Getting the Pox off All Their Houses: Cotton Mather and the Rhetoric of Puritan Science

Cotton Mather's advocacy of smallpox inoculations during the 1721 Boston epidemic has been acknowledged and lauded at least since the 1950s.¹ Yet scholars have been divided on the reasons why Mather discounted the religious objections of more conservative Bostonians during the inoculation controversy.² An accompanying article in this issue of EAL by Kelly Wisecup analyzes at length the rhetorical practices of Mather and his detractors in reference to the African origin of the inoculation procedure. The African connection has not been given the focus it deserves in the past (and certainly no credit went to Mather's slave Onesimus during his lifetime), but the very fact that new interpretations of the controversy continue to emerge would seem to indicate that Mather's role in the smallpox epidemic of 1721 remains enigmatic.

My argument is that scholars continue to examine the Mather inoculation controversy because Mather himself was deeply enigmatic when he rejected the arguments of the anti-inoculators, the more religious of whom, after all, had a perfectly valid argument. If God sends disease as punishment, and if God can heal those diseases as a lesson in morals for the sufferer, the anti-inoculators seem to assume, then something is deeply wrong with using a new technology that circumvents God's role and precludes many persons obtaining inoculations from ever receiving God's chastisement. The very manner in which Mather discounted the religious objections of conservative Bostonians during the smallpox controversy demonstrates his ability to insist that his promotion of a purely secular method of defeating smallpox in noway contradicted his sternly deterministic theology.³ The way in which Mather was able to argue that a medical procedure that seemingly ignored religious devotion could indeed be reconciled to Puritan assumptions of divine intervention in the world has not been adequately explained and is therefore worth revisiting.

I argue by way of rhetorical analysis that Mather invokes the language of the jeremiad to demonstrate that science is one of several tools in moving humanity forward toward its ultimate goal of divine reconciliation, although it is in no way a necessary component of individual salvation. This argument obviates the contradictions that arise when one considers, for example, why a smallpox inoculation should supersede simple faith in divine providence for a devout Puritan, and why, if divine providence indeed comports well with science, good Christian people died of smallpox before inoculations were available.

Recent scholarship has been silent on this aporia, although various writers have discussed the smallpox controversy in a number of contexts.⁴ One might be tempted to assume that Mather was simply taking up the new spirit of Enlightenment that was growing in popularity on the European continent he so admired. But even if we postulate that Mather shifted to embrace Enlightenment thinking, it is not sufficient to settle the contradiction between trust in a medical discovery and unqualified faith in God, because few if any leading figures of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries would have questioned that God was in control. After all, both Boyle and Newton were conventional in their religious beliefs by modern standards, and Newton is even known to have been an enthusiastic alchemist.⁵ We can move beyond the outdated opposition between Enlightenment and religious thought by examining how Mather was able to reconcile his religious views and scientific adventurousness in a way that diminished neither. The way to this reconciliation is best sought in Mather's works themselves, which in several instances display his tendency to privilege the discovery of new knowledge about the natural world over the religious compatibility of that new knowledge.

By far the most prolific Puritan, Mather published 444 works during his lifetime on a wide variety of subjects, including full-length books and ephemeral pamphlets. He was also an avid diarist (Holmes ix). Mather understood that the audiences for his various works on science were distinctly different. When he wanted to show his scientific mettle to an elite audience, he wrote up his observations in a format resembling modern scientific lab and field reports...