The Preacher, the Doctor, and the Slave: Part Two

In 1721 when smallpox spread through Boston and surrounding towns, a Puritan minister conspired with a courageous physician to fight the deadly contagion. Their method, however, was based on the experience of an African slave.

The minister was the Rev. Cotton Mather, and the African man, who had been Mather’s slave for ten years, was named Onesimus. In earlier epidemics, Mather had noticed that African slaves in Boston seemed immune to smallpox. Wondering why, Mather questioned Onesimus, who told him that as a boy in West Africa he had undergone a common practice by which infection from one with a mild case of the disease was transferred to a cut in the skin of another. Onesimus had showed him the scar on his arm.

As a corresponding fellow of the Royal Society of London, Mather had read reports of inoculation experiments in Turkey. But here was first-hand knowledge that could be put to use. Contacting physicians throughout the city, Mather found only one, a practitioner named Zabdiel Boylston, willing to try inoculation. Most Boston physicians and clerics believed that taking sickness from one and giving it to another was reckless, even devil inspired. At one point, an incendiary device, which failed to ignite, was thrown into the parsonage. Hoodlums threatened to hang Boylston.

Nevertheless, in June Dr. Boylston inoculated his two sons and seven others. In a July newspaper article he described his process and urged others to join him. He wrote: "I know not why it is unlawful to learn of Africans.”

In all, Dr. Boylston inoculated 280 persons, six of whom died. But for the 274 others, it was a remarkable success. One of those saved was Sammy, Mather’s own son.

In the coming decades, inoculation would continue to save lives in Boston and surrounding towns. In 1775 smallpox again erupted after British forces occupied Boston. A year later, nine days after the colonies declared independence, Abigail Adams took her four children to Boston to be inoculated.

In 1796 an English physician, Edward Jenner, developed the first smallpox vaccine, based on his experiment with an eight-year-old boy. He had inoculated him not with smallpox, but with cowpox, taken from a blister on a dairy maid’s hand. Exposed repeatedly to smallpox, the boy remained healthy.

In 1980, after decades of global vaccination programs, the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated. The first inoculations of smallpox in the United States, however, began in Boston in 1721, thanks to Cotton Mather, Zabdiel Boylston, and Onesimus.

Notes:

There are many accounts of the 1721 smallpox epidemic in Boston and the roles played by the Rev. Cotton Mather, his “servant,” Onesimus, and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston. I found most insightful Kathryn S. Koo’s “Strangers in the House of God: Cotton Mather, Onesimus, and an Experiment in Christian Slaveholding,” published by The Antiquarian in 2007. I enjoyed local historian J. L. Bell’s Boston 1775 blogs, April 27-30, 2020, on the epidemic, including one that follows Onesimus after manumission by Mather.

Rev. Mather, himself, wrote extensively of personal, religious and scientific matters in his diary, letters and treatises. Dr. Boston reported on his work in several journals, including “An Historical Account of the Small Pox Inoculated in New England upon all Sorts of Persons, Whites, Blacks, and of all Ages and Conditions,” published in 1726 in London.

© Ben Jacques