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Excited, he investigated among other Africans in Boston and realized that it was a widespread practice; indeed, a slave could be expected to fetch a higher price with a scar on his arm, indicating that he was immune. Mather sent the Royal Society his own reports from the wilds of America, eager to prove the relevance of Boston (and by extension, Cotton Mather) to the global crusade against infectious disease. His interviews with Onesimus were crucial. In 1716, writing to an English friend, he promised that he would be ready to promote inoculation if smallpox ever visited the city again.
When it did, Mather pursued a determined course of action, asking doctors to inoculate their patients and ministers to support the plan. His call was answered by only one person, an apothecary named Zabdiel Boylston, who began by inoculating his 6-year-old son, Thomas, and two slaves.
MPI/Getty Images
A treatise on smallpox by Zabdiel Boylston.
As word spread of the new medicine, the people of Boston were terrified and angry. According to Mather, they “raised an horrid Clamour.” Their rage came from many sources; fear that inoculation might spread smallpox further; knowledge that the bubonic plague was on the rise in France; and a righteous fury that it was immoral to tamper with God’s judgment in this way. There was a racial tone to their response as well, as they rebelled against an idea that was not only foreign, but African (one critic, an eminent doctor, attacked Mather for his “Negroish” thinking). Some of Mather’s opponents compared inoculation to what we would now call terrorism—as if “a man should willfully throw a Bomb into a Town.” Indeed, one local terrorist did exactly that, throwing a bomb through Mather’s window, with a note that read, “COTTON MATHER, You Dog, Dam You; I’l inoculate you with this, with a Pox to you.”
Another attack came from the New-England Courant, a newspaper that debuted on Aug. 7, as smallpox raged. The brainchild of a satirical editor, James Franklin, it was unlike anything Boston had seen before, ridiculing an older generation perennially telling everyone else how to behave. Inevitably, it jumped right into the inoculation debate, finding its fattest target in the prig who was always lecturing Bostonians—the Very Rev. Cotton Mather, D.D. At 58, he was the last avatar of a worldview that had exhausted itself in the 17th century, particularly during the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, which he had helped to bring about. It must have seemed as if the entire town was against him.
But in this instance, he knew what he was talking about. Through all of the opposition, he and Zabdiel Boylston persevered in their efforts to “Conquer the Dragon.” As the dreadful year continued and smallpox took its toll, the results began to tell. Inoculation was not perfect, but it was a far more effective response than doing nothing at all. When the epidemic had run its course, 5,889 people had contracted the disease (roughly half the town), and 844 people had died, or one in seven. Of the 242 who had been inoculated, only six had died–one in 40.
In the aftermath, Mather and Boylston were lionized for their courage, and Boylston was received with accolades in London, where he went for a long visit. Little is known about the fate of Onesimus, though Mather recorded that he was able to buy his freedom.
God knows that Cotton Mather could be hard to take—one reason the New-England Courant found an immediate audience by attacking him. But in his openness to science and evidence, and his willingness to listen to an African living in his household, he showed a capacity for self-correction that redeemed some of his earlier failings. We will never know if he found redemption in the sense of the word he understood; but he found a meaningful second chance in 1721, and embraced it.
Boston was not quite out of the woods—other epidemics would come, often during wars that we remember with more clarity. But a smallpox vaccine, safer than amateur inoculation, was invented in 1796. Nearly 200 years later, in 1979, the World Health Organization declared that smallpox had been eradicated. That immense victory, which took centuries to consummate, was brought closer by the knowledge that an African-Bostonian brought to a city where he was held in slavery at the beginning of the 18th century.
The episode is also fascinating for one final aftereffect. An important witness to the debate over inoculation was a 15-year-old boy, the younger brother of Cotton Mather’s chief tormentor in the Courant. Perhaps the most famous Bostonian of all time, Benjamin Franklin made his fortune, of course, by fleeing the city and its theological disputes for Philadelphia. As an adult, possibly with some acknowledgment that he and James had been too quick to ridicule an elderly minister trying to use science on behalf of humanity, Franklin would become an important advocate of inoculation, especially after his own son died of smallpox.
Franklin also had a personal encounter with Zabdiel Boylston in London, not long after the smallpox crisis, that changed his life. The young Franklin had run out of money and options, and Boylston helped him with a crucial loan of 20 guineas, despite the fact that Franklin and his brother had attacked his medical efforts throughout 1721. As an old man in Paris, Franklin met a young relative of Boylston’s and told him that he could never repay what that loan had meant to him at a low moment. “I owe everything I am to him,” he confided, before asking the young man what he could do for him.
Today, as anxiety leads many to see all of Africa as a potential source of infection, it may be time to revive a similar feeling of reciprocity—and an appreciation for what African medical knowledge meant to Boston during the most serious health crisis of its early history.
Ted Widmer is assistant to the president for special projects at Brown University and a senior research fellow with the New America Foundation. He is an Ideas columnist.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2...ht-smallpox/XFhsMMvTGCeV62YP0XhhZI/story.html
When it did, Mather pursued a determined course of action, asking doctors to inoculate their patients and ministers to support the plan. His call was answered by only one person, an apothecary named Zabdiel Boylston, who began by inoculating his 6-year-old son, Thomas, and two slaves.
MPI/Getty Images
A treatise on smallpox by Zabdiel Boylston.
As word spread of the new medicine, the people of Boston were terrified and angry. According to Mather, they “raised an horrid Clamour.” Their rage came from many sources; fear that inoculation might spread smallpox further; knowledge that the bubonic plague was on the rise in France; and a righteous fury that it was immoral to tamper with God’s judgment in this way. There was a racial tone to their response as well, as they rebelled against an idea that was not only foreign, but African (one critic, an eminent doctor, attacked Mather for his “Negroish” thinking). Some of Mather’s opponents compared inoculation to what we would now call terrorism—as if “a man should willfully throw a Bomb into a Town.” Indeed, one local terrorist did exactly that, throwing a bomb through Mather’s window, with a note that read, “COTTON MATHER, You Dog, Dam You; I’l inoculate you with this, with a Pox to you.”
Another attack came from the New-England Courant, a newspaper that debuted on Aug. 7, as smallpox raged. The brainchild of a satirical editor, James Franklin, it was unlike anything Boston had seen before, ridiculing an older generation perennially telling everyone else how to behave. Inevitably, it jumped right into the inoculation debate, finding its fattest target in the prig who was always lecturing Bostonians—the Very Rev. Cotton Mather, D.D. At 58, he was the last avatar of a worldview that had exhausted itself in the 17th century, particularly during the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692, which he had helped to bring about. It must have seemed as if the entire town was against him.
But in this instance, he knew what he was talking about. Through all of the opposition, he and Zabdiel Boylston persevered in their efforts to “Conquer the Dragon.” As the dreadful year continued and smallpox took its toll, the results began to tell. Inoculation was not perfect, but it was a far more effective response than doing nothing at all. When the epidemic had run its course, 5,889 people had contracted the disease (roughly half the town), and 844 people had died, or one in seven. Of the 242 who had been inoculated, only six had died–one in 40.
In the aftermath, Mather and Boylston were lionized for their courage, and Boylston was received with accolades in London, where he went for a long visit. Little is known about the fate of Onesimus, though Mather recorded that he was able to buy his freedom.
God knows that Cotton Mather could be hard to take—one reason the New-England Courant found an immediate audience by attacking him. But in his openness to science and evidence, and his willingness to listen to an African living in his household, he showed a capacity for self-correction that redeemed some of his earlier failings. We will never know if he found redemption in the sense of the word he understood; but he found a meaningful second chance in 1721, and embraced it.
Boston was not quite out of the woods—other epidemics would come, often during wars that we remember with more clarity. But a smallpox vaccine, safer than amateur inoculation, was invented in 1796. Nearly 200 years later, in 1979, the World Health Organization declared that smallpox had been eradicated. That immense victory, which took centuries to consummate, was brought closer by the knowledge that an African-Bostonian brought to a city where he was held in slavery at the beginning of the 18th century.
The episode is also fascinating for one final aftereffect. An important witness to the debate over inoculation was a 15-year-old boy, the younger brother of Cotton Mather’s chief tormentor in the Courant. Perhaps the most famous Bostonian of all time, Benjamin Franklin made his fortune, of course, by fleeing the city and its theological disputes for Philadelphia. As an adult, possibly with some acknowledgment that he and James had been too quick to ridicule an elderly minister trying to use science on behalf of humanity, Franklin would become an important advocate of inoculation, especially after his own son died of smallpox.
Franklin also had a personal encounter with Zabdiel Boylston in London, not long after the smallpox crisis, that changed his life. The young Franklin had run out of money and options, and Boylston helped him with a crucial loan of 20 guineas, despite the fact that Franklin and his brother had attacked his medical efforts throughout 1721. As an old man in Paris, Franklin met a young relative of Boylston’s and told him that he could never repay what that loan had meant to him at a low moment. “I owe everything I am to him,” he confided, before asking the young man what he could do for him.
Today, as anxiety leads many to see all of Africa as a potential source of infection, it may be time to revive a similar feeling of reciprocity—and an appreciation for what African medical knowledge meant to Boston during the most serious health crisis of its early history.
Ted Widmer is assistant to the president for special projects at Brown University and a senior research fellow with the New America Foundation. He is an Ideas columnist.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2...ht-smallpox/XFhsMMvTGCeV62YP0XhhZI/story.html
