied and voluminous. In purely epidemiological terms, smallpox has acquired for itself a position of significance far in excess of its numerical importance as a cause of death in the nineteenth century.1 Although mortality from the disease had already declined from high levels in the eighteenth century, smallpox vaccination has recently been cred...

The conquest of smallpox. The impact of inoculation on smallpox mortality in eighteenth-century Britain

Smallpox in London: factors in the decline of the disease in the nineteenth century.

THE decline of smallpox in Britain in the nineteenth century has long been recognized as a feature of the history of mortality in that period. The Royal Commission on Smallpox and Fever Hospitals of 1882, for example, traced the beginnings of this decline as far back as the 1780s.' Contemporaries, and historians subsequently, generally accepted that vaccination and its variants were the cause o...