The Boston inoculation controversy of 1721-1722: An incident in the history of race

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 61, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 47-76

  Minardi, Margot ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65849308725     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3491675     Document Type: Review

References (108)

1. Cotton Mather to John Woodward, July 12, 1716, transcribed in G. L. Kittredge, "Some Lost Works of Cotton Mather," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 45 (1911-1912), 422
2. "Guramantese" is Mather's spelling of "Coromantee," which referred to Akan or Twi speakers from the Gold Coast region of West Africa (now Ghana). See Donald R. Hopkins, Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History (Chicago, 1983), 174
3. and John Thornton, "The Coromantees: An African Cultural Group in Colonial North America and the Caribbean," Journal of Caribbean History, 32 (1998), 161-78
4. Philip Cash, Eric H. Christianson, and J. Worth Estes, eds., Medicine in Colonial Massachusetts 1620-1820 (Boston, 1980)
5. James H. Cassedy, Medicine in America: A Short History (Baltimore, 1991)
6. John Duffy, From Humors to Medical Science: A History of American Medicine, 2d ed. (Urbana, Ill., 1993)
7. Joseph F. Kett, The Formation of the American Medical Profession: The Role of Institutions, 1780-1860 (New Haven, 1968)
8. Richard Harrison Shryock, Medicine and Society in America, 1660-1860 (New York, 1960)
9. Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, new ed. (New York, 1997)
10. Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D. C., and Baltimore, 1996)
11. Jordan, White over Black
12. Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, Colo., 1993)
13. For a provocative theoretical perspective, see David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass., 1993)
14. Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), covers evolving ideas of human difference in the early stages of British expansion
15. Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 345-66
16. Otho T. Beall, Jr., and Shryock, Cotton Mather: First Significant Figure in American Medicine (Baltimore, 1954), 102-13
17. James W. Schmotter, "William Douglass and the Beginnings of American Medical Professionalism: A Reinterpretation of the 1721 Boston Inoculation Controversy," Historical Journal of Western Massachusetts, 6 (Fall 1977), 23-36
18. Maxine Van de Wetering, "A Reconsideration of the Inoculation Controversy," New England Quarterly, 58 (1985), 46-67
19. On Mather's idea of "doing good," see Melchert, "Experimenting on the Neighbors," 109-23
20. Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (Oxford, 1971), 350-59
21. and Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York, 1984), 243-44
22. Silverman, Life and Times of Cotton Mather, 244-49, describes the Curiosa Americana
23. Thoughtful discussions of the tensions and interactions between religion and science in Mather's thought include Michael P. Winship, "Prodigies, Puritanism, and the Perils of Natural Philosophy: The Example of Cotton Mather," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 51 (1994), 92-105
24. and Pershing Vartanian, "Cotton Mather and the Puritan Transition into the Enlightenment," Early American Literature, 7 (1973), 213-24
25. Beall and Shryock, Cotton Mather, 64
26. and Margaret Humphreys Warner, "Vindicating the Minister's Medical Role: Cotton Mather's Concept of the Nishmath-Chajim and the Spiritualization of Medicine," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 36 (1981), 278-95
27. Mather, Angel of Bethesda, 28
28. Warner, "Vindicating the Minister's Medical Role," 288
29. On the preacher-physician in early New England, see Patricia A. Watson, The Angelical Conjunction: The Preacher-Physicians of Colonial New England (Knoxville, Tenn., 1991)
30. and Ola Elizabeth Winslow, A Destroying Angel: The Conquest of Smallpox in Colonial Boston (Boston, 1974), chap. 2
31. Specific to Mather, see Louise A. Breen, "Cotton Mather, the 'Angelical Ministry,' and Inoculation," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 46 (1991), 333-57
32. For Boylston's and Colman's background and scientific interests, see Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, Ill., 1970), 435-46
33. Reginald Fitz, "Zabdiel Boylston, Inoculator, and the Epidemic of Smallpox in Boston in 1721," Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, 2 (1911), 315-27
34. and Clifford K. Shipton, "Benjamin Colman," in Sibley's Harvard Graduates, vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), 123-24
35. Biographical sources on Douglass include Charles J. Bullock, "The Life and Writings of William Douglass," Economic Studies, 2 (1897), 265-90
36. Raymond Muse, "William Douglass, Man of the American Enlightenment, 1691-1752" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1949)
37. and Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America, 477-79
38. Much to Douglass's chagrin, the status structure that characterized the English medical establishment had not taken hold in New England by the time he arrived in the colonies. See Richard D. Brown, "The Healing Arts in Colonial and Revolutionary Massachusetts: The Context for Scientific Medicine," in Cash, Christianson, and Estes, eds., Medicine in Colonial Massachusetts, 1620-1820, 37-42
39. and Shryock, Medicine and Society, 2-18
40. Winslow, Destroying Angel, chap. 1, treats medical training in early New England
41. Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvements, and Present State of the British Settlements in North-America, 2 vols. (Boston, 1749, 1752), 1:169
42. Brown, "Healing Arts," 37, 40
43. These changes happened later in rural regions than they did in cities: for the rural context, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York, 1990), 254-58
44. Muse, "William Douglass," 93-96
45. Cash, "The Professionalization of Boston Medicine, 1760-1803," 69-100
46. and Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., "Medicine in Boston and Philadelphia: Comparisons and Contrasts, 1750-1820," 159-83
47. [Douglass], Inoculation of the Small Pox as Practised in Boston ... (Boston, 1722), 13. Douglass was heavily influenced by Thomas Sydenham, one of the major figures in 17th-century English medicine, who advanced a rigorous empirical approach to identifying and treating diseases
48. As Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill, 1998), 195-96, notes, Mather also followed Sydenham in advocating a theory of disease specificity and an innovative "cooling regimen" for the treatment of smallpox
49. and St. George, "'Set Thine House in Order': The Domestication of the Yeomanry in Seventeenth-Century New England," in New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston, 1982), 2:183-84. Unlike Douglass, however, Mather does nor seem to have been committed exclusively to Sydenham's methodology, which presumed that knowledge of the body came through direct, careful observation of the body
50. and Douglass, Summary ... of the British Settlements in North-America, 2:382-83
51. Smedley, Race in North America, chap. 7; and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, 2000), 30-33
52. Alexander O. Boulton, "The American Paradox: Jeffersonian Equality and Racial Science," American Quarterly, 47 (1995), 467-92
53. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, 1998), 137-62
54. Dana D. Nelson, "Consolidating National Masculinity: Scientific Discourse and Race in the Post-Revolutionary United States," in St. George, ed., Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America (Ithaca, 2000), 201-15
55. A provocative discussion of how interracial contexts shape colonial science is Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, "New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600-1650," American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 33-68
56. On the complexities of determining the roots of medical innovation, see Genevieve Miller, "Putting Lady Mary in Her Place: A Discussion of Historical Causation," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 55 (1981), 11-16
57. Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (Philadelphia, 1957), 48-63. Timoni and Pylarini are usually referenced by their Latinized names, Timonious and Pylarinus
58. Chaplin, Subject Matter, 160
59. Alfred W. Crosby, "Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America," WMQ, 3d Ser., 33 (1976), 291
60. Philip D. Curtin, "Epidemiology and the Slave Trade," Political Science Quarterly, 83 (1968), 194
61. [Mather], An Account of the Method and Success of Inoculating the Small-Pox in Boston in New-England (London, 1722), 2
62. Kittredge, "Some Lost Works," 444-59, verifies Mather's authorship of the pamphlet
63. Boylston, An Historical Account of the Small-pox Inoculation in New England ... (Boston, 1730), 2-6
64. Such was certainly the case for most people's everyday experience, though in terms of early modern science, the division between male and female was more often blurred than Enlightenment thought would make it. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)
65. Mather, The Negro Christianized. An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, the Instruction of Negro-Servants in Christianity (Boston, 1706), 2-3, 24-25
66. Mather, Negro Christianized, 23. This insight likely came to Mather through his interactions with Onesimus
67. See Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 7th Ser., vol. 8, Diary of Cotton Mather, 1709-1724 (Boston, 1912), 222
68. Mather, Negro Christianized, 4, 19. Mather used "Negroes" and "servants" more or less interchangeably in this tract instead of the word "slaves."
69. On hierarchical but reciprocal relationships in early New England families, see Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England, rev. ed. (New York, 1966)
70. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994), chap. 2
71. As further proof of his point, Mather argued that "Persons of Quality" in England were also trying inoculation. See "A Faithful Account of What Has Occur'd under the Late Experiments of the Small-Pox ...," Boston Gazette, Oct. 23-30, 1721
72. Douglass, Inoculation of the Small Pox, 7
73. [Samuel Grainger], The Imposition of Inoculation as a Duty Religiously Considered, in a Letter to a Gentleman in the Country Inclin'd to Admit It (Boston, 1721), 3
74. Michel de Montaigne, "Of Cannibals," in Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. Charles Cotton (Garden City, N. Y., 1947), 65-66
75. on Montaigne's conception of truthfulness, see Shapin, Social History of Truth, 79-80
76. Colman, Some Observations on the New Method of Receiving the Small-Pox ... (Boston, 1721), 15
77. Mather, Account of the Method, 1
78. On the speech of 18th-century African-born slaves in the British colonies, see William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst, Mass., 1988), 39-42
79. and Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 569-70
80. Colman, Some Observations on ... Small-Pox, 16
81. Daniel K. Richter, "'It Is God Who Has Caused Them to Be Servants': Cotton Mather and Afro-American Slavery in New England," Bulletin of the Congregational Library, 30 (1979), 6, 11
82. Grainger, Imposition of Inoculation, 3
83. Lawrence W. Towner, "'A Fondness for Freedom': Servant Protest in Puritan Society," WWQ, 3d Ser., 19 (1962), 201-02. New England newspapers frequently reprinted accounts of slave uprisings elsewhere
84. See Robert Ernest Desrochers, Jr., "Every Picture Tells a Story: Slavery and Print in Eighteenth-Century New England" (Ph. D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2001), 117-40, although most examples Desrochers cites date after the 1720s. Not long after the smallpox epidemic, Boston's blacks and Indians became the scapegoats for a rash of arson that afflicted the city in 1723
85. Robert C. Twombly, "Black Resistance to Slavery in Massachusetts," in William L. O'Neill, ed., Insights and Parallels: Problems and Issues of American Social History (Minneapolis, 1973), 15, 35-37
86. Colman, A Narrative of the Method and Success of Inoculating the Small Pox in New England (London, 1722), 35-36
87. On the etymology of the word "race" in English, see Smedley, Race in North America, 36-40
88. Mather, Negro Christianized, quotations on 24
89. On the complexity of the Hamitic myth in the early modern period, see Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods," WMQ, 3d Ser., 54 (1997), 103-42
90. Douglass, Summary ... of the British Settlements in North-America, 1:438n
91. Also see Bullock, "Life and Writings of William Douglass," 282
92. and Muse, "William Douglass," 221
93. Douglass, The Practical History of a New Epidemical Eruptive Miliary Fever, with an Angina Ulcusculosa, Which Prevailed in Boston New England in the Years 1735 and 1736 (Boston, 1736), ii, 18
94. See also Melchert, "Experimenting on the Neighbors," 62-68, 176-91, on Douglass's medical philosophy and response to the Mather-Boylston inoculation trials
95. [Douglass], A Dissertation concerning Inoculation of the Small-pox (Boston, 1730), 10
96. Douglass, A Practical Essay concerning the Small Pox (Boston, 1730), 38
97. On the authorship of this piece, see C. Edward Wilson, "The Boston Inoculation Controversy: A Revisionist Interpretation," Journalism History, 7 (1980), 17
98. Douglass was not the last to posit inoculation as a form of biological warfare; see Elizabeth A. Fenn, "Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst," Journal of American History, 86 (2000), 1555-57, 1567-71
99. Piersen, Black Yankees, 166-67
100. On Douglass's travels, see Muse, "William Douglass," 8, 205
101. Joseph Ioor Waring, "James Kilpatrick and Smallpox Inoculation in Charlestown," Annals of Medical History, 10 (1938), 301-08
102. J. Kilpatrick, An Essay on Inoculation, Occasioned by the Small-Pox Being Brought into South Carolina in the Year 1738 (London, 1743). iv, 14, 38
103. On "complexion," see Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 3-6
104. Kilpatrick, Essay on Inoculation, 46-48. Yaws is a tropical skin disease that 18th-century whites associated with blacks. In his satirical proposal to wipe out the Indians through inoculation, Douglass also suggested adding "Negro yaws" to the biological arsenal
105. Kilpatrick, Essay on Inoculation, 14
106. On the contemporary trend toward professionalism in medicine, see Cassedy, Medicine in America, 17-20
107. The contrast between racial idiom and fully formed racism is elaborated in Chaplin, "Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies," WMQ, 3d Ser., 54 (1997), 229-52
108. On "racism without race," see James H. Sweet, "The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought," WMQ, 3d Ser., 54 (1997), 165-66