rst account I have seen of professional inoculation for the smallpox
in Royston is the announcement in the year 1773 of--"George Hatton,
surgeon, apothecary and man-mid-wife in Royston, who, with the advice
of his friends and the many patients whom he has inoculated, begs leave
to acquaint the public that he will wait upon any person or family
within 6 or 7 miles from Royston, and inoculate them for half-a-guinea
each person, medicines and attendances included, and, that the poor may
have the benefit of his practice, a proper allowance will be made them
and diligent attendance given."

Bills of the same period show that the charge for this species of
inoculation "when a quantity was taken," as in the parish bills, was
2s. or 2s. 6d. each person. The advantage claimed for spreading the
disease of small-pox out of the rates by means of inoculation was that
if you had it as the result of inoculation only one person in 300 died,
but if you had small-pox by infection, eight out of every hundred died.
It may be of interest to add as a general fact upon health and
diseases, that in 1792, out of 20,000 burials the following were the
proportions of deaths from the leading diseases:--Consumption 5,255,
convulsions {81} 4,646, dropsy 3,018, fevers 2,203, small-pox 1,568,
measles 450, "teeth" 419. The deaths under two years of age were
6,542, or one-third of the whole! The classification was not so exact
in those days as it would be now, but the race has improved a little in
regard to infantile mortality and consumption.

In coupling the doctor and the body-snatcher, at the head of this
chapter, I did not really mean to convey more than the general
association of human experience in the periods of sickness and the
close of life. If there was a closer association of these two
characters in the later Georgian era, it is, at least, a satisfaction
to be able to write of such things entirely in the past tense. At a
time when even to maintain the decencies and comforts of domestic life
was often a struggle with untoward surroundings, it may seem to show a
desire to load the past times with more than their share of trials and
misfortunes, to suggest that the most painful of all experiences of the
times was reserved for the end of life; that the ordeal of the
separation from friends by death was embittered, and intensified,
beyond anything in more modern experience, yet it is certain that the
revolting business of the "body-snatcher"