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The Boston Inoculation Controversy of 1721–1722: An Incident in the History of Race
Margot Minardi
ON July 12, 1716, the Reverend Cotton Mather of Boston wrote to
the Royal Society acknowledging that he had read with interest Emanuele
Timoni's description of smallpox inoculation in Turkey. But Mather
was quick to point out that the information in Dr. Timoni's letter
to the Society's Philosophical Transactions was not new to
him:
I do assure you, that many months before I mett with
any Intimations of treating the Small-Pox, with the Method
of Inoculation, any where in Europe; I had from a Servant
of my own, an Account of its being practised in Africa.
Enquiring of my Negro-man Onesimus, who is a pretty Intelligent
Fellow, Whether he ever had the Small-Pox; he answered,
both, Yes, and, No; and then told me, that he had
undergone an Operation, which had given him something of the Small-Pox,
& would forever praeserve him from it; adding, That it was often
used among the Guramantese.
1
Five years after Mather wrote this letter, smallpox returned
to Boston for the first time in nearly two decades. For Mather,
Onesimus's description of African inoculation served as the kernel
for a plan to wring some good out of the horrors of the epidemic.
He enlisted a local doctor, Zabdiel Boylston, to start testing inoculation
on Boston volunteers—setting off a rancorous debate among
prominent Bostonians over the validity of a practice regarded by
extremists as either a panacea or outright murder.
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Onesimus's transmission of medical
knowledge to Cotton Mather has slipped into larger narratives of
the 1721 smallpox epidemic only incidentally, since the history
of the inoculation controversy is usually treated as distinct from
the history of race.
2
An alternative is to regard discourses of human difference and social
practices patterned on those discourses as integral to the history
of eighteenth-century medicine and, conversely, to read the inoculation
controversy as part of the ongoing construction of race in the early
modern world. Historians of medicine have described how the mid-
to late eighteenth century witnessed the beginnings of a scientific
medical establishment in the North American colonies.
3
Intellectual historians have shown how scientific theories of the
eighteenth century were critical to the emergence of a modern concept
of "race" as an inherited complex of bodily characteristics linked
to mental and social worth.
4
The separation of these two strands of scholarship obscures what
the development of professional medicine and racial ideology shared—a
tendency to give explanatory weight to physical, observable characteristics
of the human body.
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