第18章 ON INOCULATION(1)

It is inadvertently affirmed in the Christian countries of Europe that the English are fools and madmen.Fools,because they give their children the small-pox to prevent their catching it;and madmen,because they wantonly communicate a certain and dreadful distemper to their children,merely to prevent an uncertain evil.

The English,on the other side,call the rest of the Europeans cowardly and unnatural.Cowardly,because they are afraid of putting their children to a little pain;unnatural,because they expose them to die one time or other of the small-pox.But that the reader may be able to judge whether the English or those who differ from them in opinion are in the right,here follows the history of the famed inoculation,which is mentioned with so much dread in France.

The Circassian women have,from time immemorial,communicated the small-pox to their children when not above six months old by making an incision in the arm,and by putting into this incision a pustule,taken carefully from the body of another child.This pustule produces the same effect in the arm it is laid in as yeast in a piece of dough;it ferments,and diffuses through the whole mass of blood the qualities with which it is impregnated.The pustules of the child in whom the artificial small-pox has been thus inoculated are employed to communicate the same distemper to others.There is an almost perpetual circulation of it in Circassia;and when unhappily the small-pox has quite left the country,the inhabitants of it are in as great trouble and perplexity as other nations when their harvest has fallen short.

The circumstance that introduced a custom in Circassia,which appears so singular to others,is nevertheless a cause common to all nations,I mean maternal tenderness and interest.

The Circassians are poor,and their daughters are beautiful,and indeed,it is in them they chiefly trade.They furnish with beauties the seraglios of the Turkish Sultan,of the Persian Sophy,and of all those who are wealthy enough to purchase and maintain such precious merchandise.These maidens are very honourably and virtuously instructed to fondle and caress men;are taught dances of a very polite and effeminate kind;and how to heighten by the most voluptuous artifices the pleasures of their disdainful masters for whom they are designed.These unhappy creatures repeat their lesson to their mothers,in the same manner as little girls among us repeat their catechism without understanding one word they say.

Now it often happened that,after a father and mother had taken the utmost care of the education of their children,they were frustrated of all their hopes in an instant.The small-pox getting into the family,one daughter died of it,another lost an eye,a third had a great nose at her recovery,and the unhappy parents were completely ruined.Even,frequently,when the small-pox became epidemical,trade was suspended for several years,which thinned very considerably the seraglios of Persia and Turkey.

A trading nation is always watchful over its own interests,and grasps at every discovery that may be of advantage to its commerce.

The Circassians observed that scarce one person in a thousand was ever attacked by a small-pox of a violent kind.That some,indeed,had this distemper very favourably three or four times,but never twice so as to prove fatal;in a word,that no one ever had it in a violent degree twice in his life.They observed farther,that when the small-pox is of the milder sort,and the pustules have only a tender,delicate skin to break through,they never leave the least scar in the face.From these natural observations they concluded,that in case an infant of six months or a year old should have a milder sort of small-pox,he would not die of it,would not be marked,nor be ever afflicted with it again.

In order,therefore,to preserve the life and beauty of their children,the only thing remaining was to give them the small-pox in their infant years.This they did by inoculating in the body of a child a pustule taken from the most regular and at the same time the most favourable sort of small-pox that could be procured.

The experiment could not possibly fail.The Turks,who are people of good sense,soon adopted this custom,insomuch that at this time there is not a bassa in Constantinople but communicates the small-pox to his children of both sexes immediately upon their being weaned.