3/8/2020
A Puritan Minister Incited Fury by Pushing Inoculation Against a Smallpox Epidemic
Historians in the Newstags: smallpox, epidemics, Puritans, Vaccination, Cotton Mather, 18th century
Around 3 a.m. one November morning in 1721, a bomb crashed through the window of Cotton Mather’s Boston home. It had been hurled with such force that the fuse fell off, and it failed to detonate. Attached to the explosive was a warning note: “Cotton Mather, you dog, dam you: I’ll inoculate you with this; with a Pox to you.’’
The would-be bomber was not angry over politics, or love, or a business deal gone wrong, but rather over Mather’s attempts to save Boston residents from one of the deadliest threats of the era: smallpox. The same Puritan minister who played a role in fueling the execution of 14 women and six men during the Salem witch trials was now calling for the use of an experimental new way to prevent disease. Mather supported inoculation, a precursor to vaccination.
Nearly 300 years later, doctors are working to develop a vaccine for coronavirus — an infection far less lethal than smallpox — as people around the world clamor for treatment.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel