March 3, 2022 By David Leonhardt
The original American advocate for inoculation against severe disease was arguably an enslaved man named Onesimus. Before being forcibly brought to Boston, Onesimus seems to have lived in West Africa, where inoculation was a common practice. There, he had been deliberately infected with a small amount of smallpox to make him immune from a more severe version. In Boston, Onesimus told his owner, Cotton Mather, about the practice. Mather was among the colonies’ most prominent religious leaders in the 1720s. He was also keenly interested in science, as Burns told me when we spoke recently. Today, science and religion are often considered antithetical, Burns noted, but past religious leaders were scientific pioneers.
When smallpox began spreading in Boston in the 1720s, Mather campaigned for residents to be inoculated — and was met with fierce criticism and even an attempt to bomb his home. Some Bostonians argued that inoculation violated God’s will. Others, including doctors, argued that it was folklore that would do more harm than good. In Mather’s time, one such evangelist for inoculation was Benjamin Franklin. Along with several other founders — including George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson — Franklin himself was persuaded. Yet he still had a tragic relationship with smallpox inoculation. As the disease was sweeping through Philadelphia in 1736, he and his wife, Deborah, initially decided not to inoculate their 4-year-old son Francis, known as Franky. The boy was sick with a cold and the Franklins worried that his body would not be able to handle the side effects of inoculation. Soon, though, Franky contracted smallpox and died.
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