A Reconsideration of the Inoculation Controversy

Abstract

FROM the spring of 1721 to the early winter of 1722, Boston was ravaged by smallpox. During the course of the scourge, two influential segments of the community's leadership, the town ministry and the local physicians, waged a war in print ostensibly concerning the practice of inoculation, or preventive variolation, an experimental treatment designed to provide the inoculee immunity from later attacks of smallpox by artificially inducing a mild, curable case of the disease. Boston ministers, guided by Cotton Mather, for the most part stood in favor of extending the experiment in inoculation that had been inaugurated by a single physician, Zabdiel Boylston.' Most physicians, on the other hand, led by Dr. William Douglass, the only practitioner in town with a medical degree, opposed inoculation as an untested novelty, attacked the clergymen who fostered it, and called upon the town selectmen to halt the experiment.2 The public battle between these two prestigious adversaries lasted far longer than the epidemic itself, and the literature accompanying the controversy was both vast and venomous. Although, as numerous scholars have noted, a variety of contentions and antagonisms were at issue in the inoculation debate, the controversy has been viewed primarily as a confrontation between the major opponents, Cotton Mather and William Douglass. This perspective, focusing upon both the personalities and the professional biases of the primary