The African Roots of Vaccination in AmericaAugust 14, 2021
I was today years old when I learned this, thanks to several articles in The Washington Post.
Washington Post:
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.
In the 18th century, however, Boston’s colonists met Mather’s inoculation proposal with a terror that bordered on hysteria. They didn’t understand how inoculation worked, and the notion of choosing to infect yourself with a deadly disease struck them — perhaps understandably — as outrageous. Fear of science, suspicion of the ruling elite, and a belief that medicine might meddle with God’s will — these ideas guided the angry mobs in Boston in 1721 and linger today in some form in anti-vaccine movements.
Ironically, today —
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