For all his richly attested disagreeableness, Douglass seems to have been right about the eighteen days. This time span jibes with what’s known about the transmission of small-pox: from one person’s “seizure” (by which he probably meant the onset of the first fever) to the appearance of the rash takes about three days. After that, it takes roughly another three days for the pocks inside the nose, mouth, and throat to mature and begin to burst: at which point, the ill person spews thick clouds of smallpox virus with every breath. Anyone vulnerable who breathes in that infection then has about twelve days of symptomless incubation before their own “seizure” or onset of the first fever—for a total of eighteen days. Measured from rash to rash, as I have done here, the span is the same as from fever to fever. All the different stages, of course, can vary somewhat in length. Also, patients remain infectious for a long time beyond day three of their rashes, and they can become infectious earlier. As Douglass himself noted, the pattern of widening rings of infection is easiest to see at the start of an epidemic.
Boylston, Mather, and others wrote that Douglass retrieved from Mather the volumes containing the Timonius and Pylarinus articles, and that he locked them up, refusing to let anyone else, even the governor, so much as peek at them. This must have occurred after June 6, when Mather first spread their contents abroad, and before June 23, when Mather sent his treatise out to the physicians—after which such hoarding would presumably have lost most of its point.
Mather sent his first letter, summoning the physicians to a meeting, to Dr. Nathanael Williams, with a particular request to forward it to Dr. Douglass. (Apparently, it was a single copy meant to circulate among the town’s physicians.) Williams’s compliance with this request seems the most likely avenue for Douglass’s discovery of Mather’s meddling. As no one else seems to have seen the letter (other than Mather’s later defenders, who likely had access to the author’s draft copy), it seems reasonable to suppose that it was Douglass who squelched it, along with stopping the circulation of the books.
Douglass is not known to have possessed a house of his own before 1724. (Possibly, his profits from this epidemic materially helped him toward that purchase.) There are passing references in early histories to him living in rooms in the Green Dragon; later, he bought the entire building, though it seems he did not live there at that time. He mocked Zabdiel Boylston for riding horseback, implying that a carriage was more proper to a physician’s status; presumably, therefore, he kept one himself. Given his concern with appearances, and with the appurtenances of rank, I have assumed that he also kept at least one slave, though there are no details; certainly, to keep a coach meant keeping at the very least one servant as driver and groom. Again, his mockery of Boylston and Mather reveals that he had no high opinion of African thought or practices.
In reverse, mockery aimed at Douglass suggests that he spoke with a strong Scottish accent, peppering his sentences with obviously Scottish vocabulary.
A number of witnesses said that the next “parcel” of smallpox rashes appeared in the middle of June; Douglass specified the “change of the moon, middle of June.” The new moon occurred on June 13. People then began fleeing the town in droves; Douglass claims that the refugees numbered in the thousands. As with refugee situations throughout history, housing prices in the suddenly desirable areas no doubt saw a significant spike.
The Boylstons’ relationship is almost completely hidden from history. Jerusha, however, did leave town with the girls soon after the guards were taken off the houses in mid-June. It would appear that Tommy and John, as well as the young slave Jackey, were left behind in Boston with Zabdiel and his adult slave Jack (Jackey’s father). Zabdiel junior seems to have been living outside the house, possibly already at college in Cambridge.
Zabdiel never clearly says where the girls went, or why the boys stayed. I have deduced that the women and girls fled to Roxbury from the following: Tom Boylston’s wife Sarah was pregnant when the epidemic broke out, making her a high risk for complications. In October, she gave birth at “her lodgings” in Roxbury; at least two of Zabdiel’s and Tom’s nieces, the daughters of two different sisters, were present in the same house. Twenty-year-old Mary Lane seems to have been a fellow Bostonian. Rebecca Abbot, eleven, however, lived with her parents (Zabdiel’s sister Rebecca and brother-in-law William) in Roxbury. It would seem, then, that many of the female relatives were gathered at one house in Roxbury as far out as October 1721. Since one of these families was resident in Roxbury, it may well have been their home. I have sent Jerusha and her three daughters to this same household, though it is possible the Boylston women were spread through several homes, or that Jerusha and her girls stayed with Minot relatives in Dorchester.
Until the disease spread from Boston into Roxbury, Zabdiel seems never to have gone there. After that point, however, he spent a great deal of time riding back and forth, as well as to adjacent Dorchester. He sporadically traveled to Charlestown, where his brother Richard lived, and to Cambridge, but his travels to Roxbury curtailed his house visits in these towns. He never, however, seems to have gone as far as his native Brookline (where two more brothers lived). Though he may have gone to Roxbury purely for medical business, it does seem that there was some other draw pulling him there, over and above Boston’s other equally panicked neighbors.
Overcrowding in their country retreat seems as likely a reason as any for Jerusha leaving the boys behind. At thirteen, John was of an age to be expected to make himself useful. Six-year-old Tommy and two-and-a-half-year-old Jackey, however, are unlikely to have been held back voluntarily. In the normal pattern of everyday life, boys that young would have spent most their time with the women and other children. Apart from Zabdiel’s fears for them, they would have been an unusual burden, just when he had no time to spare. Indeed, Benjamin Colman, whose house looked onto the Boylston garden, noted that the doctor’s children were “too much exposed and neglected”—and in fact ran a little wild—due to Zabdiel’s long hours away tending the sick.
Apparently, no one else was around to look after them either. From this, it has also seemed reasonable to suppose that Jack was out helping Zabdiel during the day, and that Moll was sent off to Roxbury to do for Jerusha and the girls, as well as to escape contagion herself.
Tommy and Jackey play games they are likely to have played: Jerusha Minot’s home had indeed been attacked by a lone Indian and defended by a servant maid in the manner described. No laughing matter now, but it was surely a story the family children knew well and enjoyed the way American children later played cowboys and Indians. In 1721, Captain Bartholomew Roberts was the reigning terror of the seas, already legendary as an order-loving but flamboyant and sometimes heroic king of pirates, as revered by his men as feared by his foes. “Black Bart” was one of his nicknames; “the Great Pirate Roberts” was another. “The Dread Pirate Roberts” is a small bit of homage to William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. Pirates were all over the Boston newspapers throughout May and June 1721; Roberts made a particular splash in the Boston News-Letter of May 15. Not quite a year later, in February 1722, he was killed off West Africa in action against the Royal Navy.
Mather noted his composition of both the smallpox treatise and the second letter in his diary. He also, the day before, noted his intention to help Dr. Perkins to some business. Touting Perkins seems as likely an avenue as any for the minister’s discovery that his first letter had run afoul of Douglass, producing, as he later said, a fair amount of talk in the town, as well as his own clear determination that the second letter should not similarly go astray.
Fathers and Sons
Boylston’s description of his first three inoculations is a pretty bald statement of what he did to whom, and when. I have brought his sketch to life by adding particulars that fit with what we know of the man, his family, and Boston and its environs at that time.
Almost the only thing we know about him as a man, apart from what can be gleaned from his scientific writings
and genealogy, is his extraordinary love for his horses. Even in an age when horses were a regular part of everyday life, he had a reputation as an unusually skilled horseman. I have given him, therefore, a trait of all the true horsemen and -women I have known: he seeks out a favorite horse when troubled and finds that his mind and heart settle to clarity while riding.
The landscape he rides through has almost entirely disappeared. Nineteenth-century Bostonians quite literally moved mountains: Beacon Hill, in Boylston’s day mostly covered by fields and woods, has been significantly lowered; the other two peaks of the Tri-mountain or Tremount (from which Tremont Street takes its name) have been leveled, their earth sunk into the tidal basin of the Charles River to create the area now called the Back Bay. Present-day Washington Street follows the line of the old road south out of town (it was then called Orange Street), across the Neck, and into Roxbury.
Boylston agonized over the safety of his children, acutely aware that he would likely bring the infection home from the sickrooms in which he was spending so much time. The fact that none of the boys fell ill until he deliberately infected them, however, strongly suggests that he was scrupulously clean and possibly observed some kind of quarantine himself. Though no one understood how or why, it was well known that infected people and clothing (including wigs) could spread smallpox. I have therefore made him particular about washing up and changing his clothes on coming home.
Mather’s letter to Boylston survived long enough to be printed in 1789; I’ve quoted it in full, altering only some punctuation for readability, and adding the word Guramantees. (The letter’s editor notes an “illegible” word at the point where similar sentences in both the treatise written two days before and the letter to Dr. Woodward in 1716 have “Guramantees” or “Garamantese”—an obscure enough word to merit confusion, over and above messy or cramped writing in what was then already an old sheet of paper.) This letter reads like a form letter, and intimates an enclosure. Dated June 24, 1721, the day after Mather noted in his diary that he was composing a letter to the town’s physicians, in turn the day after he noted writing his treatise upon smallpox, I have assumed that these are all related. This date is far more consistent than the first letter’s (June 6) with Boylston’s claim that he began the experiment “after short consideration.”
While it is impossible to know the shape of Mather’s smallpox treatise exactly (it grew over time), I have followed Kittredge in supposing that the Angel of Bethesda’s smallpox chapter, “Variolae trimphatae,” is a fair approximation. It is this that I have Boylston read.
Boylston’s relationship to his slaves is unknown. On the one hand, he did not admit discussing inoculation with Jack in any detail. On the other, most of his published writings were composed as defenses of inoculation, and one of the charges he continually had to answer was a too credulous trust in blacks. Nevertheless, he proved the one man in Boston willing to trust African-born blacks’ stories of inoculation (reinforced by the Royal Society) to the point of risking his children’s lives. Jack is the obvious person for him to have questioned first in whatever investigations he made about African medicine.
We don’t know anything about Jack other than his name, age, and inoculation experience. In Boston, domestic slaves generally lived with their masters as a part of the family (which then indicated everyone regularly living together in a household, not just the immediate blood and marriage relations of the patriarch). In the more humane households (Judge Samuel Sewall’s, for example), slaves were certainly on familiar terms with the rest of the family and intimately trusted. Many enslaved blacks seem to have known their masters quite well. Indeed, most probably knew their masters far more intimately than anyone else did, except possibly spouses; certainly far better than their masters knew them. This is the sort of relationship I have tried to paint between Zabdiel Boylston and Jack.
Boylston probably spoke to as many African-born blacks as possible between receiving Mather’s letter on June 24 and inoculating Tommy, Jack, and Jackey on the twenty-sixth. Prizing firsthand examination of evidence, Boylston was later extremely frustrated by his fellow physicians’ unwillingness to visit his inoculated patients. That attitude strongly suggests that he would have made every effort to consult witnesses and survivors of the operation before trying it. In his section of Some Account, he quotes the same black man that Mather does in his smallpox treatise. Boylston almost certainly relied upon Mather’s transcription, though he translated it into more standard English. He may have merely taken the quotation from the minister. Boylston’s commentary on the story is different from Mather’s, however, and it seems equally likely that he heard the same story from the same source.
As much as possible, the thoughts and debates that Boylston holds with himself are based on his own writings.
The scene of the dying woman entering Boylston’s shop is based on the defense of his experiment published in the anonymous Vindication of the Ministers of Boston (possibly by Cotton Mather):
He had just reason to apprehend [his family] in danger of being infected the common way: and here I cannot omit to observe the happy juncture of affairs that united to render this his attempt innocent and blameless. The worthy TOWNS-MEN had taken the Guards off the Infected houses, and in effect proclaimed the infection so prevalent, that ’twould be in vain to strive to suppress it. By this act, the nurses were commissioned to air themselves, who had been stifled for a considerable time by a close confinement with the sick: Liberty was declared to them to walk the streets; and now as the necessities of the sick urged, these infected persons might go to our doctors upon any occasion; and any heedless or headstrong neighbours run in to visit their contagious friends; which must necessarily render their families very obnoxious to the distemper. This clearly evinces the eminency of the danger his [i.e., Dr. Boylston’s] family was in; and in a great measure vindicates his procedure.
When he actually performed the operation, Zabdiel at first followed Timonius’s instructions to the letter, including the bit of walnut shell as a shieldlike dressing—though he soon substituted cabbage leaves. Mather records that the doctor inoculated one of his first three patients in the neck; I have given him reason to do so.
At 6:00 A.M. on June 26, 1721—the very day that Dr. Boylston began inoculating—Captain Durell did indeed gather his guns aboard HMS Seahorse; soon after 10:00 A.M. he fired off a fifteen-gun salute in the harbor. The master’s log credits a celebration of “the young princesse’s [sic] birthday.” The birthday of King George I’s granddaughter Princess Caroline, at that time his youngest, was June 10 reckoned by Britain’s Old Style or June 21 in the Gregorian New Style, as observed in Hanover where she was born. These two dates were often confused by her grandfather’s British subjects. By June 26, though, either date would appear to have been more of an excuse for gun practice than anything else.
I cannot say for certain whether Dr. Boylston met Dr. Douglass that day, or whether they ever discussed inoculation in private. However, since Douglass seems to have taken upon himself the job of orchestrating opposition to Mather’s story even before he knew it had been put into practice, it seems at least plausible that he canvassed Boylston among Boston’s other medical men, only to find he was too late. I’ve written this scene to illustrate not only the two doctors’ incipient antagonism, but other known defining (and mutually antagonistic) attitudes: as noted before, Douglass looked down his nose at Boylston’s habit of making rounds on horseback. Conversely, Boston’s streets gave Boylston (and anybody else in a real hurry) a cogent reason for choosing to ride, above and beyond sheer love of being on the back of a horse. The origin of Boston’s streets in cow-paths is a joke of three centuries’ standing; in the early eighteenth century, these famously “crooked and narrow” roads were often cut by open ditches and clogged with wayward traffic. (For those at wit’s end over the Big Dig: Nothing changes under the Boston sun. Throughout the eighteenth century, the minutes of both town meetings and selectmen’s meetings are
strewn with complaints about the state of the roads, as well as notes on permits to dig them up.)
I’ve drawn the core of Douglass’s expressions from a letter he wrote at the end of July, when he gloated over having cured a lady whose case was tricky; her cure, he said, had brought him wide patronage. In the same letter, he used the phrase Make hay while the sun shines in regard to Boston’s epidemic, along with the Latin phrase Hoc age, meaning “Do this! Apply yourself to what is at hand!” I’ve substituted carpe diem—“Seize the day!”—because it is better known nowadays and in this context, at least, means roughly the same thing.
Conversely, Boylston seems to have regarded the epidemic with unremitting horror. Though frustration at times pushed him into mockery of his opponents, there is no comparable instance of him making light of the epidemic itself, much less exulting in it—though he, too, stood to make a great deal of money out of the disaster.
Douglass later bandied about the notion that Boylston had not treated a single case of smallpox when he began inoculation; I’ve given him at least a dubious basis for making such an unlikely claim. There is no precise record of either the numbers or the timing of Boylston’s patients suffering from naturally contracted smallpox. However, Boylston’s defenders, Benjamin Colman chief among them, retorted that he had both more experience and more success than any other doctor in town, with the possible exception of John Clark.
Boylston, Mather, and Hutchinson all wrote about the tremendous clamor in the streets as the town discovered what the doctor had done. To judge by his surgical daring and his horsemanship, Boylston was not a timid man. Nevertheless he repeatedly said he was frightened by both his son’s uncontrollable fever and “the clamour, or rather rage of the people against” the new practice. Family legend, recorded by Zabdiel’s great-nephew, Ward Nicholas Boylston (grandson of Zabdiel’s brother Tom), has it that mobs “patrolled the town in parties with halters, threatening to hang him on the nearest tree.” Though Ward Nicholas got many of his facts muddled, this one seems a realistic image of outraged clamor that might have shocked even a risk-taking man like his great-uncle.
The Speckled Monster Page 57