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  • Dissecting the Pamphlet Literature of the Boston Smallpox Inoculation Controversy
  • Matthew Wynn Sivils (bio)

“COTTON MATHER, You Dog, Dam You; I’l inoculate you with this, with a Pox to you.”

—note tied to an unexploded bomb, November 14, 17211

In April of 1721, a number of ships from the West Indies docked in Boston Harbor. One of these vessels, the HMS Seahorse, hailing from Salt Tortuga, delivered a shipment of cargo to the colony. It also brought smallpox. Despite efforts to quarantine the infected, by the end of May, eight people had contracted the deadly virus, and with the specter of an epidemic looming over the city, the citizens of Boston looked to two different sources for medical leadership: the clergy and an assortment of medical practitioners.2 The clergy, led by Cotton Mather, championed the relatively new practice of inoculation, or variolation, as a preventative for smallpox, while the physicians, represented by the Scots-born physician, William Douglass, scorned such a strategy as dangerous to the general population. A battle of words ensued between these camps, with each publishing fiery arguments in the pages of Boston’s newspaper and pamphlet literature. The key documents of this debate—distributed as the epidemic claimed life after life—stand as powerful cultural narratives that reveal the complex rhetorical and literary strategies employed by these two groups at a crucial moment in the story of the institutionalization of medical knowledge-making in America.

Historians of the event, such as Perry Miller and John T. Barrett, tend, in the words of Margot Minardi, to portray “the inoculation controversy as a contest for professional authority, epitomized by [End Page 39] the clash between the preacher Mather and the physician Douglass.”3 But, Minardi explains, “Their conflict was not between religion and medicine per se. Rather, the question was what roles men of the cloth and other medical amateurs were to be permitted in the realm of medicine.”4 Underscoring that the controversy was more than simply a case of Boston’s religious leaders butting heads with its more secular physicians, John B. Blake writes that “One source of opposition to inoculation was the religious scruples of earnest and devout people. Some maintained that it was a sin for a healthy person to bring sickness upon himself . . . and that he should in submission to God’s will leave it to Him to determine whether or not he would suffer the disease.”5 Pro-inoculation ministers, such as Increase Mather and his son, Cotton, eased such religious qualms by arguing that inoculation should be encouraged because it prevented a more severe sickness. Plus, they argued, no one resisted other forms of preventative medicine such as purgatives and medicines meant to induce vomiting.6 Hence, in equating it to other forms of preventative medicine, Mather’s group of clerical inoculationists championed the practice as one example of the free access of medical knowledge to the general public. Douglass’s group, on the other hand, represented the beginning of a drive to create a more exclusive American medical establishment. The rhetoric of these two groups reflects two markedly different appeals. The inoculationists presented themselves as the beneficent servants of God, whose experience and common sense gave them the right to prescribe the technique. The anti-inoculationists portrayed themselves as members of an elite medical profession and based their rhetoric on fear, the fear that people such as the inoculationists would worsen the spread of smallpox with their unqualified meddling.

Given that there were few other venues for airing their arguments, it was inevitable that the inoculation debate would enter the public discourse of Boston through one of that community’s most powerful forums, its pamphlet literature. The pamphlet texts employed a variety of rhetorical appeals coupled with what was often an irregular narrative structure. The clergy, in particular, took advantage of the literary nature of this medium by making use of story-telling as a way to appeal to an audience used to narratives in sermons and to promote a more inclusive, and ostensibly democratic, method of dispensing medical expertise. Anti-inoculationists, notably Douglass, likewise employed narrative, but in a more subtle, epistolary manner that was targeted...

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