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Boylston agreed to make the experiment. On June 26 he inoculated his six-year-old son Thomas, as well as a thirty-six-year-old man named Jack and a toddler named Jackey, both Black slaves. Jack had few symptoms and speedily recovered. (Boylston speculated that he might previously have had smallpox and thus already possessed immunity.) The younger patients traveled a rougher road. On the seventh day, Boylston reported, “the two children were a little hot, dull and sleepy.” Thomas twitched in his sleep, and in both boys, symptoms persisted, “neither the fever nor the symptoms abating,” until the ninth day, when each developed about one hundred pocks, “after which their Circumstances became easy, our Trouble was over, and they soon were well.” Both Boylston and Mather saw this outcome as a triumph, a clear demonstration of the value of inoculation. It was (in Mather’s framework) literally a godsend, a simple technique that could save hundreds, perhaps thousands. — Those multitudes would not be saved. Almost all of Boston’s medical community opposed the practice. Responding to news of Boylston’s inoculations, Boston’s selectmen heard testimony on July 21 from a French physician visiting Boston who told them in gruesome detail about an earlier experiment gone very wrong; four out of the thirteen inoculated patients had died, he claimed, while six others suffered severe reactions. Following that testimony, local doctors publicly declared that “infusing such malignant Filth [the inoculating pus] in the Mass of Blood is to corrupt and putrify it”; that “it has prov’d to be the Death of many Persons soon after the Operation”; and that “continuing the Operation among us is likely to prove of most dangerous Consequence.” The argument continued through and after the outbreak, featuring all the extravagant vitriol of which the era was capable. The doctors did not suggest that inoculation thwarted God’s will, but the hot fury of their opposition to inoculation echoed the theological view: Mather and Boylston were guilty of the sin of pride, meddling in matters beyond their grasp, and putting those they treated at intolerable risk.
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Thomas Levenson (So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease)