Cotton Mather is one of the marvels of biography--a choice specimen of Puritanism developed without check. He was a man of boundless energy and incessant industry, of intense piety and unlimited self-confidence; and thus, without hesitation, he set himself to extirpate witchcraft, shrinking from no atrocity, until the frightful Salem tragedy of 1692 shocked the colony into mercy and common-sense.
Mather was just the sort of character to be impressed with Timoni’s description of the short and easy way with smallpox; and he who had hanged warlocks and witches with sublime assurance, was not likely to have scruples about inoculating the community when inwardly satisfied it was for the public good. The audacity and tyranny of conscientious conceit are proverbial. He had, however, to exercise patience in awaiting an opportunity to test the Turkish remedy, for there had been no smallpox in Boston for nineteen years--a fact worth noting by those who imagine smallpox was an omnipresent ailment until the advent of Edward Jenner. In 1721 a serious outbreak occurred, the deaths rising in October to 100 a week in a population of 15,000. Mather convoked a meeting of physicians, and laid before them the new prescription, but they would not listen to it. Dr. Boylston, however, was persuaded, and inoculated two of his slaves, and then his sons, aged five and six; whereon he was summoned before the justices and severely reprimanded. Undeterred by the State, and supported by the Church, he persevered, and by the end of September had inoculated 80, and by the middle of December, 250.
His custom was to make a couple of incisions in the arms, into which bits of lint dipped in pox-matter were inserted. At the end of twenty-four hours the lint was withdrawn, and the wounds dressed with warm cabbage leaves. On the seventh day the patient sickened and pustules appeared, sometimes few, sometimes hundreds. Mather and Boylston maintained it was a most wholesome operation, for after it “feeble, crazy, consumptive people, grew hearty, and got rid of their former maladies.”[4] To be poxed was to be rejuvenated.
Cotton Mather’s own account of the Boston experiment is worth reading. He wrote--
The distemper hath lately visited and ransacked the City of Boston; and in little more than half a year, of more than 5000 persons that have undergone it, near 900 have died. But how many lives might have been saved if our unhappy physicians had not poisoned and bewitched our people with a blind rage that it has appeared very like a Satanick Possession against the method of relief and safety in the way of the smallpox inoculated!
