house to Surat and Grand Cairo, and contributes to the well-being of the
world.



LETTER XI.--ON INOCULATION


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;