Abstract
DeLacy provides a political and professional context for the introduction of smallpox inoculation into England, including the involvement of the Royal Society and the inaction of the College of Physicians. She shows how the Puritan minister Cotton Mather was influenced by his religious values and by his reading of Joan Baptista Van Helmont, Richard Bradley, and Benjamin Marten to introduce inoculation in Boston. She analyzes the way support for inoculation in Britain divided along religious and political lines and summarizes the impact of inoculation on ideas about disease transmission.
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Notes
Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (Philadelphia: 1957), 30. See also Donald R. Hopkins, Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History (Chicago and London: 1983).
Miller, Inoculation, 33. See also chapter 4, “Smallpox” in Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain, eds. D. E. C. Eversley, E. Ashworth Underwood, and Linda Ovenall, vol. 2: From the Extinction of the Plague to the Present Time (London: 1965), 434–622.
Andrea Rusnock, The Correspondence of James Jurin (1684–1750): Physician and Secretary to the Royal Society (Amsterdam: 1996), 130.
Secondary sources give various dates for this conversation. Mather’s letter to Woodward, dated July 12, 1716, says only that it was “many months” before he heard about inoculation from other sources. Selected Letters of Cotton Mather, ed. Kenneth Silverman (Baton Rouge, LA: 1971), 214. See also Miller, Inoculation, 52; Hopkins, Princes and Peasants, 46, 174, and 248–9. Scholars debate the location of Onesimus’s home; Hopkins, 174, suggested that it was eastern Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso.
A. P. Waterson and Lise Wilkinson, An Introduction to the History of Virology (Cambridge: 1978), 202; Miller, Inoculation, 52; see also Creighton, Epidemics.
E. St. John Brooks, Sir Hans Sloane: The Great Collector and His Circle (London: 1954), 89. A member of the Temple Coffee House Botany Club, Sherard was also related to the botanist James Petiver, Sloane’s intimate friend. Raymond Phineas Stearns, “James Petiver, Promoter of Natural Science, c. 1663–1718,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1952) n.s., 62 pt. 2: 243–364, 246, n. 7.
Maitland had already inoculated Montagu’s son in Constantinople on March 18, 1718. Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford: 1999), 162.
See Arthur M. Silverstein and Genevieve Miller, “The Royal Experiment on Immunity: 1721–1722,” Cellular Immunology (1981) 63:437–47, 441. See also Grundy, Lady Mary, 88
Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Undertaker of the Mind (Berkeley: 2001), 96, describe her as “a considerable patroness of religious radicals.” See also Audrey T. Carpenter, John Theophilus Desaguliers: A Natural Philosopher, Engineer and Freemason in Newtonian England (London and New York: 2011), 33, 203–4, 206.
Edgar Samuel, “Sarmento, Jacob de Castro (1692?–1762),” ODNB (Oxford: 2004), online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24670.
Samuel, “Sarmento.” Albert M. Hyamson describes him as “the most distinguished English Jew of his day,” The Sephardim of England (London: 1951), 88 and 106–9. Samuel states he had an MB from Coimbra (1717); Hyamson gives him an MD. He also published several works in Portuguese; I haven’t discovered how he acquired English.
Jacob de Castro Sarmento, Materia Medica Physico-Historico-Mechanica (London: 1736, rpt. 1758). Some authors have erroneously credited de Castro Sarmento with the introduction of quinine (cinchona) into England. Saul Jarcho refers to his work as “a surprising delayed statement,” Quinine’s Predecessor, Francesco Torti and the Early History of Cinchona (Baltimore, MD: 1993), 50 and 252.
Andrea Rusnock, The Correspondence of James Jurin (1684–1750): Physician and Secretary to the Royal Society (Amsterdam: 1996), 110–11, Leeuwenhoek to Jurin, Delft, July 7, 1722.
Marc J. Ratcliff, The Quest for the Invisible: Microscopy in the Enlightenment (Farnham, Surrey: 2009), see e.g., 65.
There are numerous accounts of the events in Boston. See for example Roger Zelt, “Smallpox Inoculation in Boston, 1721–1722,” Synthesis (1977) 4, no. 1:3–14; John Blake, “The Inoculation Controversy in Boston 1721–1722,” New England Quarterly (1952) 25:489–506; Maxine van De Wetering, “A Reconsideration of the Inoculation Controversy,” New England Quarterly (1985) 58, no. 1:46–67; David P. Harper, “Angelical Conjunction: Religion, Reason and Inoculation in Boston, 1721–1722,” Pharos of Alpha Omega Alpha (Winter 2000) 63, no. 1:37–41; C. Edward Wilson, “The Boston Inoculation Controversy: A Revisionist Interpretation,” Journalism History (1980) 7, no. 1:16–19, 40; and chapter 7, “The Advent of Preventive Medicine,” in Cotton Mather: First Significant Figure in American Medicine, eds. Otho T. Beall Jr. and Richard H. Shryock (New York: 1979), 93–126.
Miller, Inoculation, 95. Benjamin Colman, Some Observations on Receiving the Small-Pox by Ingrafting or Inoculating (Boston: 1721, London and Dublin: 1722), online from the National Library of Medicine at https://archive.org/details/2546057R.nlm.nih.gov. In light of later practices, it is interesting that Colman stresses the small size of the incisions used for inoculation: “the least you ca[n] well imagine and but Skin deep.”
Louise A. Breen, “Cotton Mather, the ‘Angelical Ministry,’ and Inoculation,” Journal of the History of Medicine (1991) 46:333–57.
See Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, “Passions and the Ghost in the Machine: Or What Not to Ask About Science in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Germany,” in The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, eds. Roger French and Andrew Wear (Cambridge: 1989), 145–63, on 157.
Mather knew that plants reproduced sexually. The letter is reprinted in Conway Zirkle, The Beginnings of Plant Hybridization (Philadelphia: 1935), 104–6, online from the Hathi Trust. See also Beall and Shryock, Mather, 48.
Mather was a student at Harvard between 1674 and 1678. Alchemical theses were still being presented then. William R. Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, An American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: 2003), 14–51.
Oliver Wendell Holmes rediscovered the ms. for the “Angel” in 1869. Selections appeared in Beall and Shryock, Mather. Gordon Jones published the complete text (Barre, MA: 1972).
Sloane to Richardson, “Letter 67,” Extracts from the Literary and Scientific Correspondence of Richard Richardson M.D., ed. Dawson Turner (Yarmouth: 1835), 171. I thank the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation for providing access to a copy of this work, which is now available online from the Internet Archive.
Edmund Massey, A Sermon against the Dangerous and Sinfull Practice of Inoculation. Preach’d at St. Andrew’s Holborn, on Sunday, July the 8th, 1722 (London: 1722), 11.
Edmund Massey, A Letter to Mr. Maitland, in Vindication of a Sermon against Inoculation (Norwich: 1722), 14, online from Google.
Peter Razzell, The Conquest of Smallpox (Firle, Sussex: 1977), 95–6 noted that the religious objection was even stronger in Calvinist Scotland because it contradicted absolute predestination.
Thomas Noxon Toomey, “Sir Richard Blackmore, M.D.,” Annals of Medical History (1922) 4:180–8; Harry Solomon, Sir Richard Blackmore (Boston: 1980).
Cook, Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Johannes Groenevelt in Seventeenth-Century London (Baltimore: 1994), 168.
Gregori Flavio, “Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654–1729),” ODNB (Oxford: 2004), online ed., January 2009 at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2528. Blackmore also wrote a number of prose works against Arians and served as a vice-president of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in America.
Richard Blackmore, A Treatise upon the Small-Pox, in Two Parts (London: 1723), preface, ix.
As Nathaniel Hodges noted in 1665, reinfections even occurred among plague survivors. Charles F. Mullett, “The English Plague Scare of 1720–23,” Osiris (1936) 11:487–91. See also the English abstract of C. Huygelen, “[Attempts to inoculate against plague in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries],” Verhandelingen-Koninklijke Academie voor Geneeskunde van België (1999) 61, no. 2:385–409, online from PubMed, National Library of Medicine at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10379211.
William Oliver, A Practical Essay on Fevers. Containing Remarks on the Hot and Cool Methods of their Cure (London: 1704), 192. One outcome of Oliver’s adoption of a seed theory of disease was his belief in three distinct “species” of smallpox—distinct, middle, and confluent—each determined by its seed. Experience with inoculation would disprove this belief.
Benjamin Marten, A New Theory of Consumptions (London: 1720), 65.
Lise Wilkinson, “The Development of the Virus Concept … 5: Smallpox and the Evolution of Ideas on Acute (Viral) Infections,” Medical History (1979) 3:1–28, on 11, attributes the final defeat of this idea to two treatises by the Italian physician Angelo Gatti in 1764 and 1767.
J. Johnson Abraham, Lettsom, His Life, Times, Friends and Descendents (London: 1933), chapter 11, 185–204.
Thomas Percival, Essay 2, “On the Proportional Mortality of the Small Pox and Measles,” in same, Philosophical, Medical, and Experimental Essays (London: 1776), 87–108, online from Google.
Richard Shryock, “Germ Theories in Medicine Prior to 1870,” Clio Medica (1972) 7:81–109. Erasmus Darwin also inoculated for measles and found the same thing.
Mullett, “Cattle Distemper,” 163, and see Daniel Peter Layard, “A Discourse on the Usefulness of Inoculation of the Horned Cattle to Prevent the Contagious Distemper among Them,” Philosophical Transactions 1683–1775 (1757–58) 50:528–38. There were reports that the Turks had tried inoculation against plague as well as smallpox. See Larry Stewart, “The Edge of Utility: Slaves and Smallpox in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Medical History (1985) 29:54–70, on 69. See also the English abstract of C. Huygelen, “Attempts to Inoculate against Plague.” An English doctor, “Mr. White,” attempted to inoculate himself and four assistants with plague in 1801; all five died within days.
According to most accounts, John Hunter injected himself with venereal disease, possibly causing his fatal heart disease, but there is some question as to whether he injected himself or someone else. In the nineteenth century, French physicians also experimented with inoculation for syphilis. Deborah Hayden, Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis (New York: 2003), 29–31, notes that “inoculation experiments involved felons and prostitutes, the most likely subjects, but also servants and even children and infants … Doctors began to infect … everything living: themselves, their students, chimpanzees, monkeys, horses, rabbits, cats, and rats.” She adds that Philippe Ricord, a French syphilologist, inoculated 2500 people with gonorrhea between 1835 and 1838 and Albert Neisser injected a group of prostitutes as young as ten years old with syphilis serum in 1895.
For the different ways that other premodern civilizations have conceptualized the causes of epidemic diseases, see Lawrence I. Conrad and Dominik Wujastyk, eds., Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-modern Societies (Burlington, VT: 2000). On smallpox, see especially Chia-Feng Chang, “Dispersing the Foetal Toxin of the Body: Conceptions of Smallpox Aetiology in Pre-Modern China,” in this volume, 23–38.
Adrian Wilson, “The Politics of Medical Improvement in Early Hanoverian London,” in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, eds. Andrew Cunningham and Roger French (Cambridge: 1990), 29. Wilson’s “exclusively” is a bit too strong; as we have seen, Richard Blackmore, an Anglican Whig, opposed inoculation.
Norman Moore, “Wagstaffe, William (1683/4–1725),” rev. Jean Loudon, ODNB (Oxford: 2004), online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28402
James Drake, Anthropologia Nova: Or, a New System of Anatomy … and a Short Rationale of Many Distempers … 3rd ed. (London: 1727) vol. 1, 15.
The Tory Newtonian Dr. John Freind, however, opposed inoculation. See J. S. Rowlinson, “John Freind: Physician, Chemist, Jacobite, and Friend of Voltaire’s,” N&R (2007) 61, no. 2:109–27, doi: 10.1098/rsnr.2006.0175.
Andrea E. Rusnock, Vital Accounts (Cambridge: 2002), 44–70: “For Jurin to quantify the efficacy of inoculation, he had to develop categories to enumerate,” 59. Many French physicians rejected Jurin’s data on the grounds that smallpox in France was not the same as in England and inoculated smallpox was not comparable to naturally acquired smallpox, 87.
Rusnock, Vital Accounts, 114. Although the project was unsuccessful at the time, scientists have gone back to the weather reports of Jurin’s correspondents, and especially that of Nicolaas Cruquius, for information about climate change. See A. F. V. van Engelen and H. A. M. Geuirts, “Nicholaus Cruquius (16781754) and His Meteorological Observations” (De Bilt: 1985), Koinklijk Nederlands Meterologisch Institut, online at http://www.knmi.nl/bibliotheek /knmipubmetnummer/knmipub165_IV.pdf.
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© 2016 Margaret DeLacy
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DeLacy, M. (2016). Smallpox Inoculation and the Royal Society, 1700–1723. In: The Germ of an Idea. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57529-6_8
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