In the early 1700s, a lot was happening in Boston. But I suspect, as is the case now, it was mostly a lot of Bostonians bitching about how fucking cold Boston is when they could have been literally anywhere else.
A smallpox epidemic hit in the hub. With that came the New World’s first introduction to the concept of variolation. But they didn’t choose to adopt this life saving technology en masse.
Today in a Moment of Science, Onesimus, the slave who taught the colonizers variolation.
The ancestor of vaccination, the more rudimentary variolation existed for over 3,000 years. Vaccination and variolation work via the same general concept. It’s like being shown an Ed Hardy shirt and hair gel and being told “you’ll be able to recognize a douchebag now,” but for your immune system. Exposure to a deadened strain of a nasty little microbe or a small piece of it primes the immune system to battle the real disease up close and personal.
But vaccination is so sterile, so precise. And who has time for that when it’s the 1700s and you’ve gotta pump out fifteen babies so that 2.3 might live to see the next epidemic?
Variolation is like what happens when you order your vaccine on Wish. Sterile needle? Nah, you get some pus from an infected person’s pox jabbed into an open wound. Some forms of variolation involved inhaling ground up smallpox scabs. But for three centuries ago, it was the best they had. Given that they knew nothing about germ theory, and they were just fucking around and finding out? It’s all the more impressive.
This new technology hadn’t spread to the colonies yet when a smallpox outbreak hit in 1721. Onesimus had been enslaved by Puritan minister Cotton Mather since 1706. Onesimus was a gift from his congregation- how very 1706 of them. When the epidemic hit, he told the minister that he’d had smallpox… and also hadn’t, somehow. He explained the procedure of rubbing pus in an open wound to imbue protection from the disease, and Mather, despite deep suspicions about African medicine, looked into it. When he found it was used in several other countries and that other enslaved people had used it to protect themselves, he became an evangelist for the procedure.
But he was preaching in the 1700s. So.
Not unlike some Bostonians today, Bostonians in 1706 were determined to be racist shitheads even if it fucking killed them. It was suggested that inoculation was working against the will of God by Mather’s fellow preachers. He was accused of using “negro-ish thinking.” A bomb was thrown through his window.
Though Mather was able to convince Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to lead the charge of variolation, Bostonians were about as thrilled by this as they are hearing the Yankees swept the Sox in September. Along with this medicine sounding new and scary, hang onto your butts here…
Just over half of the 11,000 residents caught smallpox in the outbreak, and of those, 844 people died. One in seven. Dr. Boylston inoculated who he could. Out of an estimated 250 people who received inoculation, about 2% died. One in forty.
It would be another 75 years until Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who suffered cowpox seemed immune to smallpox, eventually giving birth to modern vaccines.
It’s been suggested that, despite Onesimus saving enough to buy his freedom, Mather only freed him out of his frustration over not being able to convert his slave to Christianity. He was released on the condition that he still had to be available for work for Mather. How very 1706 of them.
Onesimus was rendered to a footnote in history, occasionally landing criminally below Tom Brady on a list of “Great Bostonians.” Imagine how a person who was enslaved, brought variolation to the New World, and eventually bought his freedom would have lived and been remembered if we’d been less afraid, less racist.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, and a reminder to check if you’re up to date on all your vaccines and boosters.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=montreal+smallpox+epidemic&FORM=HDRSC1