Boylston attached a copy of an official transcript of Dalhonde’s testimony to the end of his Historical Account; I have followed it, wherever possible, word for word, though I’ve loosened it up to wind it into the scene at hand, changing expressions that are incomprehensible without a medical dictionary, or that sound stilted to modern ears. From Boylston’s later writings, it seems clear that he was blindsided by the plague argument, as well as by the fury of the opposition.
Dr. Douglass’s use of the plague argument was entirely disingenuous. Both Mather and Boylston knew that smallpox and plague were unrelated, as did most medical theory of the day. It defies belief that Douglass did not, especially since, outside inoculation, his medical writing stressed the careful differentiation of diseases. Furthermore, Douglass was for the most part careful to use the smallpox-triggers-plague argument by suggestion rather than by direct argument. He carefully excised it from the anti-inoculation tracts he published in London.
While I can’t definitely finger him as the source of the plague stories in the Boston News-Letter and later in the New-England Courant, they all lead up to—and away from—the double dark stars of Dalhonde’s testimony (which he seems to have organized) and the letter he published July 24 in the Boston News-Letter. The Scots Charitable Society linked the owner of this paper with Douglass and George Stewart, the other leading anti-inoculation physician, also Scottish; its meetings seem a likely means of transmission.
Dr. Douglass’s summation speech is a patchwork of actual statements, again edited for modern readability. The physicians’ resolution appears in the appendix to Boylston’s book along with Dalhonde’s testimony. Its style and wording, including the introduction as the resolution of Boston’s “medical practitioners” (the highest designation Douglass could bring himself to give Boston’s other doctors) suggest that Douglass wrote it.
Cotton Mather wrote that the selectmen threatened Boylston with “indictment for felony.” Douglass repeatedly implied that the felony in question was murder, a capital crime. He also claimed that the selectmen’s decision had been unanimous.
Cheever began erupting on this day, by Boylston’s own count of days from Cheever’s inoculation. In giving Sarah Cheever a fierce case of smallpox and contrasting it to her husband’s experience, I have given local habitation and names to the general contrasts, made often and with marked frustation, by supporters of inoculation. Boylston, Mather, and Colman all pleaded with their opponents to compare the ease of inoculated smallpox with the horrors of “natural” or “common” cases—as they called smallpox acquired in the natural way (by breathing in the virus, though they didn’t know that part).
Finally, Boylston had inoculated Esther Webb’s parents and uncle three days earlier, but not her (or her two younger siblings). I don’t know that he saw her on this evening, but her fate was surely on his mind. For more on her and the Webbs, see the notes to “Signs and Wonders.”
The Castle of Misery
Most of the individual fragments of this chapter are real; I have put them together into a collage that is factual in its pieces, though fictional in many of the precise connections.
Throughout the eighteenth century, Newgate was London’s prison for hard-core violent prisoners, as well as burglars and thieves of all sorts. It had a few wards of debtors as well. Originally built in or near one of the principal gatehouses in the city’s medieval walls, this “Castle of Misery” served (through several rebuildings) as a prison from 1188 until it was torn down in 1902. Its reputation was once as fearsome as those of the Bastille and Devil’s Island.
London’s Weekly Journal or Saturday’s Post recorded that on July 24, 1721, the Prince and Princess of Wales’s physicians, surgeons, and apothecary went to Newgate and picked two men and one woman to participate in the inoculation experiment. The chosen prisoners were removed to the Press Yard, “the most airy part of the prison,” in preparation. At that time, the Press Yard certainly offered the most pleasant digs available in the prison; in normal circumstances, it was reserved for those who could afford its very steep rent.
I have surmised that Maitland was involved in the selection of prisoners, as he was the surgeon in charge of the experiment; Sir Hans Sloane may also have been there. Maitland recorded the names and ages of the six prisoners (the papers got the number wrong), as well as the fact that Evans had had smallpox earlier. (He was probably chosen as a control.)
Mary North was convicted, as noted, for the capital crime of returning to England after being transported, following a previous conviction for “robbing the shop of Mr. Baylis, a linen draper near Cripplegate.” Her particular destination “beyond Sea” is unknown, though Maryland was receiving large numbers of criminal transports at that time. Also as noted, her husband turned her in. John Alcock was probably convicted of horse theft: the newspaper reporting his sentence is torn after the word horse. I have given the others capital crimes that often appear in the Newgate Calendar—the contemporary collection of “true-crime” stories relating the histories of interesting (or “infamous”) prisoners in Newgate. Ann Tompion has been identified as the wife of the famous watchmaker Thomas Tompion. I’ve accepted this ID, though I have been unable to confirm it. Tompion was an unusual name, and while she was very young to have been his wife (he died, aged seventy-four, in 1713), it is likely that she was in some way related. She may have been the wife of the elder Tompion’s nephew by the same name, also a watchmaker.
Elizabeth Harrison drew extra attention and interest from the men orchestrating the experiment, including Maitland and Sloane. I have given her a personality consistent with that interest. I do not know her particular trials and tribulations in prison, but all those mentioned here—the thick layers of lice, the misery of the Stone Hold, the sale of female prisoners to male prisoners, and the hard drinking and gambling in the prison’s own tavern—are well attested at this period. Relatively trustworthy (and probably burly) men were indeed made quasi turnkeys, or wardsmen, by jailers who were chronically understaffed and often unwilling to pay for outside labor. There was also, right around this time, an infamous case of a murderer who cut a prostitute’s throat while she was providing her services. Whether or not these particulars were part of Lizzy’s story, they were certainly part of Newgate’s history at this period.
The details of how the prisoners came to be selected have been lost. Most people, however—including prison doctors and chaplains—avoided entering the common side of the prison when they steeled themselves to enter the place at all. Besides the stench of its open sewers, the continual roaring, and a population of vermin so thick that you could hear it scrabbling on the floor, Newgate was a known breeding ground of both smallpox and typhus, then called jail fever (or ship fever). I’ve surmised that a number of prisoners were hauled out to some “airy” part of the prison for the inspection, and that even then, the inspectors maintained some distance.
One of the attending physicians noted that prisoners who were not part of the experiment tormented those who were with tales that the smallpox experiment was a sham, and that the doctors meant to drain their blood.
Signs and Wonders
Of the first twenty-three people Boylston inoculated, six were family. Of the remaining seventeen, fourteen had demonstrable ties to Salutation Alley: they either belonged to the extended Webb or Langdon clans, or were their neighbors or tenants. Of the last three, John Helyer was Cotton Mather’s parishioner at the Old North Church; though I have not located either his workplace (he was a cooper) or his home at this time, he was close enough to Boylston to be one of the only two nonfamily members inoculated before publicly advertising the operation. I strongly suspect, though I cannot prove, that Helyer, like Cheever, was among the regulars at the Salutation Inn, and a close friend of Boylston’s. Samuel Mather, of course, was Dr. Mather’s son. The sole remaining inoculee was Samuel Valentine, nineteen-year-old son of John Valentine, His Majesty’s advocate general of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The Valentines
belonged to King’s Chapel, Boston’s lone Church of England establishment; they lived in the South End, on Marlborough (now Washington) Street, near the governor’s house.
Other than the Boylstons, who belonged to the Brattle Street Church, and Samuel Valentine, who belonged to King’s, all these inoculees belonged either to Mather’s Old North Church or John Webb’s New North Church. In short, inoculation was a family, neighborhood, and congregational affair. (Even after the practice began to spread, almost all the inoculees belonged to the four churches of the ministers who signed the letter in defense of Boylston: Old North, New North, Brattle Street, and Old South. Mr. Cook’s First, or “Old” Church provided a conspicuously low number of inoculees, as did King’s Chapel.)
Lady Mary’s biographer, Isobel Grundy, has presented overwhelming evidence from England showing that two main factors were crucial in convincing people to overcome rampant fears and put themselves or their children under inoculation: significant family losses from smallpox (parents, siblings, or children), and close personal ties to one of the inoculators or patrons of inoculation. So far as I have been able to trace, Boylston’s list of inoculees follows suit—with the possible exception of Samuel Valentine, whose inoculation had clear political as well as personal import.
Unfortunately, for different reasons, both Boylston and Mather kept such family and neighborhood ties out of their writings on inoculation. The personal ties and emotional drives pushing early inoculation in Boston have to be reconstructed from what is known of the personalities involved and the intricate webs of family, workplace, and timing. The main sources are Boylston’s Historical Account, Mather’s diary, and various newspaper articles, along with genealogies, official town and province records, and the Thwing and Boston Church Records databases. Luckily, Bostonian Puritans were inveterate record keepers. I have pieced these fragments together into a plausible chain of events and emotions.
Here’s what’s indisputably historical:
Esther Webb and a servant or slave of the Cheevers were two of the first people Boylston inoculated, when he resumed inoculating. (All the dates and identities of inoculees are accurate; their courses through inoculated smallpox follow Boylston’s notes on their cases.) Esther nursed her parents and uncle through their inoculations, but her own came too late; she came down with confluent smallpox, caught in the “natural” way, probably from her patients. (It is virtually impossible that her inoculation could have produced her illness, as she was showing symptoms within twenty-four hours.)
Boylston never said why he did not inoculate Esther Webb with her parents on July 19. Later, however, when a similarly large household in Roxbury begged to be inoculated simultaneously, he refused, dividing them up into two groups five days apart, so that everyone would not reach the spiking heights of the first fever all at the same time. I have given him the same reason in this earlier case. If he had indeed intended to inoculate Esther and her younger siblings three to five days after her parents, the selectmen’s threat of a murder charge foiled their plan by a day or two.
Furthermore, if the Webbs’ cases of inoculated smallpox followed the timing of Ricketts’s “modified smallpox,” then August 5 turns out to have been one of the earliest days it would have been possible to feel certain that the parents (the last of his first set of inoculees) would survive unscathed. It looks a lot as if after the meeting, Boylston was not waiting for the selectmen to relent so much as he was waiting until he had his own firm evidence that inoculation at the very least did not harm, before he tried it again. When he did, he immediately inoculated people he might have helped to put in harm’s way.
Samuel Mather was the first and last person Boylston inoculated in secret; it was his grandfather Increase Mather who first suggested—and then pressed—for secrecy. His father vacillated for two weeks, finally allowing the operation the very day that Sammy’s roommate at Harvard, William Charnock, died. (I follow Mather for the date of August 15, as his diary entry was written that day; Boylston’s date of August 12 was printed six years later, from his notes, and is more open to error.) I have surmised that Mather maneuvered his way into the secret inoculation. Sly manipulating was part of his character; he seems to have been adept at disguising his machinations from himself, reading their results as the work of Providence. His inoculation-as-duty argument comes from a later pamphlet; it dovetails with his need to urge Boylston back into inoculating.
We do not know where the inoculation took place, but given Mather’s need for secrecy, it may well have taken place on neutral ground, so that neither party would seem to be visiting the other. Boylston did inoculate Edward Langdon that same day. Langdon was soon to become a deacon in Mather’s church; a few days before, Mather was privately worrying about his “pious barber”—likely to have been Langdon. Even from this distance in time, a visit to the barber’s shop seems a great cover for a surreptitious meeting.
Dr. Mather did indeed let Providence open the Bible for him; he says it fell open to John 4:50, “Go thy way, thy son liveth.” As if realizing that others would suspect a little Matherian help, he protested to his diary that Providence had not only not had help, but had had to work against a paper lodged behind the page. Many of Mather’s thoughts in this chapter are drawn from diary entries I do not otherwise give; where possible, I stay close to his language. I have, however, put the apropos lamentations of Rachel (Jeremiah 31:15) into his mouth.
I have streamlined the confused and often vicious shouting in the newspaper, but Douglass’s insults appear as he wrote them; Colman penned the distressed rebuttal that his fellow ministers signed.
Ben Franklin was, as written, the fifteen-year-old apprentice of his brother James Franklin, and thus responsible for delivering the Courant. In his Autobiography, he recalled having become a vegetarian when he was about sixteen. He wasn’t too precise about dating childhood events, but I may have shifted this one up by six months or a year. By 1722, he was writing (anonymously) the famous set of “Silence Dogood” essays that are by far the best pieces published in the whole run of the Courant. I have made him slyly suggest a few bits of phrasing a little earlier. The words of warning he hears whispered in his ear is taken from a much later musing over this period, again in his Autobiography.
I don’t know precisely how or when the selectmen discovered Samuel Valentine’s inoculation; I am fairly certain that their reaction was similar to the one I have given them, in intent and force. Both the squabbling and the fear at the assembly of the General Court out on the Neck in the George Inn are apparent in the House of Representatives’ Journal.
Newgate
Charles Maitland seems to have been a neat and deliberate man, down to his handwriting; he kept a detailed journal of this experiment, and published it as part of his book, Mr. Maitland’s Account of Inoculating the Small Pox—one of the chief sources of London’s earliest experiments with inoculation (Lady Mary’s included). Much of this chapter, especially the sections from Maitland’s point of view, quotes or closely paraphrases this journal. Alcock’s bout of jail fever, his pricking of his pocks, Mary North’s untimely bath, and even the three women’s synchronized menstrual cycles all come from the surgeon’s notes.
For all his precision and caution, Maitland could also lose his patience and even his temper now and again—just visible in bursts of irritation with John Alcock and Mary North.
According to Sir Hans Sloane, Maitland at first refused to conduct this experiment, and had to be coaxed into it by Sloane himself, after the Princess of Wales had already begged permission for it from the king. As is implied in several sources, I’ve therefore given Sir Hans supervisory charge of the whole, while delegating day-by-day control to Maitland. Sir Hans’s lecture during the operation itself quotes (with slight editing to fit the situation) from his later essay on inoculation.
About twenty-five men seem to have been present at the inoculation; many more visited in the ensuing weeks. One of these was the German Dr. Boretius, who noted that
the prisoners trembled as Mr. Maitland drew out his lancet—as a result of other prisoners’ tales that their blood was to be drained.
Dr. Wagstaffe published an anti-inoculation treatise in which he included his own journal of the experiment (he visited the prison almost every other day). Maitland wrote an answering pamphlet. Their exchanges here are based on the arguments and acidic tone of those pamphlets, keeping close to original language where possible.
In Boston, the chief anti-inoculation argument was that the operation spread the distemper—and put patients and others at risk for other diseases, such as the plague. In London, the chief argument of the opposition—at least at this early stage—was that the operation was a sham: that it communicated chicken pox, or something like it, not genuine or “true” smallpox: and therefore did not confer immunity. As in Boston, the participants quickly politicized the controversy, and the newspapers gleefully joined in.
Elizabeth Harrison’s thoughts have been lost; along with the nickname Lizzy, I have given her an interest in nursing consistent with her later history.
I do not know the shape of the hall where the inoculation took place, or whether a barrier was erected to separate prisoners and spectators. It is clear, however, from many witnesses, that the prisoners were on display, rather like exotic animals at a zoo, for much of the day. Contemporary mental hospitals put their patients on display (often for a fee) in much the same way.
That Lady Mary was the “Mr. Cook, an eminent Turkey Merchant” whose “very ample testimony” Maitland “cannot forbear mentioning” in his Newgate journal is an intriguing possibility. I have pursued the notion for the fun of it—as Lady Mary certainly did with similar larks at other times in her life. A year later, she wrote a defense of the Turkish practice under the literary disguise of “a Turkey Merchant.” (Isaac Massey quickly retorted that the piece was by “a sham Turkey Merchant”—though he did not appear to know who was behind the mask.) In Turkey, she had delighted in the habit of wandering about incognito in Turkish clothing—though usually dressed as a woman. She did maintain, however, that she had once sneaked into the Hagia Sofia disguised as a Turkish man. (She also visited it on an officially sanctioned tour, but that is no reason to discount such an escapade.) There were, however, a few Londoners named Mr. Cook who engaged in trade with Turkey at the time—though even that does not necessarily preclude such an adventure on the part of Lady Mary.
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