1721

Smallpox outbreak in Boston. Despite Cotton Mather’s advocacy of inoculation, only a single Boston physician, Zabdiel Boylston, took up the practice. It was condemned both by the public and the clergy, the latter led by William Douglas, who dismissed African accounts of its efficacy as an affront to the will of God (Wehrman, 15-17). It next broke out in Phila. in 1736, then Charleston, SC in 1738, where James Kirkpatrick’s An Analysis of Inoculation (1754) helped make him, esp. in the South, “a founding father of American inoculation.” (24) In Phila., Dr. Adam Thomson and NY’s Dr. George Muirson both claimed to have invented “the American method of inoculation, i.e., heavy use of mercury prior and during stages of inoculation (28). Next major epidemic in Charleston in 1760, during French and Indian War, when the city went mad for inoculation. After another wave in 1763, most white residents of Charleston had been inoculated and were nearly fully immune to smallpox – not so blacks and Native Americans (Wehrman, 33, 128).