Past is prologue with vaccinations
“History, an inexhaustible fund of entertainment and instruction” — James Madison
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” — Winston Churchill
This quote from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom after the victory in 1942 by the British army driving the Nazis out of North Africa and Egypt perhaps does foreshadow where we are today in our war against the COVID-19 infections.
The word of the year in 2020 was deemed to be “pandemic.”
The word of this year 2021 is already “vaccination.”
There is an overwhelming scientific consensus that vaccines are a very safe and effective way to fight and eradicate serious infectious diseases. The immune system is prompted to recognize a foreign agent in our body and neutralizing this invader.
Credit is usually given to the eminent British scientist Edward Jenner who developed the concept of vaccines and vaccination in 1798 to develop a vaccine know as cowpox as a protection against the disease smallpox which was a dangerous and frequent visitor to the British Isles.
In his work in the early 1880’s French scientist and doctor Louis Pasteur proposed that the words of Jenner be used to cover all types of protective inoculations.
History tells us that the inoculations have a long and much misunderstood history. Back in the era of ancient history, there was frequent reference to the process of injecting healthy people with a disease to build up their immunity.
Both India and China practiced “variolation,” a process where dried scabs were ground up and inhaled in the nose as a method of activating the immune system.
The proper phrase was translated as “nasal insufflation.”
The written record was discovered in the works of the Ottoman Empire scholars in 1650, but while the process is the same, they credited Arab merchants for bringing these practices back from the African trade routes in the 14th century.
This method of getting the disease into the body of a healthy person was part of the West African native culture, by placing ground up dried disease scabs into the arm by a needle rather than inhaling the substance.
The credibility of this thread of knowledge has credence because of a very unusual source found here in Massachusetts.
Back in the early 18th century a West African slave was given as a gift to the Puritan minister Cotton Mather.
Yes — that Cotton Mather — prominent figure in the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690’s.
In 1706 this slave was given the name “James” after a first century slave mentioned in the New Testament but not his name that he called himself — Onesimus.” Mather referred to his ethnicity as “Guaramantee” suspected now of referencing a family from Ghana.
Onesimus was correctly perceived as an intelligent man and was educated by mather to help with note-taking and religious instruction.
During a raging smallpox outbreak in boston in 1721, james introduced mather to the principle and procedures of his west african heritage — the inoculation procedure to prevent disease.
Mather had previously written a letter in 1716 to the royal society of london on his introduction to inoculation from onesimus.
“He described the operation to me, and showed me his arm with the scar.”
In his practice zabdiel boylston followed the exact method onesimus taught to mather in his practice in the 1720s. he infected 280 individuals and only six died.
The inscription on the tomb of dr. boylston incorrectly identified him as the “first to have introduced the practice of inoculation into america.”
In his biography of the second u.s. president historian david mcculloch writes how adams was inoculated against smallpox before his marriage to abigail in october of 1764.
McCulloch also wrote of the boston connection to smallpox inoculation. this event occurred in 1776 when a new smallpox infestation hit boston, and following John’s advice and counsel, Abigail took her children and some neighbors from braintree to boston for this procedure of inoculation by physician thomas bulfinch.
Belated but accurate recognition of the contributions of the slave James, or onesimus came in 2016 when boston magazine placed him among the “100 best bostonians of all time” in our history, writing that he single handedly reversed the colonial boston racial assumptions about the knowledge of the slave populations of boston.