Interested in undergoing a medical procedure that, if successful, would protect you from the worst effects of a dreaded disease? 250 years ago, that’s the enticing offer that Dr. Henry Jerningham of St. Mary’s County advertised in the May 17, 1770 Maryland Gazette.
Smallpox inoculation was practiced in parts of Asia and Africa for centuries before it was introduced in Europe and America. In 1714, England’s Royal Society published a description of how the procedure was done in Constantinople, but it took influential people with personal knowledge and useful connections to help the method make the leap from academic page to actual practice in the West.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu observed inoculations in Turkey while there with her husband, who was Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. After returning home to England, she had Dr. Charles Maitland inoculate her daughter during a 1721 smallpox epidemic. The girl survived, as did the handful of condemned Newgate Prison inmates used as experimental guinea pigs (to everyone’s credit, the convicts were pardoned for their pains). Impressed with these results, the Prince and Princess of Wales (the future King George II and Queen Caroline) had their own daughters inoculated, and much of fashionable London society followed suit.
Rev. Cotton Mather championed inoculation when Boston, Massachusetts suffered its own smallpox outbreak in 1721.
Mather was familiar with the 1714 Royal Society report, but he also knew a man, his enslaved servant Onesimus, who had been inoculated years earlier, either in Africa or the West Indies. Named by Mather after a biblical figure mentioned in St. Paul’s letter to Philemon, Onesimus told the reverend how “he had undergone an Operation, which had given him something of the Small-Pox, and would forever preserve him from it.” With the prominent clergyman’s encouragement, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston inoculated close to 300 Bostonians. While about 14% of the roughly 6,000 city residents who contracted smallpox through natural transmission died, only 2% of Boylston’s inoculated patients succumbed to the disease.
Almost five decades later, smallpox inoculation was a proven, if still rather crude, medical procedure, and doctors like Maryland’s Henry Jerningham scheduled group inoculations so patients could suffer and recover together in quarantine without putting others at risk.
The presiding physician stuck a needle into a pustule of a person with a mild case of smallpox, then scratched the skin of a patient who wished to be inoculated, making sure some of the pus was transferred from Subject A to Subject B…and to C, and D, and E, and so on. If all went to plan, every patient in Dr. Jerningham’s “Company for Inoculation” contracted a relatively minor localized case of smallpox, had several unpleasant days fighting off the infection, and eventually went back home after a few weeks with a scar to show and a story to tell. By that time, the good doctor was ready to begin the process all over again with a new batch of willing victims.
Unfortunately, some patients might come down with a full-blown case of the disease, which could result in more extensive scarring, blindness, or even death. But until a less risky vaccination procedure was developed beginning in 1796, many people were willing to play the odds that inoculation would protect them from the scourge of smallpox.
Glenn E. Campbell
HA Senior Historian
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