Massey, in the same spirit of good sense, objected to generalisations about smallpox from the Bills of Mortality, as if all who died were slain by the disease and by nothing else.
There ought to be no comparison [he said] between sick people, well regimented with diet and medicine, and those who have no assistance, or scarcely the necessaries of life.
The miserable poor and parish children make up a great part, at least one-half of the Bills of Mortality; to confirm this I have examined several yearly bills, and I find that the out-parishes generally bury more than the ninety-seven parishes within the walls, and the parish of Stepney singly, very near as many as the City of London yearly; this sufficiently shows what little help and care are taken of the poor sick, which so much abound in all those places.[35]
Of course there lurks a fallacy in all statistics of disease wherein conditions of life are not discriminated. Whether patients survive or die from any zymotic ailment depends upon their breed, their circumstances, their habits, and their medical treatment and nursing--all essential particulars, yet difficult to define and register on a large scale. It would appear that in sound constitutions, and with fair treatment, smallpox in 1721 was by no means deadly, whilst in bad constitutions, and with exposure and neglect, it was extensively fatal. Yet of these differences, little account was taken by the Inoculators, and the malady was measured and discussed as though it were something uniform like water or gold. Massey in one year had 49 cases of smallpox and one death; in Stepney an equal number of cases might have shown a mortality of 20 or 30 per cent.; whilst Dr. Nettleton reported that of 1245 cases in Halifax and adjacent towns in Yorkshire, there died 270, or about 22 per cent.[36]
One of Massey’s fears in relation to inoculation was the risk of poisoning the blood with more than smallpox. He was not disinclined to experiment with “duly prepared children infected with smallpox by inspiration,” for then--
They will run no hazard of being infected by a leprous, venereal, or scrofulous taint that may, for aught we know, be transplanted by inoculation.[37]
Massey’s prescience has been woefully verified; is indeed under perpetual verification in the pollution and destruction of multitudes of infants. The notion that virus with a complex of qualities can be transferred from one body to another, and operate with the single quality the operator is pleased to favour, is a notion that might pass muster in a manual of magic or folk-lore, but which never can have any warrant in human physiology.