I found this fascinating for some reason. In April 1721 sailors traveling to Boston brought small pox. By the summer nearly half of Boston’s 11,000 people had contracted some form of the disease.
Reverend Cotton Mather remembered something a slave had told him about a treatment used in his country where the pus from wounds were “inoculated” into a healthy person. The healthy person got sick, but recovered quickly. Mather related this to Dr. Zabdiel Boylston who tried the procedure on his 6 year old son, then later on his slave and his slave’s son. The the other doctors in Boston decried the procedure. Only one in 40 of those inoculated died from smallpox compared to one in six who naturally caught the disease.
It was a bold move and one that met with much criticism, but it worked. As the science of vaccination became more sophisticated many more lives were saved from a number of different diseases.
