The analogy between Zabdiel’s life and the story of Abraham and Isaac is close enough that it might well have seemed inescapable to anyone, like Zabdiel, who had grown up amid the Puritan exhortations to apply the Bible to one’s own experience.
As is so often the case, fact proves at least as quirky as fiction: from his house at the far end of the Boylstons’ garden, the Reverend Colman witnessed Tommy trying to cool himself off under the pump, and Lieutenant Hamilton did indeed name a slave Cotton Mather, entering him into the Seahorse’s muster as his personal servant on July 2, 1721. The original Cotton Mather did not find out until the following December; he assumed it was meant as an insult.
Salutation Alley
The main events of this chapter—Tommy’s recovery, the Seahorse’s departure, the various inoculations and warnings, and even Joshua Cheever’s firefighting—are all documented. The details, especially the emotional connections, have to be inferred from the silences between Zabdiel Boylston’s rather terse lines.
Tommy’s temperature did suddenly go down on the morning of July 4, after his father gave him a “gentle” vomit; in all likelihood, the fever’s nosedive was due to the natural course of smallpox rather than to Boylston’s treatment.
While I do not know that Benjamin Colman took part in whatever celebrations shook the Boylston household after Tommy’s fever went off, he did become one of Boylston’s earliest and staunchest supporters—as well as his most convincing. Colman’s elegance, moderation, and popularity with women have all been richly attested. As the Boylstons were part of his congregation, he would have been responsible for their spiritual welfare during this crisis.
On Tommy and Jackey’s course through the smallpox, Boylston wrote only that on the fourth day “a kind and favourable Small-Pox came out, of about an hundred a piece; after which their circumstances became easy, our trouble was over, and they were soon well.” It cannot, however, have seemed so carefree before he possessed the rose-colored glasses of hindsight, especially in light of Tommy’s extreme first fever. Boylston did not inoculate anyone else until Joshua Cheever on July 12. By count of days through a typical case of discrete smallpox, that was the earliest point at which he might have been all but certain that both Tommy and Jackey would escape the second fever altogether, to survive without permanent damage.
As with Lady Mary, I’ve drawn details of Tommy’s case (especially the timing and the particular look of the rash) from Ricketts, whose in-depth description of a light case of discrete smallpox with no secondary fever closely matches the outlines of Tommy’s experience as sketched by Boylston. Even more intriguingly, Ricketts’s description of “modified” smallpox—cases suffered by patients still partially shielded by long-past vaccinations whose protective mechanisms had partly to mostly worn off—also closely resemble Boylston’s descriptions of inoculated smallpox. Both were marked by unusual speed in the progress of the disease, as well as by light rashes resembling the chicken pox; both rarely exhibited the fearful secondary fever common in cases of “natural” smallpox.
George Stewart was, as noted, a Scottish surgeon who had married the daughter of Boylston’s mentor; professional rivalry goes a long way toward explaining their quick drift into loggerheads. Stewart later wrote a letter to Dr. William Wagstaffe of London in defense of his opposition to inoculation, noting that Boylston had privately admitted to him that his son came close to dying during the first fever. His propensity for pessimism, snide gossip, and defamation is made abundantly clear in an anti-inoculation column he later wrote for the New-England Courant. I have built the encounter between him and Boylston from these hints.
In his writings on inoculation, Boylston never pointed out Cheever as a friend; however, he did not point out any of his relations, including his brother Tom, as family either. On the other hand, he did include a few more details about Cheever’s life (the firefighting, for example) than he did about most other patients. Just as many of the first inoculees in London have traceable connections to Lady Mary or the Princess of Wales, many of Boston’s inoculees have connections to Boylston. I’ve surmised that both Cheever and Helyer belong among this group—as his friends—chiefly because, outside his family, they were the only two people he inoculated before publicly announcing his experiment. Furthermore, both were men close to him in age and socioeconomic status, and so far as can be traced, Cheever appears to have been, like Boylston, more of an active than a contemplative man.
Outside his family, all Boylston’s earliest inoculees—with the exception of John Helyer—have clear ties to homes, jobs, or close family in or near Salutation Alley, to the Salutation Inn at the eastern end of the lane, or to the New North Church at its western end (at Hanover Street). Cheever, for example, lived on the south side of the alley and was a deacon of the New North. Joseph Webb lived one street farther south, on White Bread Alley, and was also a deacon of the New North. His older brother John was the patriarch of the Webb clan (though at sixty-seven, he seems to have been a little frail, and if the opposition was right, may possibly have been senile); his eldest surviving son was the Reverend John Webb, first pastor of the New North.
I have surmised that John Helyer, a member of Mather’s Old North Church, was a part of this same close-knit group of people. See the notes to “Signs and Wonders” for more details.
Salutation Alley still exists, though it has long since graduated to the status of “street.” The winding dockside road that Boylston knew as Ann, Fish, and Ship Streets (and I have condensed to the single name of Ship Street) is now called North Street; it is considerably farther in from the shore than it once was. The taverns and inns named here are all known to have stretched in this order along the North End’s wharfs at this period, or shortly afterward.
The anti-inoculators later insisted that Cheever and Helyer had pressed Boylston to inoculate them out of desperation, presumably stemming from known exposure to the disease. Boylston eventually inoculated both Cheever and his “lad”—a servant, slave, or apprentice, as he had no children—but not his wife. As with Jerusha Boylston, this implies that Sarah Cheever had either already survived smallpox, or had come down with it before Boylston was willing to inoculate anyone beyond the bounds of his own family. The latter possibility reconciles her own failure to be inoculated with her husband’s desperate insistence upon it; furthermore, they lived in Salutation Alley, which was particularly hard hit by this epidemic.
In Massachusetts, public days of fasting, prayer, and humiliation were, by 1721, a traditional response to catastrophes ranging from smallpox to fire to menacing weather, dating back to an era when the iron piety of the Puritan ministers ruled the colony of Massachusetts Bay. July 13, 1721, however, was marked as much or more by political in-fighting as by devotion.
Boylston wrote that he had been given three warnings before appearing at the selectmen’s meeting to discuss the dangers of inoculation on July 21. He did not say who delivered the warnings, or how.
The selectmen did meet on July 17, the last day of the brief adjournment the House had granted itself. Though no official discussion of inoculation was entered in the minutes, the three warnings to Boylston, plus the selectmen’s well-organized and united resistance suggest strongly that they came to some kind of off-the-record agreement. The meeting that brought Boylston before all seven selectmen, several justices of the peace, and the town’s physicians was likewise left out of the minutes for July 21.
No record of Jerusha Boylston’s response to her husband’s experiment on Tommy survives. The fact that all three of their daughters were home to be inoculated in one day about a month later, however, suggests that she cooperated, and very likely approved of his actions.
Prying Multitudes
Young Mary’s rash did indeed erupt after only one night of moderate fever. Lady Mary’s dream, however, comes from my own imagination, spun from Dryden’s smallpox elegy and the classical tales that she loved.
Maitland identified none of his hard-won witn
esses by name, noting only that “Three learned physicians of the college were admitted, one after another, to visit the young lady; they are all gentlemen of honour, and will on all occasions declare, as they have hitherto done, that they saw Miss Wortley playing about the room, cheerful and well, with the small pox rais’d upon her; and that in a few days after she perfectly recovr’d of them.”
Dr. Walter Harris later identified himself in his own writing; he also recorded the number of little Mary’s pocks. Dr. Keith’s identity is clear from Maitland’s notes on inoculating the doctor’s son Peter, submitted to the Royal Society as a part of James Jurin’s later project to apply statistics to the study of inoculation’s efficacy. Keith’s quick decision was no doubt hurried along by the fact that his family had proved achingly vulnerable to smallpox.
Wortley family tradition said that four physicians served as witnesses; Maitland had three. I have inferred Sir Hans Sloane as the third man and Dr. Steigerthal as the possible fourth. Sir Hans had long been gathering information on inoculation in the form of letters and testimony from abroad; by June if not before, he had become the driving force behind medical and scientific interest in the operation. As the king’s personal physician, he was the liaison between the court and the medical profession. As president of the Royal College of Physicians, he certainly fell under Maitland’s rubric of “learned physicians of the college.” Dr. Steigerthal had followed the king to England from Hanover at royal request; from beginning to end, he was almost as closely involved in the royal consideration of inoculation as Sir Hans.
Dr. Mead had been Lady Mary’s family physician since before she had suffered small-pox herself; Dr. Arbuthnot was a good friend. Though she was suspicious of medical men in general, it seems likely that her own familiar doctors would have been on hand as consultants throughout young Mary’s bout with inoculated smallpox.
I’ve drawn the scene of Lady Mary and Mr. Maitland witnessing the witnesses from what is known about the doctors in question, inflected by attitudes that the two speakers displayed in their own writings. That Lady Mary and Mr. Maitland had something of a comfortable relationship is apparent from her long-standing willingness to trust the man with the lives of her children, and by the fact that he could coax her, at least occasionally, from adamant opposition into agreement with his actions and assessments.
As much as possible, Maitland’s thoughts follow the paths and even the words he laid out in Mr. Maitland’s Account of Inoculating the Small Pox, published in 1722.
As for Lady Mary’s other visitors at this time, Maitland identified them only as “several ladies, and other persons of distinction.” Lord and Lady Townshend, however, are likely candidates, as they were close friends. Lord Townshend was, as later described, the minister who procured legal clearance for the prison experiment. Among the many friends that Lady Mary and the Princess of Wales shared, I have chosen two: Elizabeth Sackville, duchess of Dorset, and Charlotte (Monck) Tichborne were both confidantes of Princess Caroline, and both girlhood friends of Lady Mary.
It is impossible, now, to trace with any accuracy the scheming that went on in the effort to bring the prison experiment into being, though clearly there was more than a little. Genevieve Miller would have it that the physicians, especially Sir Hans Sloane, were almost solely responsible. Contemporary writers in a position to know, including Maitland and Sloane, give much of the credit to Lady Mary and Caroline, Princess of Wales. Lord Townshend and the Whig ministry also had some part in it. I think it most likely that all these people were deeply involved, for many different reasons, ranging from scientific and medical, to personal and familial, to political. I have followed those who were there in giving to the Princess of Wales much of the credit for organizing the concerted push for the experiments.
The process by which the king came to his decision is obscure. It seems likely, though, that he would have asked the two Turks he knew best—Mehemet and Mustafa. By 1721, they had been with him for years (many more years than he had been king, in fact). They went everywhere with him, including driving in the park and attending the opera, and they could and did enter into quasi-familiar conversations with the king and the courtiers who surrounded him.
People who considered inoculation seriously almost all shared two experiences: first, they themselves had suffered a serious bout of smallpox (as had Zabdiel Boylston, Lady Mary, and the Princess of Wales), or had lost or nearly lost a loved one to it (as had Jerusha Boylston, Lady Mary, the Princess of Wales, and Dr. Keith). Second, they also tended to know one of the early inoculators well. I see no reason to think that in this matter King George would have been different from anyone else. In the absence of Lady Mary’s diaries, I have no proof that he spoke to her in person about the proposed prison experiment. On balance, though, given the facts that they were on speaking terms, and that interest in inoculation seems to have been driven more strongly by personal relationships and trust than by anything else (except possibly desperation), it would be stranger if the king had not consulted Lady Mary, than if he had.
An Infusion of Malignant Filth
Five years after the fact, this meeting still made Boylston steam under the collar. Though the selectmen called the meeting, they did not record it in their minutes. A close approximation of what went on that day can be gleaned from the writings of both Douglass and Boylston, along with others who rushed to defend one side or the other. For example, on the subject of African inoculation being a common success, Boylston wrote: “I have as full evidence of this, as I have that there are lions in Africa. And I don’t know why ’tis more unlawful to learn of Africans how to help against the poison of the Small Pox, than it is to learn of our Indians how to help against the Poison of a Rattle-snake.” Piecing together real sneers and points made by Douglass, I have reconstructed a line of argument that culminates in such comments.
Dr. Douglass’s arguments are marked by arrogant erudition and gleeful revelry in slander. In contrast, Boylston’s arguments and rebuttals are marked by a wry humor as well as frustration, though it is clear that the plague argument made him lose his temper.
Douglass laid out his line of thought in a letter published in the Boston News-Letter three days later, on Monday, July 24; the letter, however, is dated July 20, 1721—a day before the meeting. This suggests that Dr. Douglass had advance warning in order to plan his attack; the content suggests that he had every expectation of conquest. He was almost certainly the orchestrator of the opposition at this meeting: Within days, and for the remainder of the controversy, he was the acknowledged leader of the anti-inoculators. That he already held this position by the time of this meeting is further attested by the fact that he was the interrogator and translator of Dr. Dalhonde. (Though Douglass did not sign his name to his inoculation publications until decades later, his veil of anonymity was transparent. Both his contemporaries and modern scholars have identified him as the author of the works I cite as his.)
Boylston’s rebuttal was not published until a month later, in Some Account of What Is Said of Innoculating or Transplanting the Small Pox. In the second section of that pamphlet, he refutes many of Douglass’s arguments point by point.
For both men, I’ve also relied on later writings that elucidate arguments suggested in these earlier pieces, especially when they do so in pungent language.
I present nowhere near all Dr. Douglass’s many objections against inoculation, though I have touched upon those he hit hardest (that it amounted to poison, infringed on God’s Providence, produced the plague, and was the product of lies and foolish dreams on the part of Africans, “Asiaticks,” and women). Many of his arguments, however, quibbled with word choice and editing decisions in Dr. Mather’s (slightly) abridged translation of the two papers from the Philosophical Transactions. While some of this is interesting if you have side-by-side texts in front of you, mostly it’s mind-numbingly petty. I have tried to convey this pettiness in his stance toward Dr. Boylston: in his refusal, for example, to acknowledge
Boylston as “Dr.” (amply demonstrated in his writings, when he could bring himself to refer to Boylston by name at all; usually he preferred epithets like “the Inoculator,” which he clearly regarded as a slur).
In opposing inoculation, Douglass operated at least as much by vicious personal attack as he did by reasoned argument against the procedure. Besides slandering Boylston, he repeatedly defamed the Greek women and the Africans whose testimony Boylston had accepted. The slurs included here are direct quotes or close paraphrases of Douglass’s own words. The exceptions are the dismissive references to black Africans as “idiots” who used language blunderingly. These appear in one of Boylston’s statements in Some Account.
Boylston was no saint; he was a slave-owner throughout his life. I’ve found no other instance, however, of his unprovoked use of such derogatory language. Furthermore, he alone had credited African experience enough to stake his child’s life on it. In the context of the many arguments presented at this meeting and directly afterward, this particular statement reads to me as a mimicking reply to a particular challenge; since Dr. Douglass repeatedly used such language in making similar challenges, I’ve put this one into his mouth.
George Stewart recorded that the first part of the meeting devolved into a morass of squabbling in which Boylston was repeatedly asked whether inoculation was infallible, or whether people “might not die by it”—to which he repeatedly replied “that persons might die by a vomit or a purge” too. This did not satisfy the doctors, wrote Stewart, so “after a long debate, Mr. Dalohonde was called upon to say what he thought of it.” As Dalhonde is said to have been called for at four o’clock and the standard dinner hour of the day was at two, I have made the company break for dinner.