derived from the discovery which far outweighs every other consideration. While there may be a question as to the expediency of rewarding a member of the profession above want, with money for distinguished services to the public for which he never asks and seldom receives any reward from government or other sources, it seems to us there can be no question as to the propriety and expediency of governments granting old-age pensions to worthy, poor, and worn-out physicians. It is a matter of record that some of the best scholars in the profession die in penury, when age is unduly prolonged, and many who are not cared for by relations and friends find their way at last to the county house and become a public charge, such, at least, as have not courage to commit suicide.

It is difficult to estimate the benefactions that Jenner's discovery conferred on Europe. He believed and insisted that vaccination would banish that pestilence from the earth wherever it was introduced and enforced. It would hardly be logical to attribute the decline of the disease in Europe and America altogether to vaccination; something is due to improved sanitary conditions; but making due allowance for that, the civilized world owes a heavy balance to vaccination. We cite the following conclusive statistics on the subject from Dr. J. Rutherford Russell's article in the London and Edinburgh Monthly Journal of Medical Science for the year 1842,

and republished in his interesting "History of Medicine."

In Anspach, in Bavaria, in the years 1797-98 and 1799, five hundred died yearly of small-pox, and in the year 1800 no less than one thousand and nine; whereas, from 1809 to 1818, a period of nine years, there was not a single death from that disease, although it prevailed epidemically in the neighborhood. In Copenhagen, in twelve years, before the introduction of vaccination, 5500 persons died of small-pox; from the year 1802 to 1818, a period of sixteen years, after vaccination had been peremptorily insisted upon, only 158 persons died in the whole of Denmark. Sezay Manazia, Prefect of the Rhine and Mozel Department, published in his report for the year 1810, that in his district not a single case of small-pox had occurred since vaccination had become general; and in consequence the population had increased to the number of 1911. In Rouen the mortality had decreased 500 annually from the effects of vaccination. In Glasgow 15,500 persons had been vaccinated, and during the ten years previous to the date of the report no individual of that number had taken the small-pox.

It would appear that the prediction of the discoverer of vaccination was being fulfilled. In the United States children cannot be admitted into the public schools to-day without a certificate of vaccination.

Jenner died in 1823, at the age of seventy-two, with honors beyond his fondest dreams-beyond almost any other physician in English history. Russell well says:

It is meet that his statue should now forever stand in the centre of the Metropolis of the British Empire, and his name be associated with Trafalgar. It is well that England has learned to honor her heroes in peace as well as her heroes in war.

And he cites from the words of Coleridge:

Pronounce meditatively the name of Jenner, and ask, What might we not hope, what need we deem unattainable, if all the time, the effort, the skill, which we waste in making ourselves miserable through vice or error, and vicious through misery, were embodied and marshalled to a systematic war against the existing evils of nature?1

JOHN AND WILLIAM HUNTER

Among the great anatomists of the eighteenth century the names of John and William Hunter stand pre-eminent. They were Scotchmen. William, the elder, was born in 1718, at Calderwood, near Glasgow. He was sent to Glasgow University and came under the celebrated Cullen's influence. After finishing his education, he removed to London and engaged in the practice of medicine, and continued his anatomical studies. He was made Fellow of the Royal Society, physician extraordinary to the Queen, and founded in London an Anatomical Museum, to which a classical library was attached, and wrote an important work on the "Anatomy of the Gravid 1 Op. cit., p. 382.