The end of the eighteenth century was made notable by one of the most
remarkable and beneficent discoveries which has ever blessed the human
race, the discovery of the means of preventing small-pox. On May 14,
1796, Dr. Edward Jenner inoculated James Phipps. When we remember that
two million persons died in a single year in the Russian Empire from
small-pox; that in 1707 in Iceland, out of a population of thirty
thousand, sixty per cent., or eighteen thousand, died; that in Jenner’s
time “an adult person who had not had small-pox was scarcely met with
or heard of in the United Kingdom, and that owing to his discovery
small-pox is now one of the rarest diseases,” the strong words I have
used seem fully justified. But the eighteenth century was not to
witness the end of progress in medicine. The advances in the nineteenth
century have been even more startling and more beneficent. What these
advances have been in the department of medicine has been related by
Professor Osler. It is my province to speak only of surgery.