“The Practice of Conveying and Suffering the Small-pox”: Inoculation as a Means of Spiritual Conversion in Cotton Mather’s Angel of Bethesda

You may see (said they) what hee is by his Diseases!

—Cotton Mather, The Diary, 1692

Smallpox arrived for the sixth time in the city of Boston in late April of 1721.¹ Reacting to the outbreak in his diary, Cotton Mather—the eminent Puritan theologian and first proponent of inoculation in America—wrote, “The grievous Calamity of the Small-pox has now entered the Town. The practice of conveying and suffering the Small-pox by Inoculation, has never been used in America…But how many lives might be saved by it, if it were practiced? I will procure a Consult of our Physicians, and lay the matter before them.”² If his first remark about smallpox was an apparently scientific one, Mather’s second comment, which came just two days later, looked entirely ministerial. He noted, again in his diary, “The Entrance of the Smallpox into the Town must awaken in me several Tempers and Actions of Piety relating to myself, besides a Variety of Duty to the People.”³ Throughout the nearly yearlong epidemic, Mather oscillated between his interest in medicine and his deeply-entrenched sense of Protestant ethics to determine the proper course of action in assisting the community with the outbreak.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, medical historians have paid special attention to the scientific impact of Mather’s work on inoculation. Otho T. Beall, Jr. and Richard H. Shryock, for instance, in Cotton Mather: First Significant Figure in American Medicine (1954), were the first to show in a book-length study the importance of Mather’s role in the smallpox epidemic. They asserted that “the history of immunology, with all its ultimate values in overcoming infectious diseases, began…in the Boston of 1721.”⁴ Three decades later, Arthur M. Silverstein, in A History of Immunology (1989), argued that Mather “not only advanced a theory of acquired immunity in natural smallpox infection but also explained…why variolation [or inoculation] is effective in inducing lasting immunity.”⁵ More recently, Ed Cohen, in A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (2009) has suggested that “the first person to adapt the notion of ‘self-defense’ to a medical context, thereby foreshadowing what we now call immunity, is the most iconic and bombastic of American Protestants, Cotton Mather.”⁶ While these studies have positioned Mather as a progressive scientist on the verge of discovering concepts that would become theories of contagion and acquired immunity well over a century after the 1721 outbreak, their tendency to follow the scientific legacy of inoculation has overlooked the fact that Mather viewed the procedure chiefly as a method for obtaining resistance to the pathogenic force of innate sin. In this regard, inoculation served as the very “action of piety” and “duty to the people” he mentioned in his diary.⁷

This essay proves that Mather viewed inoculation not just as a medical procedure but, more accurately, as a new scientific means for inducing spiritual conversion. For the Puritans, the ultimate purpose of conversion was to produce the assurance that God had bestowed saving grace upon the repentant. Early in the twentieth century, Perry Miller explained that this process began within each person by some contact with a conversionary “means.” “Conversion,” Miller writes, “is an event in nature, and as in other natural events, the process of regeneration is initiated by an external object from which the senses derive a phantasm, exactly as in any other act of apprehension.”⁸ The experience Miller describes began with the convert capturing a sensation, but it quickly became an intellectual operation wherein she sought to interpret the spiritual meaning of both the stimulus and the sensation. Inoculation, then, promoted such a conversion in two specific ways. First, it kindled a weak form of smallpox in the patient and produced symptoms that could be read for signs of healing in both the body and the soul. Second, and of most importance to Cotton Mather, was the idea that it induced a prescribed...