Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.s2.8

c6.s2.8

After giving the details of the indigenous practice, Holwell stated (Chapter VIII, pg 158): ‘When the before recited treatment of the inoculated is strictly followed, it is next to a miracle to hear, that one in a million fails of receiving the infection, or of one that miscarries under it.’ It is possible that Holwell’s information was not as accurate as of the newly appointed Superintendent General of Vaccine Inoculation in 1804. According to the latter, fatalities amongst the inoculated were around one in two hundred amongst the Indian population and amongst the Europeans in Calcutta, etc., ‘one in sixty or seventy’.25 The wider risk, however, seems to have been in the spreading of disease by contagion from the inoculated themselves to those who for one reason or another had not been thus inoculated.