A ‘DEVILISH INVENTION’
Before vaccination, there was variolation, which also faced resistance from critics
The primitive firebomb came crashing through the window with a note attached: “Mather, you dog, damn you, I’ll inoculate you with this.”
Thankfully, the device malfunctioned, which is why the note survived.
What was the motivation for the crime? Objection to the “devilish invention” of inoculating people against disease! Lest you think that this was the work of some current anti-vaxxer, think again. The attempted fire bombing took place in 1721 in Boston as a response to the Rev. Cotton Mather’s advocacy of what may well have been the most important health-care improvement in colonial America, inoculation with small amounts of material taken from a smallpox victim to prevent full-blown disease. Of great interest is that this episode occurred some 70 years before English physician Edward Jenner’s celebrated introduction of vaccination against smallpox.
Jenner was intrigued by the observation that milkmaids hardly ever contracted smallpox and thought this may have been due to their exposure to animals infected with “cowpox.” He proved his point by injecting fluid from cowpox blisters on a milkmaid’s hands into a young boy and then, quite unethically, exposing him to infectious material from a smallpox victim. Eight-year-old James Phipps did not contract the disease and goes down in history as the first person to be vaccinated, the term deriving from the Latin “vaccus,” for cow. Vaccination was a significant improvement over “variolation,” the technique that Mather promoted, because it was safer and did not leave the vaccinated person infectious to others. While the methods were quite different, both Mather and Jenner were attacked for putting healthy people at risk by treating them with dangerous substances — not unlike the claims being made by today’s opponents of vaccination.
Mather learned about variolation from his Libyan-born slave, Onsimus. Asked if he had ever had smallpox, he answered that yes, he had a mild version of the disease after having been scratched with something when he was young by a local medicine man, but no, he had never been afflicted with full-blown smallpox. Mather then asked other African slaves in Boston, for there were many, about similar experiences and became convinced that inoculating healthy people with pus from the skin of an infected person would protect them against smallpox. He was unaware that the Chinese, as early as AD 1000, had developed a technique of blowing the dried powder from smallpox scabs into the nostrils of people to protect them, or that in India and Turkey pus was introduced into scratches on a healthy person’s arms to trigger a mild form of the disease that would then offer protection against the more serious variety.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador to Turkey, encountered this method in 1717, when she witnessed local peasant women performing inoculations at “smallpox parties.” She had her children inoculated and became a powerful advocate for variolation in England. There was opposition from critics, many of whom maintained that not only was the practice dangerous, it was a “diabolical operation” because it attempted to prevent disease, which was a punishment for human sins. There was certainly some truth to the danger. A small percentage of people variolated died from contracting smallpox as a result of the procedure, putting fear into the public.
However, it wasn’t only the layperson who developed a fear of variolation. In Boston, physicians, save for one Zabdiel Boylston, were opposed, and formed the “Society of Physicians Anti-Inoculators,” regularly meeting in coffee houses to denounce inoculators. They were more or less silenced when Mather and Boylston collected data to show that the death rate as a result of inoculation was 2 per cent, while 15 per cent of people who contracted smallpox naturally died. This may well have been the first time that statistics were used to evaluate a clinical trial! George Washington was convinced. In 1777, he ordered that all his troops who had not had smallpox be inoculated against the disease. And Benjamin Franklin put the risk into perspective:
“In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the smallpox taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of the parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.”
Curiously, while Mather was a champion of validating variolation scientifically, he was also a believer in witchcraft. In his 1693 book, Wonders of the Invisible World, he justified the Salem witch trials, seeing witches as tools of the devil in Satan’s battle to “overturn this poor plantation, the Puritan colony,” and prosecution of witches as a way to secure God’s blessings for the colony.
Although today no rational person believes that the Salem witch trials were justified, there are many who believe that vaccination is a devilish procedure that causes more harm than good. Fear often is the result of lack of understanding, which is why we are inviting you to a screening at 7 p.m. on April 18 of the film Hilleman: A Perilous Quest to Save the World’s Children, followed by a discussion with the filmmakers.
Maurice Hilleman has been described as “the greatest scientist of the 20th century, and no one knows his name.” Amazingly, Hilleman was the developer of some 40 vaccines, including the standard MMR (mumps, measles, rubella) vaccine used today. He never seemed to miss an opportunity to create a new vaccine. His mumps vaccine was developed from a sample of virus he isolated from his daughter’s throat after she came down with the disease. The film is a real eye-opener. The screening is free, but you do need to reserve a place by going to our website at www.mcgill.ca/oss.
It was a ‘diabolical operation’ because it attempted to prevent disease, which was a punishment for human sins.