Abstract
Cotton Mather (1663-1728), who introduced inoculation into the British colony of Boston (1721), was a Puritan minister. Intellectually precocious, he had a strong interest in medicine and read extensively in medical texts, but chose the ministry as his profession. Yet he maintained a lifelong interest in medicine. Mather never served an apprenticeship but he had read medicine voraciously and widely, and his own medical book, The Angel of Bethesda , shows an extraordinary acquaintance with the medical teachings of his time. He was deeply religious and all his medical concepts had a religious orientation. A personal god and a personal devil, sin and redemption, colored his medical teachings. His book was written over a long period, finished in 1724, but never published. Only a few subsequent writers had studied the manuscript. Parts of it—about one fifth—were published by Beall and Shryock in their excellent little book, Cotton Mather . Now for the
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