Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures

3. African Testimony, Dangerous Communications, and Colonial Medical Knowledge in the 1721 Boston Inoculation Controversy

97 Chapter 3 african testimony, dangerous communications, and colonial Medical Knowledge in the 1721 Boston inoculation controversy Communicating Disease: Smallpox and the Circulation of Information I n 1721, Reverend Ebenezer Parkman, of Westborough, Massachusetts , received “two instance [letters] from friends who had just been innoculated [sic] for smallpox, [and] immediately burnt them both for fear of catching the disease from them.”1 The letters arrived during a smallpox epidemic that struck Boston after several enslaved Africans on board a ship from the West Indies contracted the disease in June 1721. Although city officials quarantined the Africans who first exhibited symptoms, smallpox spread throughout Boston, becoming an epidemic that would kill over eight hundred citizens before ending a year later. Parkman’s decision to burn the letters indicated not only colonists’ fear of contracting smallpox but also their concerns regarding inoculation, a preventive treatment for smallpox, and, by extension, concerns regarding how to recognize safe, or “healthy” forms with which to communicate disease. It is significant that Parkman’s fears were not allayed by his knowledge that the letter writers had been inoculated; instead, he worried that the writers might have transmitted smallpox virus in their written communications. 98 chapter 3 Such concerns that inoculated patients would transmit smallpox were articulated most publicly and forcefully during the epidemic by the physician William Douglass, who argued that inoculation was an unsafe method of preventing smallpox because the “Communication of Constitutional Distempers, is a difficulty which will require some series of Years to obviate.”2 Douglass expressed concerns that inoculation could communicate, or transmit, undesirable elements, including fatal doses of the smallpox virus and other illnesses present in the donor’s blood. He worried that inoculation , like Parkman’s letters, would invisibly communicate diseases that would be fatal to their recipients. Parkman’s concerns regarding the parallel repercussions of inoculation and of letter writing point as well to the ways in which, during the 1721 epidemic, anxiety about inadvertent, fatal transmissions of disease was not limited to medical practices but extended as well to acts of communicating medical knowledge. Indeed, Douglass’s reference to inoculation as the “Communication of Constitutional Distempers” posited an equivalence between medical and literary communications that connected the safety of inoculation with the “health” or trustworthiness of information about inoculation and of the source of that information.3 In fact, Douglass’s arguments against inoculation frequently manifested concerns about appropriate forms of transmitting both smallpox viruses and medical knowledge. Douglass objected to inoculation not only because it was an untested practice that might transmit diseases already in the patients’ blood but also because pro-inoculators based their arguments on communications from sources who, Douglass alleged, were unreliable. Douglass’s rival, Cotton Mather, shared his understanding of the connections between medical and literary communications, but Mather disagreed about how to interpret inoculation and knowledge of the practice. Mather, who presented inoculation to Bostonians as an effective prevention for smallpox , argued that the procedure transmitted only a small dose of smallpox that would not harm patients. Moreover, he explained that he had first learned of inoculation when his African slave Onesimus informed him of firsthand experiences with inoculation in Africa. Drawing on the rhetorical strategies oftheplainstyle,whichpositedacloserelationbetweenwordsandthetruths they represented, Mather offered Onesimus’s testimony as trustworthy, unbiased evidence that inoculation worked to prevent smallpox. By contrast, Douglass insisted that only multiple tests and careful evaluation could prove African Testimony, Dangerous Communications, and Medical Knowledge 99 that inoculation would not cause a full-blown case of smallpox and further spread the disease. Moreover, he argued that Africans’ testimony contained irrational ideas that threatened to compromise colonial medical knowledge. For Douglass, both forms of medical communication hid dangerous elements under an appearance of efficacy. In a dispute that raged alongside the epidemic, Mather and Douglass debated the nature of medical communications : both inoculation and African testimony. Historical and literary studies of the inoculation controversy, as it is now called, have explained Mather’s and Douglass’s respective responses to inoculation and to African testimony by describing the two men as opposing figures who occupied contrasting cultural and epistemological positions. Mather, who originally studied medicine at Harvard when he thought a stammer would prevent him from preaching, was not a licensed physician, but he did own the most extensive medical library in the colonies.4 Moreover, he argued that he was uniquely authorized to attend to his congregants’ bodies and souls, since...