African Medical Knowledge, the Plain Style, and Satire in the 1721 Boston Inoculation Controversy

In June 1721, just after a ship from the West Indies had arrived in Boston, smallpox broke out among several Africans on board. Though city officials instituted a quarantine, the disease spread throughout Boston, becoming an epidemic that would kill over eight hundred citizens before ending a year later. Anxiety about smallpox was rivaled only by news about inoculation: an alleged African practice by which patients were immunized with a small dose of the live virus. A debate about inoculation raged alongside the epidemic, taking shape as a dispute between men who had different medical credentials and employed competing literary forms. Cotton Mather, trained as a minister, with perhaps the most extensive medical library in the colonies, employed a plain style to insist that Africans' testimony was reliable. Mather called inoculation a providential gift that he, as a minister, was authorized to interpret, and he offered firsthand evidence from his African slave Onesimus, who described how he had been inoculated in Africa. By contrast, Dr. William Douglass, who possessed an official degree from the foremost European medical university, in Edinburgh, satirized African medical knowledge and insisted that only multiple tests and careful evaluation could justify accepting inoculation. To protest inoculation, Douglass formed the first colonial medical society and printed his satirical counterarguments in the New-England Courant, a newspaper that James Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's older brother, began publishing in order to circulate articles opposing inoculation.

The inoculation controversy, as the argument between Mather and Douglass is now called, has been described as a pivotal moment in both medical and literary histories of British America. Historians of medicine have seen the debate as a conflict between Puritan interpretations of illness, represented by Mather's belief that natural phenomena possessed spiritual significance, and Enlightenment "materialist" philosophies, represented by Douglass's insistence that smallpox had a natural, not a spiritual, cause and that only repeated tests could authorize new medical practices (Humphreys Warner 279). Mather promoted inoculation because he "hoped to improve his own position as a figure of importance in New England society" and to defend ministers' influence in both religious and political affairs (279). However, much to Mather's dismay, many colonists refused to accept inoculation, giving what historians suggest was one of the last, fatal blows to clerical authority. Meanwhile, Douglass's opposition to inoculation has been seen as an "obstacle . . . in the path of scientific progress," especially since inoculation eventually became the preferred method of preventing smallpox until Edward Jenner introduced vaccination in 1796 (Schmotter 23).¹ Yet while his claims regarding inoculation were eventually proven wrong, Douglass's insistence that ministers lacked authority to produce medical philosophies paradoxically "represented the earliest calls for medical professionalism heard in the colonies" (23).

More recently, literary scholars and historians of the book have explored the controversy's significance for early American literary history, focusing in particular upon the literary practices that Douglass employed to protest inoculation, which included privately circulated manuscripts, polite conversation, "'insider' verse," and periodicals (Hall, Cultures 153). David D. Hall argues that the New-England Courant made available new rhetorical strategies with which colonists could express opinions critical of the clergy, describing the literary practices associated with Douglass's "coterie" and the Courant as part of a "politics of culture" that sought to "create a sphere that was liberated from the pulpit" (Cultures 157). As both Hall and David S. Shields observe, anti-inoculators sought to facilitate sociable exchanges among writers who thought of themselves as gentlemen. Hall and Shields attribute the development of genteel literary practices during the controversy to the inspiration of English literary culture, especially periodicals such as Richard Steele and Joseph Addison's Tatler, which colonists imitated to "ease the provincialism of [their] new world culture" (Hall, Cultures 153).²

This article investigates the connections between colonists' genteel literary strategies and their encounters with African medical knowledge.³ I examine here the tension between Mather's plain literary style and Douglass's satire in the context of Africans' knowledge of inoculation in order to uncover how colonists alternately promoted and...