Anti-vaxxers in colonial Boston (CW for racism, slavery)

[breathedout]

Boston's status as one of the key ports in the colonies left the city vulnerable to disease. On April 21, 1721, the HMS Seahorse sailed into Boston Harbor from Barbados. A month later, Cotton Mather logged in his journal, "The grievous calamity of the smallpox has now entered the town." One thousand Bostonians, nearly 10 percent of the town, fled to the countryside to escape the judgment of the Almighty.

Fifteen years prior, Mather had asked Onesimus[, an enslaved West African man Mathers's congregation had bought for him,] one of the standard questions that Boston slaveholders asked new house slaves—Have you had smallpox? "Yes and no," Onesimus answered. He explained how in Africa before his enslavement, a tiny amount of pus from a smallpox victim had been scraped into his skin with a thorn, following a practice hundreds of years old that resulted in building up healthy recipients' immunities to the disease. This form of inoculation—a precursor to modern vaccination—was an innovative practice that prevented untold numbers of deaths in West Africa and on disease-ridden slave ships to ports throughout the Atlantic. Racist European scientists at first refused to recognize that African physicians could have made such advances. Indeed, it would take several decades and many more deaths before British physician Edward Jenner, the so-called father of immunology, validated inoculation.

Cotton Mather, however, became an early believer when he read an essay on inoculation in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions in 1714. He then interviewed Africans around Boston to be sure. Sharing their inoculation stories, they gave him a window into the intellectual culture of West Africa. He had trouble grasping it, instead complaining about how "brokenly and blunderingly and like Idiots they tell the Story."

On June 6, 1721, Mather calmly composed an "Address to the Physicians of Boston," respectfully requesting that they consider inoculation. If anyone had the credibility to suggest something so new in a time of peril it was Cotton Mather, the first American-born fellow in the London's Royal Society, which was still headed by Isaac Newton. Mather had released fifteen to twenty books and pamphlets a year since the 1690s, and he was nearing his mammoth career total of 388—probably more than the rest of his entire generation of New England ministers combined.

The only doctor who responded to Mather was Zabadiel Boylston, President John Adams's great-uncle. When Boylston announced his successful inoculation of his six-year-old son and two enslaved Africans on July 15, 1721, area doctors and councilmen were horrified. It made no sense that people should inject themselves with a disease to save themselves from the disease. Boston's only holder of a medical degree, a physician pressing to maintain his professional legitimacy, fanned the city's flames of fear. Dr. William Douglass concocted a conspiracy theory, saying there was a grand plot afoot among African people, who had agreed to kill their masters by convincing them to be inoculated. "There is not a Race of Men on Earth more False Liars" than Africans, Douglass barked.

—Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Welp.

Comments

[starshipfox]

How fascinating, as well as predictably awful on the part of the white people.

[breathedout]

Right?

"White people, here's a game of 'Would You Rather': be a little less racist for a minute, or die of smallpox?"
"Hmmmmm that's a toughie, Janet, but we're gonna have to go with 'die of smallpox'!"
"Right you are, Desmond! Enjoy your lingering demise!"

[starshipfox]

"Oh Janet, I do not regret for an instant these horrific pus-filled sores or my agonising fever. I can die knowing I am still a racist, and that's enough for me."

[breathedout]

Yeahhhhh that's. Plainly what counts, for sure.

[teaforlupin]

Holy crap, and also #yikes

...predictably, I did not know that about the West African inoculation tradition. That's fascinating!

[sylvaine]

Wow! Unsurprised by the racism, deeply fascinated and pleased that inoculation was a Known Thing in at least some African cultures. How cool!

[anelith]

That's fascinating... and literally hits home. We live in MA, about 45 mins drive from Boston. Across the street from my house is a small cemetery that dates back to the mid 1700s. Many of the oldest graves are clustered around a few months' span, and that's because they're from a smallpox epidemic that hit the town right around the Revolution. Supposedly a travelling soldier brought it here when he stopped for the night, due to feeling poorly. He left the next morning (presumably to die elsewhere), but the household who took him in were the first to fall ill. That's the local legend anyway.

There are whole families buried together, who died days apart. It's really sad.

[oracne]

You! Racists! Out of the gene pool!

[breathedout]

Isn't that interesting? I thought so, too. (And yes, I too, predictably, had never heard about it.)

[breathedout]

Yes, isn't that cool & interesting? I'd never heard it before!

[breathedout]

It is super sad. There was a graveyard near my old apartment with family clusters like that who all died in the 1918 influenza pandemic. I remember imagining what it must have been like for the person who died last, having watched their loved ones succumb and then realizing they were getting sick too. :-(

[breathedout]

Ha, if only it had worked out like that!