NOTES

Titles

Throughout this book, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu appears as Lady Mary. This isn’t undue familiarity; it is correct. Her honorific Lady came from her father’s title, first as an earl, on up to duke, and was therefore attached to her first name and only her first name. She has sometimes appeared in print as Lady Montagu, but that title properly indicates someone else. In the British peerage, a woman uses Lady with a title (sometimes but not always the same as the family surname) only when she holds that title in her own right, or, more commonly, when she is married to the man who does. In Lady Mary’s circle of friends, there was a duchess of Montagu, but no Lady Montagu—which would have indicated the wife of a baronet, baron, viscount, earl, or marquess whose title was Montagu.

Referring to Lady Mary as plain Montagu or Mrs. Montagu would have been an unthinkable demotion of rank. Neither she nor her husband much used the surname Montagu in any case. He was known as Wortley; when she wanted to use a surname she usually went by Lady Mary Wortley. However, since she has achieved a minor literary fame as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, that is the form used here. It is correct, even if more ultra-correct than she usually bothered to be.

In contrast, Caroline of Ansbach held her royal title from her husband, not her father. She was therefore Caroline, Princess of Wales, or the Princess of Wales. She was not Princess Caroline. When her husband ascended the throne as King George II, she became Queen Caroline.

Dates

In 1582 large sections of Europe began adopting the Gregorian calendar (named for Pope Gregory XIII, who first put it into wide use). With some minor adaptations, this calendar is the one we still use today. Although most of Europe had made the transition by 1701, the British Empire, including its American colonies, clung to the old—and less accurate—Julian calendar (named for Julius Caesar) until 1752. As a consequence, during the period covered by this book, British dates (marked O.S., or Old Style) were eleven days behind those on the continent (marked N.S., or New Style). Months and days appear in the British Old Style throughout this book.

Until 1752, the British also held to the old custom of beginning the New Year on March 25 (Lady Day, or the Annunciation), rather than January 1—though they called January 1 New Year’s Day. Often, dates from January 1 through March 24 would show up with two years, e.g., March 1, 1715/6. In this book, all years appear in the modern style, changing over at January 1.

Introduction

Lady Mary and Boylston both lamented their exhausting popularity and sometimes terrifying demonization while the inoculation controversy was in full scream. Lady Mary’s daughter vividly recalled seeing and hearing servants’ reactions to her mother—including the condemnation that she was “unnatural”—when she was a young girl. Boylston’s children long remembered him daring insults and assaults to perform inoculations at all hours.

The best popular history of the eradication of smallpox from nature, along with a chilling assessment of its possible future threat, is Jonathan Tucker’s Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox, from which I have drawn the summary presented here. The estimated number of smallpox victims comes from him, as do the comparisons to the bubonic plague and twentieth-century wars, the story of the last sufferer of smallpox “in the wild,” and the metaphor of the maximum-security prison.

The odds given of vaccination resulting in death are modern; those of variolation resulting in death are from the early eighteenth century. Serious complications from both vaccination and variolation can result in permanent damage, even when patients survive.

The modern vaccine does not use the cowpox virus, but another virus in the family of “orthopoxviruses.” Some have argued that Jenner never used the true cowpox virus, working with horsepox instead; others maintain that the vaccine strain mutated into something new during intensive reduplication in laboratories. In any case, the virus now used for medical purposes is called vaccinia, incorporating the old story of cows and dairymaids right into its name.

Two Marys

When Queen Mary died in Kensington Palace in 1694, doctors had no standard system of classifying the various forms of smallpox. From eyewitness accounts of her symptoms, it is likely that she suffered from what modern doctors would call “late hemorrhagic smallpox, with flat-type lesions.” Though rare, it was a death sentence barely less inevitable than the hundred-percent mortality of the “early hemorrhagic” form: about three percent of its victims might survive. The queen was not one of them. I have drawn the story of her suffering and death from contemporary eyewitness accounts and modern biographies, with details on the course of her disease filled in from both eighteenth- and twentieth-century medical treatises.

The resemblance of smallpox to chicken pox remains legendary, but for many years the disease it was most closely linked to (at least in imagination) was the measles. British doctors began differentiating smallpox (especially the hemorrhagic forms) from measles around the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth (when they began differentiating diseases more generally), but they had by no means reached unanimous agreement on the subject. Well into the eighteenth-century, many still thought smallpox and measles were different forms or degrees of the same illness. At least one of the queen’s physicians, Dr. Walter Harris, concluded that she had “smallpox and measles mingled.” In their early stages, the two diseases looked enough alike that they were not uncommonly confused until the late twentieth century, when smallpox was removed as a possible diagnosis.

Many years after the queen’s death, Harris published a description of her case; from his notes come most of the early details (and much of the imagery) given here, up through the sinking of her blisters and her labored breathing that night. Out of respect for royal dignity, witnesses become vague about many details of the queen’s case from this point on, painting the highly unlikely scenario of a comfortable, peaceful, and dignified death. Across the next three centuries, however, their fellow physicians would carefully, even obsessively, catalogue the final horrors endured by more common mortals struck with late hemorrhagic smallpox. I have matched the queen’s condition to the main points of this cataloged nightmare.

The rotten-garden imagery appears scattered throughout early descriptions of small-pox; I have put the snappish recognition of its weirdness into the king’s mouth, though his general anxiety and near hysteria during his wife’s illness is well documented. The letter quoted is his.

Young Gloucester is generally supposed to have died from smallpox, though measles was also diagnosed. The combined diagnosis suggesting a flat reddish rash, his doctors’ early declaration that the case was hopeless, and his death on the sixth day of the fever strongly suggests that he suffered specifically from early hemorrhagic smallpox (which invariably kills its victims on or about the sixth day after the onset of fever).

As Lady Mary liked to tell the tale of her visit to the Kit-Cat Club—and as it was recorded in skeletal form by her granddaughter decades after Lady Mary’s death—she was not quite eight years old. In the context of her life and the history of the Kit-Cat Club, however, the story makes far more sense set several years later: somewhere between early 1699, when she was not quite ten, to late 1701 or early 1702, when she was twelve. (Other than Lady Mary’s dubious timing of this anecdote, the Kit-Cat Club is not known to have existed before 1699 or 1700.) I have set the scene at the beginning of the London social season late in 1701, when she was twelve, expanding her story with contemporary detail.

The men’s verses are drawn from a list of Kit-Cat toasts given in 1703. Garth made the verse quoted; I have given Lord Halifax—famous as an extempore versifier—an unattributed toast. Lady Mary must have said something pretty as well, for her father’s friends praised her brilliance as well as her beauty. Within a year or two, she wrote a poem to Lord Halifax, praising him for his praise, in turn, of the countess of Sunderland. (One of the four famously beautiful daughters of the duke of Marlborough, Lady Sunderland was the elder sister of Lady Mary’s friend, Lady Mary Churchill.) I have drawn Lady Mary’s verse exchange with him from this slightly later poem. The first couplet adapts lines from the later poem to the Kit-Cat situation; the second I quote verbatim. Halifax’s verse within hers is adapted from another of the 1703 toasts.

Jesting stories as to the origin of the Kit-Cat Club’s name became legion soon after its rise to fame. I have accepted the three most common theories. That 1. a tavern owner-cum-pastry chef named Christopher Cat 2. served the mutton pies called Kit-Cats 3. at an establishment under the sign of the Cat and Fiddle makes as much—or more—sense as one combined story than as three separate stories. Sheer—or Shear or Shire—Lane, where the first meeting place stood, has since disappeared beneath the white fairy-tale castle of the Royal Courts of Justice. Soon after Lady Mary’s visit, the club moved to larger digs at another tavern under the sign of the Fountain, in the Strand.

Three Rebellions

Lady Mary recorded her girlhood escapades, her clashes with her father, and her courtship with Wortley in detail in letters and in her diary. Her letters often report whole conversations; her diary was lively enough that her granddaughter remembered what she read of it for decades. I have also adapted some dialogue from Lady Mary’s more autobiographical romances and poems.

Lady Mary later recalled that her brother had always been her best friend; every scrap of evidence suggests that she regarded her father with awe and fear. From the beginning, Wortley both intrigued and irritated her.

The garden-wall episode with the Brownlows is true, as was her practice of giving her girlhood friends names out of romances—and listing them in her notebook. Lady Mary did indeed slit twenty pages from her earliest album of poems and stories (dating from 1702-04, when she was twelve to fourteen), and then burn them. She squeezed the poem quoted into a blank space on an earlier page; its content strongly suggests that while it was she who carried out this “burning and blotting,” she did not do so voluntarily. The poem’s phrasing sounds as if it answers direct accusations: I have reconstructed the book-burning episode from these clues.

The critic who made her mutilate her work remains unknown, however, as does the exact nature of the offense. Very young, she developed a dangerous taste for both reading and writing tales that lightly masked real people’s adventures as fiction. Later, this temptation would get her into much worse trouble; I have surmised that her mistake at fourteen may have been an early foray into this habit. Whatever the problem was, it was particular to the excised pages, or the whole book would have burned.

Her tormentor may have been her French governess, Madame Dupont, or her brother’s tutor (who possibly also tutored Lady Mary), but the anger-prone authority in her life whose biography was hands down most tale worthy was her father. I have drawn his character from sketches to be found in her diary and romances. He did, in fact, always require from his children the ritual court greeting of bended knee and kissed hand. In 1709 Kneller painted Kingston in a suit of purple velvet; I have drawn his physical description from this painting, and put him in morning dress of the same material.

Lady Mary gave out many different stories about teaching herself Latin in secret. At times she credited Wortley with sparking her desire to learn. She also credited both Wortley and Congreve for help along the way.

As an old woman, Lady Mary saw her father in a rakish character from Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison; had she survived to read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, she would surely have seen Edward Wortley Montagu in Elizabeth Bennett’s first disagreeable impressions of Mr. Darcy: but Wortley never transformed into Prince Charming. Lady Mary described him in arch detail in her letters and romances—especially the tale of Princess Docile (herself) and Prince Sombre, clearly a fictionalized alter ego of Wortley. “He had all the qualities of an upright man, and no single quality of an amiable one,” she wrote: a line I’ve adapted as an exchange between Lady Mary and her sister. Wortley’s letters to Lady Mary uphold her romance characterizations of him, good, bad, and irritating.

It is not clear when or where they met, though they certainly continued to meet through the convenience of seeing Anne. Why Anne died in February 1710 is uncertain, but at the time typhus—London’s other great eighteenth-century scourge—was rampant.

Wortley carefully preserved the squabbling letters that passed back and forth between him and Lady Mary, including the mischief-making note of Betty Laskey, endorsed by Richard Steele. Nothing is known of Laskey beyond this note and Lady Mary’s lamentations about her. In one autobiographical romance, however, Lady Mary made her hero Sebastian (Wortley) incur wrath of the heroine Laetitia (Lady Mary) by falling for just such a trumped-up offer on the part of an orange-woman who had played go-between for the lovers in Hyde Park. I have sketched Betty Laskey from that hint, drawing on contemporary engravings of street hawkers using the cries “Fair Lemons & Oranges” and “Six pence a pound fair Cherryes.”

Wortley’s anxiety about Lady Mary’s possible loss of “colour” or complexion betrays his apprehension about her diagnosis. Given the timing of her illness within the worst smallpox epidemic London had yet known, his fears suggest that he was all too aware of the long-standing confusion between measles and smallpox.

The epidemic of 1710 was at its height from May through July. Using James Jurin’s slightly later statistic that one of every five or six Londoners who came down with small-pox died, I have extrapolated the number of people ill in 1710 from the official figure of 3,138 dead of smallpox that year. The quack bills are adapted from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague-Year. Defoe’s fictionalized history covers London’s last great epidemic of the bubonic plague in 1665, but within a year of writing it in 1722, he had been eyewitness to the devastations of another disease: the smallpox epidemic of 1721. Though that more recent epidemic was not near so fearsome as the 1665 outbreak of the plague, it also seems to have progressed through the city from west to east. Other details, too, are general enough to fit London’s panic in the face of any epidemic disease.

I have given Wortley encounters with various epidemic scenes, as well as thoughts comparing smallpox to the plague: Creighton documents the general awareness of small-pox as a threat of growing intensity and frequency, such that it began to replace the plague as Britain’s most feared disease in the early eighteenth century. (The plague could and did kill far more people than smallpox within the span of a single epidemic. In London, however, its “visitations” were far fewer, and it was virtually absent between epidemics; after 1665, it also belonged to the past. Smallpox remained a steady killer in that city even in “healthy” years right into the twentieth century; at the beginning of the eighteenth century, fearsome smallpox epidemics began appearing with markedly increasing frequency.)

Margaret Brownlow’s death is the first known instance of smallpox interfering in Lady Mary’s life. Beyond the two facts that Margaret fell ill and died of smallpox while Lady Mary was convalescing from the measles, and that her sister Jane did indeed marry Margaret’s intended husband in June 1711, however, I do not know the details. I have given her the nickname of “Meg” and a standard set of smallpox symptoms. Cream applied with a feather was a traditional regimen for preventing smallpox scarring.

Emperor Joseph and the grand dauphin Louis both died of smallpox as stated. The emperor certainly was given the ancient “hot” treatment; given descriptions of the dauphin’s rooms just after his death, he may well have endured the “cold” treatment (an innovation of the famous seventeenth-century English doctor Thomas Sydenham). I have made Dorchester and his cronies discuss these regimens; they surely discussed the political consequences.

Lady Mary detailed her longing for her unidentified Paradise and her loathing of Skeffington in her many letters to “Dear Phil.” I have condensed and combined a few of them and pulled her dramatic sentence “Limbo is better than Hell” into the place of a conclusion because it crystallizes her tortured choice of Wortley over Skeffington; otherwise, the letters stand as she wrote them, save for modernizing spelling and punctuation.

Lady Mary reported her various interviews with her father, family, and brother on the subject of the match to Skeffington—complete with most of the dialogue presented here—in several detailed letters to Wortley just before the elopement, as she tried to make him see that her father would not easily forgive them and was certainly not going to pony up money. I have added her brother’s unhappiness with his own marriage, on the strength of Lady Mary’s extreme reactions against it, and his own willingness to help her escape a similar fate. I have divided between Lady Frances and Lady Kingston the reactions Lady Mary reported as generally being those of the family. When she gave her father her “final” answer, she first chose the single life, but relented in a letter following her father’s threat to pack her into the country immediately. The threat is Kingston’s as Lady Mary later reported it to Wortley; its presentation in a valise is my way of literalizing the cramped life he was offering her. She gave no indication as to the dates or settings of any of these familial encounters; those are my surmise.

The particulars of her aversion to Skeffington are lost, but surviving letters suggest that it was both primarily physical and inexplicable to others (especially her father). Skeffington’s family were the proud lords of Castle Antrim and other vast estates in Northern Ireland.

Her long bickering courtship with Wortley was Byzantine in its plotting and spying, and their elopement was worse: a two-months’ tangle of aborted attempts, near break-offs, procrastinations, and terrors. I have streamlined both courtship and elopement, but the general arc of events—including the two major breaks—remains accurate. Whether the lovers actually met in the inn on the way to West Dean is unclear, but they certainly passed a flurry of notes that attest Lady Mary’s laughter at Wortley’s “highwayman” getup, her indignation at his inability to provide the “decent conveyance” of a coach, Wortley’s suggestion that they borrow her family’s, and her absolute refusal to implicate her brother—though he was undoubtedly an accomplice.

How Lady Mary received word of her brother’s illness is unclear, though the timing is accurate. I have let her learn from Lady Frances, though a face-to-face meeting would have dared their father’s wrath. It seems to have been Lady Frances who later took it upon herself to keep Lady Mary informed of Will’s progress.

A Destroying Angel

Lady Mary poured her anguish over her brother’s death into her diary and letters; her sorrow and rage made a lasting impression on her granddaughter, reading them many years later.

Wortley’s vengeance in coyly threatening to consign his wife and child to an infected house is taken directly from their letters, though I have reconstructed his first (I have taken a house in Duke Street . . . ) from her reply to it.

Pope’s readings of his Iliad translation before Halifax took place somewhere between October 1714 and May 1715, when Halifax died. I’ve taken the liberty of including Lady Mary at the second gathering, as she was in town and fast becoming a fixture in the literary crowd that Halifax—an old acquaintance and good friend of her father’s—liked to entertain. She was certainly on jesting terms with Pope by the summer of 1715. Pope’s illness and reflections on his own appearance are amply documented.

The “ridiculous adventure” with Craggs is one of the few that Lady Mary’s granddaughter reported in detail from her reading of Lady Mary’s diary. I have supplied Craggs’s rebuke to Lady Mary, reported only as “a bitter reproach with a round oath to enforce it.” In a polite age that enveloped passion in delicate nettings of euphemism, such frank anger carried the force of a slap across the face.

The real distress evident in Craggs’s reaction, as well as the extravagant emphasis that Lady Mary’s granddaughter lavished upon the awfulness of her indiscretion, suggest that Craggs was worried about far more than just being revealed as an impetuous young man—which in any case he was already known to be: such pranks were common among the nobility, even if not often run directly under the king’s nose. I have opted for rivalry as the most likely undercurrent of danger, given the king’s known interest in the lady.

The appearance and habits of King George I, Schulenberg, and Kielmansegg (including their nicknames and La Schulenberg’s pastime of snipping caricatures out of scraps of paper), are all attested by their contemporaries.

Details of Lady Mary’s bout with smallpox are few but richly suggestive. Gossip revealed that Lady Mary was “very full”—i.e., that she had a case of confluent smallpox—and that she was thought to be fighting for her life for two days around Christmas. From these details, I have given her a classic case of confluent smallpox, following Ricketts’s description of “confluent smallpox with severe suppurative fever.” The notion that victims looked weirdly old or young is Ricketts’s, as is the image of the gray caul. Richard Mead, one of Lady Mary’s physicians, wrote a treatise on smallpox published in 1747, though written much closer to the time of Lady Mary’s illness. His words, as well as the details of her treatment, come from this book. The statistics are from the World Health Organization.

In eighteenth-century England, surgeons (who learned from apprenticeship and often did not hold any university degree whatever) were properly titled “Mr.” rather than “Dr.”—the latter being an honorific reserved for physicians (who held medical doctorates). With what is now a bit of reverse snobbery, modern British surgeons retain this ancient distinction of title, going by Mr.—or Miss, Ms., or Mrs.—though they hold medical degrees. In colonial America, where trained doctors were in perennially short supply, strict divisions between physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries collapsed; the title “Dr.” was given to those with proven talent and experience, whether their training came from the university or from apprenticeship.

I have dramatized the scene of Lady Mary’s first look at her ruined face from her eclogue titled:

 

Satturday
The Small Pox
Flavia.

 

According to her granddaughter, “she always said she meant the Flavia of her sixth Town-Eclogue for herself, having expressed in that poem what her own sensations were while slowly recovering under the apprehension of being totally disfigured.” From this poem come the details of her reclining on a couch, holding a mirror reversed in her right hand, the identities of her doctors (Mead as Mirmillo with the golden-headed cane, Garth as Machaon wearing a red cloak), Garth’s reassurance about her beauty, and her order to have the Kneller removed from her sight. Her granddaughter attested the loss of Lady Mary’s “very fine eyelashes.” I have supplied the detail of the veiled mirrors; it fits with the general desire to keep her calm, and with her lack of any knowledge about what she looked like well into convalescence.

At the end of this chapter and elsewhere through the book, I have made Lady Townshend stand in for Lady Mary’s wide circle of aristocratic friends. Her comment on Lady Mary’s loss of beauty is adapted from one recorded by Lady Hertford. Lady Mary’s reply comes from her own assessment of her loss of face in “Carabosse”—a personalized version of “Sleeping Beauty,” in which the cursed princess is clearly herself. She probably wrote this French fairy tale years later, but the feelings it records about smallpox echo those of Flavia, and were probably of long standing.

Bidding the World Adieu

From her fascination with “Frost Fairs” to her travels to Turkey, Lady Mary’s life at times bears an uncanny resemblance to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Whether Lady Mary attended the frost fair of 1716 is uncertain; given her regret for missing the previous one (when she had been trapped up at Thoresby by impassable roads) and Mead’s prescription for taking fresh air, it seems likely that she would have done her best to see it, even if only from the window of a coach.

Asses’ milk was a standard drink while convalescing from many illnesses; Mead specifically recommended it for smallpox. The scene of Lady Mary and Lady Townshend examining other remedies is my invention; the remedies, however, are drawn from contemporary recipes.

The story of Pope’s revenge on Edmund Curll is unfortunately accurate.

Direct evidence that Lady Mary heard about inoculation before leaving London is lacking; circumstantial evidence, however, is very strong: those who were buzzing about the story abroad were among her closest friends and their families. Given Lady Mary’s imminent journey to Constantinople, her vested interest in smallpox, and her wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, it beggars imagination to think that none of them should have mentioned the story to her. I have therefore created scenes in which Garth and her other friends who knew the rumors gather to tell her. The timing of these rumors’ appearance, however, is accurate.

At some point that spring, Lady Mary satisfied public curiosity and discarded her mask; the particulars are my surmise. Photographs in Ricketts suggest that Lady Mary’s face would have recovered significantly during convalescence: the swelling would eventually have disappeared, and the scars faded a great deal. The “nutmeg grater” image comes from the same source. The total disfigurement that Lady Mary feared did not come to pass, said her granddaughter. Lady Mary’s famed beauty, however, was gone for good. (Pepys reported a similar outcome for the duchess of Richmond.)

While Maitland cannot be specifically linked to Kennedy, London’s learned surgeons were then a tight-knit group; it is far more likely than not that two of their number who were Scottish knew each other at least well enough to discuss such a hot topic, especially when Maitland was soon headed to the source, and Kennedy had been there previously.

Lady Mary wrote an unending stream of letters home about her adventures en route. Wherever possible, I have kept close to her language (or to that of the snippets of gossip about her). Though almost all the originals as well as her own copies have been lost, she later edited these letters into literary gems that run together as an epistolary travel book. As she intended, this was printed after her death. Wortley also kept several pages of her notes recording dates, addressees, and general content lists of her actual letters: these often, but not always, correspond to their edited counterparts.

In Hanover, the king was widely seen to be still fascinated with her, but I have surmised that his interests might have been altered—as hers seem to have been toward him. She had no intention of remaining behind, no matter who might delight in her presence.

Lady Mary’s description of her visit to the Baths of Sofia is one of the gems of her Embassy Letters. I have dramatized the scene from that description; the dialogue, both direct and indirect, is hers. I have assumed that she used, as she did later, a Greek interpretress.

Lady Mary carefully shaped most of her embassy letters to focus on one Turkish custom at a time: dress, poetry, the baths, inoculation. I have made explicit connections she implies by logic and timing. At the baths, she is quite clear that the ladies’ smooth, shining skin is what amazed and delighted her most. Though she does not specifically say that smallpox (or the lack of it) was on her mind, it seems likely that her fascination with their unmarked skin prompted her immediate efforts to figure out how the Ottomans protected themselves from smallpox. Within two weeks, she had ferreted out stories of inoculation and interviewed everyone she could find on the subject. Maitland, it is important to note, was not with her at this point. Whatever she had learned before she left London or along the way, what she discovered at this juncture, she discovered on her own. According to her granddaughter, Lady Mary acknowledged that “former sufferings and mortifications . . . led her to observe the Turkish invention with particular interest.”

My Dear Little Son

Lady Mary wrote at length about her sojourn in Turkey; Maitland wrote somewhat more tersely about his inquiries and experiment with smallpox inoculation. Though neither makes much mention of cooperation, much less debate and discussion, with the other, events suggest that all of that was going on. I have woven their accounts together, and given them life as scenes.

Lady Mary wrote about inoculation to many people; her record of letters sent home includes one to her father concerning the smallpox. Sir Hans Sloane later said she also wrote the court and various friends on the subject. The only such letter that survives is the one she included in her Embassy Letters—polished and edited for circulation, and addressed to her girlhood friend Sarah Chiswell (who had, by the time of editing, died uninoculated from smallpox). I quote from it, in the place of the lost letter sent to her father, adding a suitable opening; I have also added the word rendered where some such word seems to be missing.

She described her Turkish dress in detail to her sister while it was still being made. If her later portraits in it (or a modified version of it) are to be trusted, however, she mixed up a few things. I have followed Lady Mary’s written account, “corrected” by what Jean Baptiste Vanmour and Jonathan Richardson seem actually to have seen. (Commissioned by Alexander Pope, Kneller painted another portrait of her in her Turkish robes, but her dress is so shadowed in the reproductions I have seen that it is hard to make out details.)

The disastrous Balm of Mecca experiment comes from a self-mocking letter to the king’s half-sister. Lady Mary pointedly lamented her “mortification” at Wortley’s reproaches, though the specific reproaches are my inventions.

Wortley engaged Dr. Timonius as the family physician in August, and though Lady Mary seems to have decided earlier to have her son inoculated, she missed the first opportunity to join the regular smallpox parties. I have surmised that the expert Dr. Timonius had a hand in preventing her; though she never gives a reason for missing this opportunity, pregnancy was a very good reason to stay as far away from the smallpox as possible.

I have drawn the conversations between Lady Mary and Maitland from his account of his inquiries into inoculation while in Constantinople, staying as close as possible to his language. That Lady Mary might have had some part in his discoveries or discussions is my supposition; she was certainly investigating the topic for herself during her stay in Constantinople.

The inoculation of young Edward closely follows Maitland’s account, save that I have elaborated on the boy’s struggles. Mr. Maitland merely remarked that “the good woman went to work; but so awkwardly by the shaking of her hand, and put the child to so much torture with her blunt and rusty needle, that I pitied his cries, who had ever been of such spirit and courage, that hardly any thing of pain could make him cry before; and therefore inoculated the other arm with my own instrument, and with so little pain to him, that he did not in the least complain of it.” I find Mr. Maitland’s terse explanation suspicious—if understandable, given the need to be complimentary to the Wortley Montagus in print. The Greek woman was far more experienced and almost certainly more capable than he makes out. Given Maitland’s extreme reluctance to inoculate later—when he already had firsthand experience of success—his sudden willingness to operate at this point is odd, to the say the least. And while Edward Wortley Montagu, Jr., certainly had spirit and a wayward courage, he also regularly caused more than his share of mischief and mayhem—even for a scion of the Pierreponts. I have given the boy a minor episode of well-provoked mischief, which goes some way toward requiring Maitland to participate.

The boy’s course through inoculated smallpox adheres almost word for word with Maitland’s account, with some details filled in from modern descriptions of standard symptoms, in particular, Ricketts’s descriptions of “modified smallpox”—by which he meant cases seen in people whose protection due to long previous vaccinations had in large part worn out. In many details, these cases resemble those described by inoculators. Neither Lady Mary nor Maitland had much to say about the incisions. Medical paintings of variolation, however, suggest that their development would have been startling.

Rosebuds in Lily Skin

From the Wortleys’ return to London in 1719 through the spring of 1721 (including the location of their house, the illness of Princess Anne, the rift in the royal family, and the bursting of the South Sea stock bubble), the events Lady Mary recalls are well documented. Her reverie, however, is my invention. While she certainly knew Dryden through and through, I am responsible for having her ponder this particularly weird poem at this apropos moment.

Some of the tiniest details in this chapter are true: roses and violets did indeed bloom in January 1721, after which the early warmth dissolved into a cold, wet spring. The small-pox house in Swallow Street did exist, serving as both refuge and quarantine, primarily for servants from the great houses of St. James’s and Piccadilly.

Lady Mary began to lose friends and family to smallpox in frighteningly large numbers in February 1721. She does not appear to have considered inoculating her daughter until the beginning of April, however, at which point she was suddenly insistent. This abrupt switch suggests a known exposure; unfortunately, the loss of Lady Mary’s diaries has obscured the details. As no particular close friend or family member seems to have succumbed to smallpox right around this time, I have located such an exposure in the nurse. It is at least plausible, in explaining Lady Mary’s suddenly sharp fear for her daughter. Furthermore, if she was the same nurse that Mary had had in Constantinople, she was vulnerable: according to Lady Mary, the reason little Mary was not inoculated in Turkey along with her brother was that “her Nurse has not had the smallpox.” Presumably, she refused to be inoculated as well.

More generally, servants were always a concern as agents of infection. No doubt there was a great deal of class prejudice involved in this fear, but it was not without foundation. Servants worked long and exhausting hours for mere pittances, and even in great houses their rooms could be crowded, cold, damp, and unsanitary. Furthermore, the work of supplying their masters with food, drink, fuel, and other necessaries took many into the crowded streets and marketplaces even during epidemics. The living and work conditions of servants, in short, not infrequently made them more vulnerable to disease than their more comfortable masters.

Charles Maitland is the chief source for young Mary’s inoculation. He sketches out the bargaining that went on before he would agree to perform the operation, though he does not give details as to the situations in which the negotiations occurred. (I am responsible for making Lady Mary conjure up Constantinople for him.) But he did request witnesses, and Lady Mary at first refused. According to family tradition and her own later writings, she feared that professional jealousy and greed would induce physicians to try and make the inoculation fail. For his part, Maitland appears to have been reluctant to inoculate in London at all. No doubt his stated reason of wanting to increase the operation’s credit and reputation in part explains his insistence on witnesses. Self-protection, however, seems also to have been an issue.

Little Mary’s long wait of ten days before the outbreak of fever is attested by Maitland, as is the summons of an “ancient apothecary.” Neither Maitland nor any of the later witnesses date Mary’s inoculation any more precisely than the month of April; I have made the fever coincide with the birth of Prince William Augustus, the future duke of Cumberland, on April 15, 1721, to great (if typical) rejoicing.

Zabdiel and Jerusha

The facts about Zabdiel Boylston’s boyhood are nearly as fragmentary as the dream I have given him. Here’s what’s real: He was born March 9, 1680 in Muddy River, later Brookline, Massachusetts, to Dr. Thomas Boylston and his wife Mary. The only child, of twelve, to follow his father’s interest in medicine, he was fifteen when his father died in 1695; there is no record of the cause of death. Judging by Zabdiel’s account of the 1721 smallpox epidemic and by his business dealings, of all his siblings, he was closest to his youngest brother, Thomas.

As late as 1700, the hamlet of Muddy River spread across five thousand acres of fields, marshland, and forest; its population was below two hundred. It incorporated as the town of Brookline in 1705.

Family tradition has it that Zabdiel’s father had an Oxford M.D., but the university has no record of granting him any degree whatsoever. The Boylstons, however, had apothecary relatives in both Birmingham and London; Zabdiel later visited several of them. I have made his father visit them first. I have found no firm record of Zabdiel’s apprenticeship under Cutler: but there seems no reason to doubt this bit of family lore. He certainly completed an apprenticeship with a doctor who trained him well and helped establish him within Boston’s medical community.

Zabdiel later wrote that he had nearly died during the 1702 smallpox epidemic. At that time, he was at or near the end of his apprenticeship, possibly already setting up on his own. He may well have deliberately contracted the disease, or have dispensed with any attempt to avoid it. Young doctors sometimes did so: they were otherwise virtually useless in an epidemic. Thomas Dover, one of Sydenham’s famous protégés, for example, took notes on his own progress and treatment, just as I have had Zabdiel do. Before the shields of antisepsis and antibiotics, being a doctor was not for the faint of heart: repeatedly risking “putrid” fevers (typhus and typhoid, not then differentiated), dysentery, and various streptococcal infections, to name just a few of the common killers in colonial New England, required no small dose of personal courage. At least smallpox only had to be suffered once.

Zabdiel’s father served briefly in the cavalry troop of Captain Thomas Prentice in King Philip’s War, during the Mount Hope campaign against the Narragansetts. This tribe was supposed to be loyal or neutral toward the English, but the women and children were slaughtered anyway, when it became apparent that they were sheltering Wampanoag women and children. The elder Dr. Boylston, who probably served as a surgeon, seems to have removed himself after this first campaign, though the war dragged on. I have found no record that any of his sons ever served against the Indians (though they would have been too young for this war).

Zabdiel Boylston’s character and habits as a doctor have to be pieced together from fleeting phrases and tiny shreds of evidence, as well as from his general reputation. Later, he exhibited open-minded interest in Native American medicine, using it, if briefly, as one of his defenses for being open-minded about African medical practice. I have presumed that this attitude was fostered in part by his father. Likewise, Zabdiel’s record as a daring and unusually successful surgeon suggests that he was, for his day, unusually clean, quick, and precise, as well as unusually well versed in anatomy.

Jerusha Minot was born in Dorchester on January 28, 1679 (possibly 1680; the genealogies do not specify old or new style dating). Both her parents died of smallpox in Dorchester during the 1690 epidemic—her father on January 26 and her mother on April 6. Three of her brothers—Israel, Josiah, and George—are not traceable after that time, though the Minot family genealogies covering that generation are quite detailed; it is at least plausible that they died unrecorded during the epidemic. In 1702, she lost two young cousins in Boston to the disease. These exposures, plus the fact that Zabdiel never inoculated her, make it all but certain that she herself survived it, either in 1690 or 1702. References to her as “of Boston” suggest she went to live with her closest Bostonian relative, her uncle Stephen Minot—who was, as stated, a wealthy merchant—after she was orphaned in 1690.

I don’t know any details of her courtship with Boylston, other than the date of their marriage, and their ages at the time: average for him, a little late for her. Boylston advertised or prescribed everything I have her encounter in his shop, however. Later writings show his interest in Indian remedies for rattlesnake bite, as well as ambergris.

Curiosities of the Smallpox

I have taken Cotton Mather’s diary entry from December 16, 1706—the day several men from his parish presented him with the slave he named Onesimus—and a letter he wrote to the Royal Society in July 1716, and reversed them to tell the events from Onesimus’s point of view.

Mather repeatedly identified the man as “Guramante,” a classical term phonetically close enough to “Coromantee” to make the confusion of the two quite plausible on the part of an eager scholar such as Mather. “Coromantee” was a general and imprecise English (specifically West Indian) term for the Akan-speaking peoples of Africa’s Gold Coast, now known as Ghana. The most famous and numerous of these peoples are the Asante or Ashanti. In the early eighteenth century, Coromantees were the most valuable and sought-after slaves among the British; they were also the most feared, thought to be prone to fomenting violent revolt.

The outlines of Onesimus’s experience of the Middle Passage on a slave ship, his voyage broken in the West Indies before being sent up to Boston on a ship whose main cargo was not slaves, follows the general pattern of the triangle slave trade in the early eighteenth century. If Onesimus was, as Mather wanted, a young man worth £40-£50 on the slave market—then at or near the top of the pricing—he would have been a relatively unusual figure in Boston: unless specially reserved for a buyer of note, strong, healthy young men were skimmed off for hard labor in the West Indies or the Carolinas. Especially in the early years, Boston tended to get what were called “refuse” slaves: the young, the old, the frail, the troublemakers.

In Boston, unlike on the big plantations far to the south and the farms to the west, most slaveholders had only one or two slaves. Though they did heavy and dangerous chores, they were domestics. They lived in their master’s houses, and were often treated as part—though a low-ranking part—of the patriarchal Puritan family.

I have borrowed various wonderings and observations from Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa (1745-97), another brilliant young African man whose unquenchable curiosity led him to observe in minute detail places, persons, and cultures that he could not yet understand, yet saw with a fine eye; he later wrote one of the earliest slave autobiographies to survive. From him come the interpretations of snow as salt and of books as boxes containing voices.

Mather’s letter stands pretty much as he wrote it, though I have abridged and edited it slightly for the sake of readability, and lifted the sentence about “Small-Pox proving a great plague to us poor Americans” to appear higher than it does in the original. His thoughts are closely paraphrased or borrowed outright from his own words.

Mather and others recorded his struggles with a terrible stutter. He overcame it by forcing himself to speak extremely slowly and deliberately, and by learning to sing his words. At points of high stress, however, the stutter would return.

The Beauty of the Sea

The story of Captain John Gore dying from smallpox within sight of home on November 7, 1720, is all documented, save for his wife Rebecca’s farewell voyage out to the vicinity of his ship, which is my addition. Gore was eulogized as quoted by the Reverend William Cooper. Through his wife, Gore inherited property in Boylston’s neighborhood of Dock Square. He seems, however, to have lived a little farther west, on the slopes of Beacon Hill: a favorite spot for seagoing captains, though well back from the water, because the whole spread of the harbor was visible from these heights. Gore, like Boylston, was a member of the Brattle Street Church; they were close in age. I have taken the liberty of making them friends.

There’s plenty of evidence for the general outlines of the smallpox outbreak in Boston at the beginning of May 1721. The fragments are spaced widely enough, though, to allow for connecting the dots into a number of different specific stories. I have told what I think is the most likely tale.

In particular, there is a mystery—and at least one lie—in the matter of identifying the source of the epidemic. Boston’s selectmen pointed repeatedly at HMS Seahorse, the sixth-rate ship, or frigate, assigned to run convoy with the merchant fleet between Boston and the West Indies. In what remains of the ship’s official documentation, her commander, Captain Thomas Durell, never acknowledged his ship as the source of the infection, nor do either the master’s log or the ship’s paybook note any deaths or sickness due to small-pox. The paybook, however, does list several deaths as well as many desertions and discharges that are consistent with a smallpox outbreak on a ship whose crew was largely, but not entirely, immune through previous survival of the disease.

It would seem that either all six selectmen and Dr. John Clark—their appointed medical examiner as well as a representative to the Massachusetts General Court and at various times the speaker of the House and a member of the Governor’s Council—were lying outright, or Captain Durell was lying by omission. I have concluded that one man lying by omission is inherently more likely than a conspiracy of seven lying outright: especially in light of further circumstantial evidence linking Seahorse to the Boston outbreak—namely, the Paxton family.

Here’s what we know:

I have put an accurate examination of the Seahorse’s surviving paybook and master’s log into the hands of Dr. John Clark, the physician chosen by the selectmen to inspect the suspect ship; his discoveries and frustrations are those any modern historian might have while sifting through the surviving fragments. Thomas Gibson, ship’s surgeon, was in a position to know the answers. Unfortunately, Gibson’s log, like most surgeons’ logs from eighteenth-century British naval ships, does not appear to have survived. In Clark’s case, I have made Gibson (and his log) absent on the cruise after pirates (documented by both Captain Durell and his master, or navigator, though the only man explicitly named on that cruise is Lieutenant Hamilton).

On May 8, 1721, the selectmen asked Dr. Clark to inspect the Seahorse, having heard that one of the ship’s sailors was sick with the smallpox in town: I have quoted the meeting’s minutes in full, save an introductory phrase. The wording is open to several interpretations. It is possible, for instance, that the “certain Negro man” in from the Saltertudas aboard the Seahorse was one and the same man as Captain Paxton’s servant. No member of the crew stands out as an obvious match, though two are possibilities:

Able seaman Hector Bruce joined the Seahorse’s company four days after Charles Paxton. His name directly follows Charles Paxton’s in the Seahorse paybook. Bruce was a slave owned by Paxton’s father; his pay went to Captain Paxton’s agent. When Bruce later ran away, the captain ran an advertisement describing him as an Indian, so he is probably not the “certain Negro” in question, however. Furthermore, pockmarks were commonly used identifying markers for runaways; if Bruce had been the sick man, it is unlikely that Paxton would have omitted mention of them in the runaway notice, given that Paxton took pains to describe Bruce’s face, stature, and skill as a sailor.

The only other Seahorse with any clear connection to the Paxtons is able seaman Richard Kent. He joined the ship’s company the same day as Bruce; his name follows Bruce’s in the paybook. Like Bruce, his pay went to Wentworth Paxton’s agent: except that the tag, “agent to Wentworth Paxton, agent” has been added, which may indicate that he was a free man, contracted with Paxton as his own agent. He was discharged by request on October 30, 1722. If he is the same Richard Kent to be found in the Thwing archives, he married the year of his discharge and became a shipwright and an innkeeper. He was certainly not a slave, though in 1721 he may have been some kind of servant, possibly indentured; he probably was not black.

The likeliest interpretation of the selectmen’s minutes is that the black Seahorse sailor was a different man than Captain Paxton’s black servant. In this case, that the selectmen did not order the sailor put under guard suggests that they did not know exactly where he was.

By May 12, Clark had reported back that “two or three” men were indeed sick with the smallpox on that ship, that “sundry others” were sick on shore, and that most of the crew had gone off on a cruise to chase pirates. I have written an inspection scene consistent with a discovery of this information.

Possibly, the infection entered the town through a number of ships in the Saltertudas fleet, most of which had probably made some call in Barbados, but the selectmen chose to finger Seahorse alone. This still does not explain Durell’s reticence.

Able seaman John Dunn of the Seahorse died (without explanation) on May 4, 1721. Gunner’s mate Joseph May died (also without explanation) on May 14; I have identified May as the missing black sailor, though beyond the coincidence of timing, there is no evidence that he was.

The lone specifically identified and located man known to be ill with smallpox on May 8—Captain Paxton’s black servant—also points, if circumstantially, back to the Seahorse. For Captain Paxton’s son Charles was, as stated, a sailor on that warship, having been entered into the Seahorse paybook, rated “ord” for “ordinary seaman,” on December 1, 1720. A note next to his name states that he had shore leave from January 6, 1721 (the day Seahorse sailed for Barbados) through April 22, 1721 (when she returned); his pay was duly docked. He is the only sailor to be granted such leave while Durell was in command of HMS Seahorse; no reason is supplied. Other sailors appear to have been discharged altogether when they could supply legitimate reasons for leaving the ship, or they were marked as having run, and then later reentered, under different numbers, when they rejoined—or were forced to rejoin—the crew. The two most obvious reasons for young Paxton’s leave are illness or some kind of special privilege accruing from an agreement between Captains Paxton and Durell, possibly in light of his age, which was young—though not remarkably so. I have opted for the latter.

Neither of Paxton’s two men aboard Seahorse seems likely to have been either of the black men sick with smallpox. However, as both hustled (or were hustled) on board directly after the boy, I have tied them into the story of Charles Paxton’s shore leave, making them a sort of doubled payment-in-kind for the boy’s temporary release from the ship. Given the high desertion rate, Durell seems to have needed men more than money.

Epidemiologically, Paxton’s servant’s bout with smallpox fits precisely with the arrival of the Seahorse on April 22, and a presumed return of young Charles Paxton to the ship on or about the twenty-third. The virus’s average incubation period of twelve days following initial infection (anywhere from ten to fourteen being normal), followed by three days of fever before the telltale eruption, dovetails with exposure on April 23, duly followed by the appearance of the rash on May 7 or 8. The man may well have been exposed while returning Charles to the Seahorse, or possibly while carousing with sailors ashore. Since the Seahorse remained in the relative isolation of a mooring off Castle Island until April 27, when she removed to an anchorage off Boston’s Long Wharf, I have opted for the first explanation.

The name of this servant, probably a slave, was never recorded by any of the authorities. Slaves, in particular those newly shipped over from Africa, were named by their masters. While pious Bostonians—like Cotton Mather—tended to opt for Biblical nomenclature, classical names such as Scipio, Caesar, and Pompey were popular among more worldly, self-consciously cultured gentlemen and merchants. I have given Captain Paxton’s servant the name of the black slave who was one of Judge Samuel Sewall’s most trusted personal servants.

The official records remain silent about whether or not Charles Paxton came down with smallpox at this time. Since he was born in 1707, five years after Boston’s last bout with smallpox, he was vulnerable. If indeed the Seahorse was infected and Paxton went aboard, odds are vanishing to none that he escaped infection himself; I have assumed that he was one of the “sundry others” from that ship sick on shore, and that his name was kept out of the record. It is notable that both people specifically scapegoated as the first to fall ill were black men.

The young Paxtons’ father, Captain Wentworth Paxton, had been the commander of an earlier, smaller Seahorse in 1701; he appears to have resigned his naval commission after being refused a larger ship. His proud temper later got him memorialized in Samuel Sewall’s diary, as the judge once fined the captain for beating another gentleman in the street with his cane. After leaving the navy, Captain Paxton married well, gaining the hand and the fortune of the widow Faith Gillam Middleton, who inherited a third of the merchant empire of warehouses, wharves, and houses owned by her father, Captain Benjamin Gillam. Most successful Boston merchants of the period left trails of deeds, buying and selling properties all over the town; Paxton’s deeds are almost all sales. Possibly, he wished to consider himself a gentleman unsullied by trade, living off investments; possibly, he was not terribly successful in business, and was gradually forced to sell off his (or his wife’s) assets.

Captain Durell would seem to have been well thought of, at least by the Admiralty, who promoted him, giving him larger and larger ships. He had a long and solid navy career. Not surprisingly, his surviving letters from this period are obsessively focused on pirates, mostly in the Caribbean. His work-a-day job was to sail convoy. His letters reveal, though, that he yearned for more daring action, pitting his men, his ship, and his seamanship whenever possible against the wily robbers of the sea. During the spring of 1721, the ship was severely damaged off Barbados during one such chase, by the wind and the sea rather than by enemy fire. From this, I have extrapolated a character of some rashness, zeal, and intense focus.

Durell was indeed enamored of trumpets. He recruited a trumpeter on May 16, 1721 (a sixth-rate ship was allowed one). In 1724, Judge Samuel Sewall visited the captain to request that he not sound the ship’s trumpets on Saturday nights, as Bostonians kept the Sabbath from sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday, and found the trumpeting “offensive.” Durell promised to comply.

Boston did indeed have laws governing quarantine; they specifically grant to the selectmen and their medical examiners the powers to inspect and quarantine ships. I have not been able to find any description of how such inspections worked day to day, though it seems likely that they would have been based on or even linked to the customs bureaucracy already in place.

Boylston had the personally rough fall and winter described; the Boylstons’ eighth child, Josiah, was born on July 11, 1720, but had almost certainly died by the time of the smallpox epidemic, since Boylston never mentions him among his other children at that time. I have deduced the furor over cancer treatments and the mastectomy (the first known in North America) from newspaper advertisements, which appeared as quoted (save for some minor editing for readability) in Boston’s two papers, both weeklies appearing on Mondays: the Boston Gazette and the Boston News-Letter. If the advertised Mrs. Winslow was, as I believe, the Sarah married to Captain (later Major) Edward Winslow of Rochester, then Boylston’s operation truly was successful: she survived to the age of eighty-five.

In New England, many adult slave men were trained as highly skilled assistants to their masters. Although we do not know about Jack in particular, there were other black slaves who were physician’s assistants. Jack would also have been responsible for such heavy chores as hauling wood and water and mucking out stalls. That he was a slave is clear from Boylston’s first reference to him in the Boston Gazette.

While I do not know that Tommy Boylston pulled his father away from work to see the ships, it seems reasonable behavior for a six-year-old late on a Saturday afternoon. The names of the ships and their captains are real. On March 31, 1721, the Seahorse counted fifty-nine vessels in her convoy. Though a few probably peeled off to other destinations before reaching Boston, the convoy was a spectacularly large one by North American standards of the time.

Caging the Monster

This chapter’s anchorholds in fact are the quoted minutes and newspaper articles, as well as entries in Cotton Mather’s diary and the master’s log and paybook for the HMS Seahorse. As with the previous chapter, these fragments reveal a lack of candor and detail, as much as anything else. Here are my reasons for taking the paths I chose from fact to fact:

As their minutes of May 12 show, the freeholders of Boston voted in a full town meeting to require the selectmen to approach the governor about the Seahorse going to Spectacle Island. Dr. John Clark, the inspecting physician, seems as likely a person as any to demand that quarantine be complied with to the full letter of the law. The selectmen’s minutes record that Seahorse was headed for Bird rather than Spectacle Island. Rather than either surprise or dissent with this shift, they record a substantial offer of help to Captain Durell in securing the ship’s hasty removal. I have put into the mind of William Hutchinson my own suspicion that somebody somewhere, made a deal.

To a man, in May 1721, the six selectmen of Boston were deeply invested in the mercantile interests of the town, over and against royal and religious concerns. Elisha Cooke was widely recognized as the leader of this pack. (There were supposed to be seven selectmen, but the seventh, Dr. Oliver Noyes, had died just days after being elected in March.) The others were William Clark (of the North End; brother to Dr. John Clark), Ebenezer Clough (of the North End), Thomas Cushing (of Dock Square in the center of town), and John Marion (of the South End). On May 12, Captain Nathaniel Green was chosen to replace Oliver Noyes.

The council room on the upper floor of the Town House, with its three east-facing windows, still exists. The Bunch of Grapes Tavern, once at the head of the Long Wharf, on the corner of King (now State) Street and Mackerel Lane (now Kilby Street), has long since disappeared beneath massive bank towers. The Bunch of Grapes seems to have been one of the favorite haunts among the rich and powerful of Cooke’s town (or popular) party, while the Royal Exchange, across King Street and farther up from the wharf, served the same purpose for the governor’s (or court) party. This division held into the Revolutionary era.

The early form of billiards the selectmen indulge in had, by 1721, been popular in England for fifty years; it reached Boston by 1730, when public billiards rooms (that is, tables in the large common rooms on a tavern’s ground floor) were advertised as drawing points. I have installed a more discreet table in a private upper room in the Bunch of Grapes a few years earlier.

On May 10, two days before these meetings (and two days following the selectmen’s request to Dr. John Clark to inspect the ship), Captain Durell discharged three able seamen from his ship, apparently no longer quite able. “Unserviceable” was what he noted in the paybook against the names of two strangers (as Boston called noncitizens): Gilbert Anthony and John Wilkinson. It was not a remark Durell handed out with frequency. Save for one further man, on June 1, 1721, he did not use it again while in command of the Seahorse (though in 1723, he discharged several men for “Sickness”). The third man, James Mansell, had joined the ship in Boston and was probably a local. He was discharged by request (Durell’s standard, almost unvaried, reason for discharges that were not straight to other navy ships). I have equated these three sailors with the “two or three” men Dr. Clark reported sick aboard the Seahorse. Discharging them at this time would have removed the evidence for quarantine, just before Dr. Clark was to make his formal report on May 12.

There were many reasons a man might be discharged as unserviceable: weakness due to scurvy, syphilis, or any of a host of chronic diseases common to sailors, or debilitating injury, for example. Captain Durell did not, however, use this explanation outside the limits of the dates his ship stood in Boston Harbor, suspected of carrying smallpox and admitting nothing. Furthermore, May 10—ten days into a port call and nowhere near departure—seems odd timing for discovering men to be unserviceable. Outside fingers pointing at the ship as the bearer of smallpox make this disease a very strong candidate as the culprit.

The two “strangers” were later warned to leave town—as were all indigents whose welfare Boston did not see it had any responsibility to underwrite. However, Wilkinson was not told to leave until May 19, and Anthony not until May 23: depending on the stage of smallpox they may have reached by May 10, these are dates consistent with recovery and release from quarantine.

On the fourteenth of May, Durell noted Joseph May’s death in the paybook, once again giving no explanation. It may have been a coincidence that he died the very day that the ship moved out to an anchorage off Bird Island. However, sheer numbers suggest that May had gone ashore a few days earlier with most of the rest of his shipmates; in that case, he may well have only been discovered to be dead the day that the ship was to leave. Given the town’s fears, I have presumed there would have been a dockside search for any and all missing Seahorses.

With nigh on half her complement of men away, the Seahorse would have needed some help to weigh anchor and maneuver with precision through the sea lanes and shoals of the inner harbor, even if the remaining half of her sailors had all been hale, hearty, and truly able. Captain Timothy Clark and a body of Boston’s civilian mariners helped remove the Seahorse to Bird Island in accordance with the selectmen’s request, and were duly paid for their help.

The newspaper reported the door-to-door search of the town on May 20. I have added the hogreeves to the list of officers included in the search: mostly because I find the need to elect a body of hog catchers each year both amusing and highly descriptive of Boston’s street life.

Cotton Mather’s third wife, Lydia, was a strong-willed woman, accustomed to luxury and pampering; it is possible that she was just fed up to the screaming point with Dr. Mather, and he assumed that displeasure with him must stem from madness or possession. However, the fact that he sent his two much-loved daughters to live out of the house in order to escape their stepmother suggests that the problem was not merely sweetness and light gone a little sour in the face of rigid piety. Lizzy, like Sammy, was Mather’s child by his second wife, Elizabeth, née Clark, sister of Dr. John Clark and Selectman William Clark. At this time, Lizzy was living with her uncle John and his family. Although Mather did not divulge his source for the information that smallpox was loose in the town by May 26, his daughter is an obvious link to the man most likely to know.

All Mather’s trials, his fears of smallpox hovering near, as well as his feelings of triumph and tribulation in communing with angels, are to be found in his diaries, voluminous writings, and Kenneth Silverman’s biography. As much as possible, I have kept close to Mather’s language in trying to follow his thoughts. In particular, I have dipped into another long diary entry for May 28. Mather himself named the smallpox “a destroying angel,” which he imagined looming over the town. For others, this might have been a poetic metaphor. Mather, however, is more likely to have meant it to approximate truth: he believed in angels and demons who could wield fiery swords and golden voices both for good and for ill.

Mather’s writings on smallpox across the spring and summer of 1721 present quite a tangle. The clearest unraveling is George Lyman Kittredge’s article, “Some Lost Works of Cotton Mather.” I have followed his lead with one major exception. Kittredge argues that Mather wrote only one letter to the physicians, while he manifestly wrote two. The first, requesting a meeting, he wrote on June 6. Its dated conclusion was reprinted twice in the ensuing pamphlet wars; that is the piece quoted here, via Isaac Greenwood. Apparently circulated in a single copy, the letter went first to Dr. Nathanael Williams (identified as a schoolmaster/physician) with a specific plea to forward it on to Dr. William Douglass, among others.

Kittredge believed that this letter included a transcript, or at least a lengthy abridgment, of both Timonius and Pylarinus. I think it more likely that this first letter was relatively short, requesting a meeting to read and discuss the articles in question. Mather certainly disseminated such transcripts, but I think he did so much later in the month. See the notes to “Fathers and Sons.”

At this point, Dr. Mather canvassed Boston’s black population, with a clear interest in people born in Africa. He later claimed there was “an army of Africans” who could attest to the practice of inoculation; Douglass scoffed that there were only six or ten. The unnamed black man’s description of the African practice appears in Mather’s treatise on smallpox, later included as the twenty-second chapter of his medical magnum opus, The Angel of Bethesda. Other men might have produced such broken English as mockery of African ignorance; that kind of humor was beyond Mather’s ken. Given his fascination with both the subject and its origins, this quotation is likely to be as close to word for word as he could get: and where language was concerned, Mather could get pretty close.

Some scholars have assumed this description came from Onesimus. I find that unlikely: Mather did not produce it for Dr. Woodward’s perusal in his letter of July 1716 to the Royal Society, when Onesimus was his one and only direct source. Furthermore, by 1721 Onesimus had long since bought his freedom and was no longer living under Mather’s roof. While I do not know that the reverend interviewed the free black men sent out to clean the streets in late May, they are one obvious source for his queries. (Onesimus was not one of them.)

Demonic Wings

I have drawn Dr. Douglass’s attitudes toward Boston, Bostonians, money, smallpox, his fellow physicians, and especially Cotton Mather from his own writings, using his words where possible. Though his knowledge on many topics was encyclopedic, the man was hard pressed to write a single sentence that did not drip with scorn; where his reputation was concerned, he was prone to paranoia.

Douglass was also, however, a superb observer of both nature and human affairs, especially in the fields of medicine and botany; geography, weather, and history were also pet topics. Most of the statistical data about Boston’s 1721 outbreak of “natural” smallpox (as opposed to inoculated smallpox) comes from his pen. In particular, he stressed the eighteen-day span from “seizure to seizure” as the disease spread.

For all his richly attested disagreeableness, Douglass seems to have been right about the eighteen days. This time span jibes with what’s known about the transmission of small-pox: from one person’s “seizure” (by which he probably meant the onset of the first fever) to the appearance of the rash takes about three days. After that, it takes roughly another three days for the pocks inside the nose, mouth, and throat to mature and begin to burst: at which point, the ill person spews thick clouds of smallpox virus with every breath. Anyone vulnerable who breathes in that infection then has about twelve days of symptomless incubation before their own “seizure” or onset of the first fever—for a total of eighteen days. Measured from rash to rash, as I have done here, the span is the same as from fever to fever. All the different stages, of course, can vary somewhat in length. Also, patients remain infectious for a long time beyond day three of their rashes, and they can become infectious earlier. As Douglass himself noted, the pattern of widening rings of infection is easiest to see at the start of an epidemic.

Boylston, Mather, and others wrote that Douglass retrieved from Mather the volumes containing the Timonius and Pylarinus articles, and that he locked them up, refusing to let anyone else, even the governor, so much as peek at them. This must have occurred after June 6, when Mather first spread their contents abroad, and before June 23, when Mather sent his treatise out to the physicians—after which such hoarding would presumably have lost most of its point.

Mather sent his first letter, summoning the physicians to a meeting, to Dr. Nathanael Williams, with a particular request to forward it to Dr. Douglass. (Apparently, it was a single copy meant to circulate among the town’s physicians.) Williams’s compliance with this request seems the most likely avenue for Douglass’s discovery of Mather’s meddling. As no one else seems to have seen the letter (other than Mather’s later defenders, who likely had access to the author’s draft copy), it seems reasonable to suppose that it was Douglass who squelched it, along with stopping the circulation of the books.

Douglass is not known to have possessed a house of his own before 1724. (Possibly, his profits from this epidemic materially helped him toward that purchase.) There are passing references in early histories to him living in rooms in the Green Dragon; later, he bought the entire building, though it seems he did not live there at that time. He mocked Zabdiel Boylston for riding horseback, implying that a carriage was more proper to a physician’s status; presumably, therefore, he kept one himself. Given his concern with appearances, and with the appurtenances of rank, I have assumed that he also kept at least one slave, though there are no details; certainly, to keep a coach meant keeping at the very least one servant as driver and groom. Again, his mockery of Boylston and Mather reveals that he had no high opinion of African thought or practices.

In reverse, mockery aimed at Douglass suggests that he spoke with a strong Scottish accent, peppering his sentences with obviously Scottish vocabulary.

A number of witnesses said that the next “parcel” of smallpox rashes appeared in the middle of June; Douglass specified the “change of the moon, middle of June.” The new moon occurred on June 13. People then began fleeing the town in droves; Douglass claims that the refugees numbered in the thousands. As with refugee situations throughout history, housing prices in the suddenly desirable areas no doubt saw a significant spike.

The Boylstons’ relationship is almost completely hidden from history. Jerusha, however, did leave town with the girls soon after the guards were taken off the houses in mid-June. It would appear that Tommy and John, as well as the young slave Jackey, were left behind in Boston with Zabdiel and his adult slave Jack (Jackey’s father). Zabdiel junior seems to have been living outside the house, possibly already at college in Cambridge.

Zabdiel never clearly says where the girls went, or why the boys stayed. I have deduced that the women and girls fled to Roxbury from the following: Tom Boylston’s wife Sarah was pregnant when the epidemic broke out, making her a high risk for complications. In October, she gave birth at “her lodgings” in Roxbury; at least two of Zabdiel’s and Tom’s nieces, the daughters of two different sisters, were present in the same house. Twenty-year-old Mary Lane seems to have been a fellow Bostonian. Rebecca Abbot, eleven, however, lived with her parents (Zabdiel’s sister Rebecca and brother-in-law William) in Roxbury. It would seem, then, that many of the female relatives were gathered at one house in Roxbury as far out as October 1721. Since one of these families was resident in Roxbury, it may well have been their home. I have sent Jerusha and her three daughters to this same household, though it is possible the Boylston women were spread through several homes, or that Jerusha and her girls stayed with Minot relatives in Dorchester.

Until the disease spread from Boston into Roxbury, Zabdiel seems never to have gone there. After that point, however, he spent a great deal of time riding back and forth, as well as to adjacent Dorchester. He sporadically traveled to Charlestown, where his brother Richard lived, and to Cambridge, but his travels to Roxbury curtailed his house visits in these towns. He never, however, seems to have gone as far as his native Brookline (where two more brothers lived). Though he may have gone to Roxbury purely for medical business, it does seem that there was some other draw pulling him there, over and above Boston’s other equally panicked neighbors.

Overcrowding in their country retreat seems as likely a reason as any for Jerusha leaving the boys behind. At thirteen, John was of an age to be expected to make himself useful. Six-year-old Tommy and two-and-a-half-year-old Jackey, however, are unlikely to have been held back voluntarily. In the normal pattern of everyday life, boys that young would have spent most their time with the women and other children. Apart from Zabdiel’s fears for them, they would have been an unusual burden, just when he had no time to spare. Indeed, Benjamin Colman, whose house looked onto the Boylston garden, noted that the doctor’s children were “too much exposed and neglected”—and in fact ran a little wild—due to Zabdiel’s long hours away tending the sick.

Apparently, no one else was around to look after them either. From this, it has also seemed reasonable to suppose that Jack was out helping Zabdiel during the day, and that Moll was sent off to Roxbury to do for Jerusha and the girls, as well as to escape contagion herself.

Tommy and Jackey play games they are likely to have played: Jerusha Minot’s home had indeed been attacked by a lone Indian and defended by a servant maid in the manner described. No laughing matter now, but it was surely a story the family children knew well and enjoyed the way American children later played cowboys and Indians. In 1721, Captain Bartholomew Roberts was the reigning terror of the seas, already legendary as an order-loving but flamboyant and sometimes heroic king of pirates, as revered by his men as feared by his foes. “Black Bart” was one of his nicknames; “the Great Pirate Roberts” was another. “The Dread Pirate Roberts” is a small bit of homage to William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. Pirates were all over the Boston newspapers throughout May and June 1721; Roberts made a particular splash in the Boston News-Letter of May 15. Not quite a year later, in February 1722, he was killed off West Africa in action against the Royal Navy.

Mather noted his composition of both the smallpox treatise and the second letter in his diary. He also, the day before, noted his intention to help Dr. Perkins to some business. Touting Perkins seems as likely an avenue as any for the minister’s discovery that his first letter had run afoul of Douglass, producing, as he later said, a fair amount of talk in the town, as well as his own clear determination that the second letter should not similarly go astray.

Fathers and Sons

Boylston’s description of his first three inoculations is a pretty bald statement of what he did to whom, and when. I have brought his sketch to life by adding particulars that fit with what we know of the man, his family, and Boston and its environs at that time.

Almost the only thing we know about him as a man, apart from what can be gleaned from his scientific writings and genealogy, is his extraordinary love for his horses. Even in an age when horses were a regular part of everyday life, he had a reputation as an unusually skilled horseman. I have given him, therefore, a trait of all the true horsemen and -women I have known: he seeks out a favorite horse when troubled and finds that his mind and heart settle to clarity while riding.

The landscape he rides through has almost entirely disappeared. Nineteenth-century Bostonians quite literally moved mountains: Beacon Hill, in Boylston’s day mostly covered by fields and woods, has been significantly lowered; the other two peaks of the Tri-mountain or Tremount (from which Tremont Street takes its name) have been leveled, their earth sunk into the tidal basin of the Charles River to create the area now called the Back Bay. Present-day Washington Street follows the line of the old road south out of town (it was then called Orange Street), across the Neck, and into Roxbury.

Boylston agonized over the safety of his children, acutely aware that he would likely bring the infection home from the sickrooms in which he was spending so much time. The fact that none of the boys fell ill until he deliberately infected them, however, strongly suggests that he was scrupulously clean and possibly observed some kind of quarantine himself. Though no one understood how or why, it was well known that infected people and clothing (including wigs) could spread smallpox. I have therefore made him particular about washing up and changing his clothes on coming home.

Mather’s letter to Boylston survived long enough to be printed in 1789; I’ve quoted it in full, altering only some punctuation for readability, and adding the word Guramantees. (The letter’s editor notes an “illegible” word at the point where similar sentences in both the treatise written two days before and the letter to Dr. Woodward in 1716 have “Guramantees” or “Garamantese”—an obscure enough word to merit confusion, over and above messy or cramped writing in what was then already an old sheet of paper.) This letter reads like a form letter, and intimates an enclosure. Dated June 24, 1721, the day after Mather noted in his diary that he was composing a letter to the town’s physicians, in turn the day after he noted writing his treatise upon smallpox, I have assumed that these are all related. This date is far more consistent than the first letter’s (June 6) with Boylston’s claim that he began the experiment “after short consideration.”

While it is impossible to know the shape of Mather’s smallpox treatise exactly (it grew over time), I have followed Kittredge in supposing that the Angel of Bethesda’s smallpox chapter, “Variolae trimphatae,” is a fair approximation. It is this that I have Boylston read.

Boylston’s relationship to his slaves is unknown. On the one hand, he did not admit discussing inoculation with Jack in any detail. On the other, most of his published writings were composed as defenses of inoculation, and one of the charges he continually had to answer was a too credulous trust in blacks. Nevertheless, he proved the one man in Boston willing to trust African-born blacks’ stories of inoculation (reinforced by the Royal Society) to the point of risking his children’s lives. Jack is the obvious person for him to have questioned first in whatever investigations he made about African medicine.

We don’t know anything about Jack other than his name, age, and inoculation experience. In Boston, domestic slaves generally lived with their masters as a part of the family (which then indicated everyone regularly living together in a household, not just the immediate blood and marriage relations of the patriarch). In the more humane households (Judge Samuel Sewall’s, for example), slaves were certainly on familiar terms with the rest of the family and intimately trusted. Many enslaved blacks seem to have known their masters quite well. Indeed, most probably knew their masters far more intimately than anyone else did, except possibly spouses; certainly far better than their masters knew them. This is the sort of relationship I have tried to paint between Zabdiel Boylston and Jack.

Boylston probably spoke to as many African-born blacks as possible between receiving Mather’s letter on June 24 and inoculating Tommy, Jack, and Jackey on the twenty-sixth. Prizing firsthand examination of evidence, Boylston was later extremely frustrated by his fellow physicians’ unwillingness to visit his inoculated patients. That attitude strongly suggests that he would have made every effort to consult witnesses and survivors of the operation before trying it. In his section of Some Account, he quotes the same black man that Mather does in his smallpox treatise. Boylston almost certainly relied upon Mather’s transcription, though he translated it into more standard English. He may have merely taken the quotation from the minister. Boylston’s commentary on the story is different from Mather’s, however, and it seems equally likely that he heard the same story from the same source.

As much as possible, the thoughts and debates that Boylston holds with himself are based on his own writings.

The scene of the dying woman entering Boylston’s shop is based on the defense of his experiment published in the anonymous Vindication of the Ministers of Boston (possibly by Cotton Mather):

 

He had just reason to apprehend [his family] in danger of being infected the common way: and here I cannot omit to observe the happy juncture of affairs that united to render this his attempt innocent and blameless. The worthy TOWNS-MEN had taken the Guards off the Infected houses, and in effect proclaimed the infection so prevalent, that ’twould be in vain to strive to suppress it. By this act, the nurses were commissioned to air themselves, who had been stifled for a considerable time by a close confinement with the sick: Liberty was declared to them to walk the streets; and now as the necessities of the sick urged, these infected persons might go to our doctors upon any occasion; and any heedless or headstrong neighbours run in to visit their contagious friends; which must necessarily render their families very obnoxious to the distemper. This clearly evinces the eminency of the danger his [i.e., Dr. Boylston’s] family was in; and in a great measure vindicates his procedure.

 

When he actually performed the operation, Zabdiel at first followed Timonius’s instructions to the letter, including the bit of walnut shell as a shieldlike dressing—though he soon substituted cabbage leaves. Mather records that the doctor inoculated one of his first three patients in the neck; I have given him reason to do so.

At 6:00 A.M. on June 26, 1721—the very day that Dr. Boylston began inoculating—Captain Durell did indeed gather his guns aboard HMS Seahorse; soon after 10:00 A.M. he fired off a fifteen-gun salute in the harbor. The master’s log credits a celebration of “the young princesse’s [sic] birthday.” The birthday of King George I’s granddaughter Princess Caroline, at that time his youngest, was June 10 reckoned by Britain’s Old Style or June 21 in the Gregorian New Style, as observed in Hanover where she was born. These two dates were often confused by her grandfather’s British subjects. By June 26, though, either date would appear to have been more of an excuse for gun practice than anything else.

I cannot say for certain whether Dr. Boylston met Dr. Douglass that day, or whether they ever discussed inoculation in private. However, since Douglass seems to have taken upon himself the job of orchestrating opposition to Mather’s story even before he knew it had been put into practice, it seems at least plausible that he canvassed Boylston among Boston’s other medical men, only to find he was too late. I’ve written this scene to illustrate not only the two doctors’ incipient antagonism, but other known defining (and mutually antagonistic) attitudes: as noted before, Douglass looked down his nose at Boylston’s habit of making rounds on horseback. Conversely, Boston’s streets gave Boylston (and anybody else in a real hurry) a cogent reason for choosing to ride, above and beyond sheer love of being on the back of a horse. The origin of Boston’s streets in cow-paths is a joke of three centuries’ standing; in the early eighteenth century, these famously “crooked and narrow” roads were often cut by open ditches and clogged with wayward traffic. (For those at wit’s end over the Big Dig: Nothing changes under the Boston sun. Throughout the eighteenth century, the minutes of both town meetings and selectmen’s meetings are strewn with complaints about the state of the roads, as well as notes on permits to dig them up.)

I’ve drawn the core of Douglass’s expressions from a letter he wrote at the end of July, when he gloated over having cured a lady whose case was tricky; her cure, he said, had brought him wide patronage. In the same letter, he used the phrase Make hay while the sun shines in regard to Boston’s epidemic, along with the Latin phrase Hoc age, meaning “Do this! Apply yourself to what is at hand!” I’ve substituted carpe diem—“Seize the day!”—because it is better known nowadays and in this context, at least, means roughly the same thing.

Conversely, Boylston seems to have regarded the epidemic with unremitting horror. Though frustration at times pushed him into mockery of his opponents, there is no comparable instance of him making light of the epidemic itself, much less exulting in it—though he, too, stood to make a great deal of money out of the disaster.

Douglass later bandied about the notion that Boylston had not treated a single case of smallpox when he began inoculation; I’ve given him at least a dubious basis for making such an unlikely claim. There is no precise record of either the numbers or the timing of Boylston’s patients suffering from naturally contracted smallpox. However, Boylston’s defenders, Benjamin Colman chief among them, retorted that he had both more experience and more success than any other doctor in town, with the possible exception of John Clark.

Boylston, Mather, and Hutchinson all wrote about the tremendous clamor in the streets as the town discovered what the doctor had done. To judge by his surgical daring and his horsemanship, Boylston was not a timid man. Nevertheless he repeatedly said he was frightened by both his son’s uncontrollable fever and “the clamour, or rather rage of the people against” the new practice. Family legend, recorded by Zabdiel’s great-nephew, Ward Nicholas Boylston (grandson of Zabdiel’s brother Tom), has it that mobs “patrolled the town in parties with halters, threatening to hang him on the nearest tree.” Though Ward Nicholas got many of his facts muddled, this one seems a realistic image of outraged clamor that might have shocked even a risk-taking man like his great-uncle.

The analogy between Zabdiel’s life and the story of Abraham and Isaac is close enough that it might well have seemed inescapable to anyone, like Zabdiel, who had grown up amid the Puritan exhortations to apply the Bible to one’s own experience.

As is so often the case, fact proves at least as quirky as fiction: from his house at the far end of the Boylstons’ garden, the Reverend Colman witnessed Tommy trying to cool himself off under the pump, and Lieutenant Hamilton did indeed name a slave Cotton Mather, entering him into the Seahorse’s muster as his personal servant on July 2, 1721. The original Cotton Mather did not find out until the following December; he assumed it was meant as an insult.

Salutation Alley

The main events of this chapter—Tommy’s recovery, the Seahorse’s departure, the various inoculations and warnings, and even Joshua Cheever’s firefighting—are all documented. The details, especially the emotional connections, have to be inferred from the silences between Zabdiel Boylston’s rather terse lines.

Tommy’s temperature did suddenly go down on the morning of July 4, after his father gave him a “gentle” vomit; in all likelihood, the fever’s nosedive was due to the natural course of smallpox rather than to Boylston’s treatment.

While I do not know that Benjamin Colman took part in whatever celebrations shook the Boylston household after Tommy’s fever went off, he did become one of Boylston’s earliest and staunchest supporters—as well as his most convincing. Colman’s elegance, moderation, and popularity with women have all been richly attested. As the Boylstons were part of his congregation, he would have been responsible for their spiritual welfare during this crisis.

On Tommy and Jackey’s course through the smallpox, Boylston wrote only that on the fourth day “a kind and favourable Small-Pox came out, of about an hundred a piece; after which their circumstances became easy, our trouble was over, and they were soon well.” It cannot, however, have seemed so carefree before he possessed the rose-colored glasses of hindsight, especially in light of Tommy’s extreme first fever. Boylston did not inoculate anyone else until Joshua Cheever on July 12. By count of days through a typical case of discrete smallpox, that was the earliest point at which he might have been all but certain that both Tommy and Jackey would escape the second fever altogether, to survive without permanent damage.

As with Lady Mary, I’ve drawn details of Tommy’s case (especially the timing and the particular look of the rash) from Ricketts, whose in-depth description of a light case of discrete smallpox with no secondary fever closely matches the outlines of Tommy’s experience as sketched by Boylston. Even more intriguingly, Ricketts’s description of “modified” smallpox—cases suffered by patients still partially shielded by long-past vaccinations whose protective mechanisms had partly to mostly worn off—also closely resemble Boylston’s descriptions of inoculated smallpox. Both were marked by unusual speed in the progress of the disease, as well as by light rashes resembling the chicken pox; both rarely exhibited the fearful secondary fever common in cases of “natural” smallpox.

George Stewart was, as noted, a Scottish surgeon who had married the daughter of Boylston’s mentor; professional rivalry goes a long way toward explaining their quick drift into loggerheads. Stewart later wrote a letter to Dr. William Wagstaffe of London in defense of his opposition to inoculation, noting that Boylston had privately admitted to him that his son came close to dying during the first fever. His propensity for pessimism, snide gossip, and defamation is made abundantly clear in an anti-inoculation column he later wrote for the New-England Courant. I have built the encounter between him and Boylston from these hints.

In his writings on inoculation, Boylston never pointed out Cheever as a friend; however, he did not point out any of his relations, including his brother Tom, as family either. On the other hand, he did include a few more details about Cheever’s life (the firefighting, for example) than he did about most other patients. Just as many of the first inoculees in London have traceable connections to Lady Mary or the Princess of Wales, many of Boston’s inoculees have connections to Boylston. I’ve surmised that both Cheever and Helyer belong among this group—as his friends—chiefly because, outside his family, they were the only two people he inoculated before publicly announcing his experiment. Furthermore, both were men close to him in age and socioeconomic status, and so far as can be traced, Cheever appears to have been, like Boylston, more of an active than a contemplative man.

Outside his family, all Boylston’s earliest inoculees—with the exception of John Helyer—have clear ties to homes, jobs, or close family in or near Salutation Alley, to the Salutation Inn at the eastern end of the lane, or to the New North Church at its western end (at Hanover Street). Cheever, for example, lived on the south side of the alley and was a deacon of the New North. Joseph Webb lived one street farther south, on White Bread Alley, and was also a deacon of the New North. His older brother John was the patriarch of the Webb clan (though at sixty-seven, he seems to have been a little frail, and if the opposition was right, may possibly have been senile); his eldest surviving son was the Reverend John Webb, first pastor of the New North.

I have surmised that John Helyer, a member of Mather’s Old North Church, was a part of this same close-knit group of people. See the notes to “Signs and Wonders” for more details.

Salutation Alley still exists, though it has long since graduated to the status of “street.” The winding dockside road that Boylston knew as Ann, Fish, and Ship Streets (and I have condensed to the single name of Ship Street) is now called North Street; it is considerably farther in from the shore than it once was. The taverns and inns named here are all known to have stretched in this order along the North End’s wharfs at this period, or shortly afterward.

The anti-inoculators later insisted that Cheever and Helyer had pressed Boylston to inoculate them out of desperation, presumably stemming from known exposure to the disease. Boylston eventually inoculated both Cheever and his “lad”—a servant, slave, or apprentice, as he had no children—but not his wife. As with Jerusha Boylston, this implies that Sarah Cheever had either already survived smallpox, or had come down with it before Boylston was willing to inoculate anyone beyond the bounds of his own family. The latter possibility reconciles her own failure to be inoculated with her husband’s desperate insistence upon it; furthermore, they lived in Salutation Alley, which was particularly hard hit by this epidemic.

In Massachusetts, public days of fasting, prayer, and humiliation were, by 1721, a traditional response to catastrophes ranging from smallpox to fire to menacing weather, dating back to an era when the iron piety of the Puritan ministers ruled the colony of Massachusetts Bay. July 13, 1721, however, was marked as much or more by political in-fighting as by devotion.

Boylston wrote that he had been given three warnings before appearing at the selectmen’s meeting to discuss the dangers of inoculation on July 21. He did not say who delivered the warnings, or how.

The selectmen did meet on July 17, the last day of the brief adjournment the House had granted itself. Though no official discussion of inoculation was entered in the minutes, the three warnings to Boylston, plus the selectmen’s well-organized and united resistance suggest strongly that they came to some kind of off-the-record agreement. The meeting that brought Boylston before all seven selectmen, several justices of the peace, and the town’s physicians was likewise left out of the minutes for July 21.

No record of Jerusha Boylston’s response to her husband’s experiment on Tommy survives. The fact that all three of their daughters were home to be inoculated in one day about a month later, however, suggests that she cooperated, and very likely approved of his actions.

Prying Multitudes

Young Mary’s rash did indeed erupt after only one night of moderate fever. Lady Mary’s dream, however, comes from my own imagination, spun from Dryden’s smallpox elegy and the classical tales that she loved.

Maitland identified none of his hard-won witnesses by name, noting only that “Three learned physicians of the college were admitted, one after another, to visit the young lady; they are all gentlemen of honour, and will on all occasions declare, as they have hitherto done, that they saw Miss Wortley playing about the room, cheerful and well, with the small pox rais’d upon her; and that in a few days after she perfectly recovr’d of them.”

Dr. Walter Harris later identified himself in his own writing; he also recorded the number of little Mary’s pocks. Dr. Keith’s identity is clear from Maitland’s notes on inoculating the doctor’s son Peter, submitted to the Royal Society as a part of James Jurin’s later project to apply statistics to the study of inoculation’s efficacy. Keith’s quick decision was no doubt hurried along by the fact that his family had proved achingly vulnerable to smallpox.

Wortley family tradition said that four physicians served as witnesses; Maitland had three. I have inferred Sir Hans Sloane as the third man and Dr. Steigerthal as the possible fourth. Sir Hans had long been gathering information on inoculation in the form of letters and testimony from abroad; by June if not before, he had become the driving force behind medical and scientific interest in the operation. As the king’s personal physician, he was the liaison between the court and the medical profession. As president of the Royal College of Physicians, he certainly fell under Maitland’s rubric of “learned physicians of the college.” Dr. Steigerthal had followed the king to England from Hanover at royal request; from beginning to end, he was almost as closely involved in the royal consideration of inoculation as Sir Hans.

Dr. Mead had been Lady Mary’s family physician since before she had suffered small-pox herself; Dr. Arbuthnot was a good friend. Though she was suspicious of medical men in general, it seems likely that her own familiar doctors would have been on hand as consultants throughout young Mary’s bout with inoculated smallpox.

I’ve drawn the scene of Lady Mary and Mr. Maitland witnessing the witnesses from what is known about the doctors in question, inflected by attitudes that the two speakers displayed in their own writings. That Lady Mary and Mr. Maitland had something of a comfortable relationship is apparent from her long-standing willingness to trust the man with the lives of her children, and by the fact that he could coax her, at least occasionally, from adamant opposition into agreement with his actions and assessments.

As much as possible, Maitland’s thoughts follow the paths and even the words he laid out in Mr. Maitland’s Account of Inoculating the Small Pox, published in 1722.

As for Lady Mary’s other visitors at this time, Maitland identified them only as “several ladies, and other persons of distinction.” Lord and Lady Townshend, however, are likely candidates, as they were close friends. Lord Townshend was, as later described, the minister who procured legal clearance for the prison experiment. Among the many friends that Lady Mary and the Princess of Wales shared, I have chosen two: Elizabeth Sackville, duchess of Dorset, and Charlotte (Monck) Tichborne were both confidantes of Princess Caroline, and both girlhood friends of Lady Mary.

It is impossible, now, to trace with any accuracy the scheming that went on in the effort to bring the prison experiment into being, though clearly there was more than a little. Genevieve Miller would have it that the physicians, especially Sir Hans Sloane, were almost solely responsible. Contemporary writers in a position to know, including Maitland and Sloane, give much of the credit to Lady Mary and Caroline, Princess of Wales. Lord Townshend and the Whig ministry also had some part in it. I think it most likely that all these people were deeply involved, for many different reasons, ranging from scientific and medical, to personal and familial, to political. I have followed those who were there in giving to the Princess of Wales much of the credit for organizing the concerted push for the experiments.

The process by which the king came to his decision is obscure. It seems likely, though, that he would have asked the two Turks he knew best—Mehemet and Mustafa. By 1721, they had been with him for years (many more years than he had been king, in fact). They went everywhere with him, including driving in the park and attending the opera, and they could and did enter into quasi-familiar conversations with the king and the courtiers who surrounded him.

People who considered inoculation seriously almost all shared two experiences: first, they themselves had suffered a serious bout of smallpox (as had Zabdiel Boylston, Lady Mary, and the Princess of Wales), or had lost or nearly lost a loved one to it (as had Jerusha Boylston, Lady Mary, the Princess of Wales, and Dr. Keith). Second, they also tended to know one of the early inoculators well. I see no reason to think that in this matter King George would have been different from anyone else. In the absence of Lady Mary’s diaries, I have no proof that he spoke to her in person about the proposed prison experiment. On balance, though, given the facts that they were on speaking terms, and that interest in inoculation seems to have been driven more strongly by personal relationships and trust than by anything else (except possibly desperation), it would be stranger if the king had not consulted Lady Mary, than if he had.

An Infusion of Malignant Filth

Five years after the fact, this meeting still made Boylston steam under the collar. Though the selectmen called the meeting, they did not record it in their minutes. A close approximation of what went on that day can be gleaned from the writings of both Douglass and Boylston, along with others who rushed to defend one side or the other. For example, on the subject of African inoculation being a common success, Boylston wrote: “I have as full evidence of this, as I have that there are lions in Africa. And I don’t know why ’tis more unlawful to learn of Africans how to help against the poison of the Small Pox, than it is to learn of our Indians how to help against the Poison of a Rattle-snake.” Piecing together real sneers and points made by Douglass, I have reconstructed a line of argument that culminates in such comments.

Dr. Douglass’s arguments are marked by arrogant erudition and gleeful revelry in slander. In contrast, Boylston’s arguments and rebuttals are marked by a wry humor as well as frustration, though it is clear that the plague argument made him lose his temper.

Douglass laid out his line of thought in a letter published in the Boston News-Letter three days later, on Monday, July 24; the letter, however, is dated July 20, 1721—a day before the meeting. This suggests that Dr. Douglass had advance warning in order to plan his attack; the content suggests that he had every expectation of conquest. He was almost certainly the orchestrator of the opposition at this meeting: Within days, and for the remainder of the controversy, he was the acknowledged leader of the anti-inoculators. That he already held this position by the time of this meeting is further attested by the fact that he was the interrogator and translator of Dr. Dalhonde. (Though Douglass did not sign his name to his inoculation publications until decades later, his veil of anonymity was transparent. Both his contemporaries and modern scholars have identified him as the author of the works I cite as his.)

Boylston’s rebuttal was not published until a month later, in Some Account of What Is Said of Innoculating or Transplanting the Small Pox. In the second section of that pamphlet, he refutes many of Douglass’s arguments point by point.

For both men, I’ve also relied on later writings that elucidate arguments suggested in these earlier pieces, especially when they do so in pungent language.

I present nowhere near all Dr. Douglass’s many objections against inoculation, though I have touched upon those he hit hardest (that it amounted to poison, infringed on God’s Providence, produced the plague, and was the product of lies and foolish dreams on the part of Africans, “Asiaticks,” and women). Many of his arguments, however, quibbled with word choice and editing decisions in Dr. Mather’s (slightly) abridged translation of the two papers from the Philosophical Transactions. While some of this is interesting if you have side-by-side texts in front of you, mostly it’s mind-numbingly petty. I have tried to convey this pettiness in his stance toward Dr. Boylston: in his refusal, for example, to acknowledge Boylston as “Dr.” (amply demonstrated in his writings, when he could bring himself to refer to Boylston by name at all; usually he preferred epithets like “the Inoculator,” which he clearly regarded as a slur).

In opposing inoculation, Douglass operated at least as much by vicious personal attack as he did by reasoned argument against the procedure. Besides slandering Boylston, he repeatedly defamed the Greek women and the Africans whose testimony Boylston had accepted. The slurs included here are direct quotes or close paraphrases of Douglass’s own words. The exceptions are the dismissive references to black Africans as “idiots” who used language blunderingly. These appear in one of Boylston’s statements in Some Account.

Boylston was no saint; he was a slave-owner throughout his life. I’ve found no other instance, however, of his unprovoked use of such derogatory language. Furthermore, he alone had credited African experience enough to stake his child’s life on it. In the context of the many arguments presented at this meeting and directly afterward, this particular statement reads to me as a mimicking reply to a particular challenge; since Dr. Douglass repeatedly used such language in making similar challenges, I’ve put this one into his mouth.

George Stewart recorded that the first part of the meeting devolved into a morass of squabbling in which Boylston was repeatedly asked whether inoculation was infallible, or whether people “might not die by it”—to which he repeatedly replied “that persons might die by a vomit or a purge” too. This did not satisfy the doctors, wrote Stewart, so “after a long debate, Mr. Dalohonde was called upon to say what he thought of it.” As Dalhonde is said to have been called for at four o’clock and the standard dinner hour of the day was at two, I have made the company break for dinner.

Boylston attached a copy of an official transcript of Dalhonde’s testimony to the end of his Historical Account; I have followed it, wherever possible, word for word, though I’ve loosened it up to wind it into the scene at hand, changing expressions that are incomprehensible without a medical dictionary, or that sound stilted to modern ears. From Boylston’s later writings, it seems clear that he was blindsided by the plague argument, as well as by the fury of the opposition.

Dr. Douglass’s use of the plague argument was entirely disingenuous. Both Mather and Boylston knew that smallpox and plague were unrelated, as did most medical theory of the day. It defies belief that Douglass did not, especially since, outside inoculation, his medical writing stressed the careful differentiation of diseases. Furthermore, Douglass was for the most part careful to use the smallpox-triggers-plague argument by suggestion rather than by direct argument. He carefully excised it from the anti-inoculation tracts he published in London.

While I can’t definitely finger him as the source of the plague stories in the Boston News-Letter and later in the New-England Courant, they all lead up to—and away from—the double dark stars of Dalhonde’s testimony (which he seems to have organized) and the letter he published July 24 in the Boston News-Letter. The Scots Charitable Society linked the owner of this paper with Douglass and George Stewart, the other leading anti-inoculation physician, also Scottish; its meetings seem a likely means of transmission.

Dr. Douglass’s summation speech is a patchwork of actual statements, again edited for modern readability. The physicians’ resolution appears in the appendix to Boylston’s book along with Dalhonde’s testimony. Its style and wording, including the introduction as the resolution of Boston’s “medical practitioners” (the highest designation Douglass could bring himself to give Boston’s other doctors) suggest that Douglass wrote it.

Cotton Mather wrote that the selectmen threatened Boylston with “indictment for felony.” Douglass repeatedly implied that the felony in question was murder, a capital crime. He also claimed that the selectmen’s decision had been unanimous.

Cheever began erupting on this day, by Boylston’s own count of days from Cheever’s inoculation. In giving Sarah Cheever a fierce case of smallpox and contrasting it to her husband’s experience, I have given local habitation and names to the general contrasts, made often and with marked frustation, by supporters of inoculation. Boylston, Mather, and Colman all pleaded with their opponents to compare the ease of inoculated smallpox with the horrors of “natural” or “common” cases—as they called smallpox acquired in the natural way (by breathing in the virus, though they didn’t know that part).

Finally, Boylston had inoculated Esther Webb’s parents and uncle three days earlier, but not her (or her two younger siblings). I don’t know that he saw her on this evening, but her fate was surely on his mind. For more on her and the Webbs, see the notes to “Signs and Wonders.”

The Castle of Misery

Most of the individual fragments of this chapter are real; I have put them together into a collage that is factual in its pieces, though fictional in many of the precise connections.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Newgate was London’s prison for hard-core violent prisoners, as well as burglars and thieves of all sorts. It had a few wards of debtors as well. Originally built in or near one of the principal gatehouses in the city’s medieval walls, this “Castle of Misery” served (through several rebuildings) as a prison from 1188 until it was torn down in 1902. Its reputation was once as fearsome as those of the Bastille and Devil’s Island.

London’s Weekly Journal or Saturday’s Post recorded that on July 24, 1721, the Prince and Princess of Wales’s physicians, surgeons, and apothecary went to Newgate and picked two men and one woman to participate in the inoculation experiment. The chosen prisoners were removed to the Press Yard, “the most airy part of the prison,” in preparation. At that time, the Press Yard certainly offered the most pleasant digs available in the prison; in normal circumstances, it was reserved for those who could afford its very steep rent.

I have surmised that Maitland was involved in the selection of prisoners, as he was the surgeon in charge of the experiment; Sir Hans Sloane may also have been there. Maitland recorded the names and ages of the six prisoners (the papers got the number wrong), as well as the fact that Evans had had smallpox earlier. (He was probably chosen as a control.)

Mary North was convicted, as noted, for the capital crime of returning to England after being transported, following a previous conviction for “robbing the shop of Mr. Baylis, a linen draper near Cripplegate.” Her particular destination “beyond Sea” is unknown, though Maryland was receiving large numbers of criminal transports at that time. Also as noted, her husband turned her in. John Alcock was probably convicted of horse theft: the newspaper reporting his sentence is torn after the word horse. I have given the others capital crimes that often appear in the Newgate Calendar—the contemporary collection of “true-crime” stories relating the histories of interesting (or “infamous”) prisoners in Newgate. Ann Tompion has been identified as the wife of the famous watchmaker Thomas Tompion. I’ve accepted this ID, though I have been unable to confirm it. Tompion was an unusual name, and while she was very young to have been his wife (he died, aged seventy-four, in 1713), it is likely that she was in some way related. She may have been the wife of the elder Tompion’s nephew by the same name, also a watchmaker.

Elizabeth Harrison drew extra attention and interest from the men orchestrating the experiment, including Maitland and Sloane. I have given her a personality consistent with that interest. I do not know her particular trials and tribulations in prison, but all those mentioned here—the thick layers of lice, the misery of the Stone Hold, the sale of female prisoners to male prisoners, and the hard drinking and gambling in the prison’s own tavern—are well attested at this period. Relatively trustworthy (and probably burly) men were indeed made quasi turnkeys, or wardsmen, by jailers who were chronically understaffed and often unwilling to pay for outside labor. There was also, right around this time, an infamous case of a murderer who cut a prostitute’s throat while she was providing her services. Whether or not these particulars were part of Lizzy’s story, they were certainly part of Newgate’s history at this period.

The details of how the prisoners came to be selected have been lost. Most people, however—including prison doctors and chaplains—avoided entering the common side of the prison when they steeled themselves to enter the place at all. Besides the stench of its open sewers, the continual roaring, and a population of vermin so thick that you could hear it scrabbling on the floor, Newgate was a known breeding ground of both smallpox and typhus, then called jail fever (or ship fever). I’ve surmised that a number of prisoners were hauled out to some “airy” part of the prison for the inspection, and that even then, the inspectors maintained some distance.

One of the attending physicians noted that prisoners who were not part of the experiment tormented those who were with tales that the smallpox experiment was a sham, and that the doctors meant to drain their blood.

Signs and Wonders

Of the first twenty-three people Boylston inoculated, six were family. Of the remaining seventeen, fourteen had demonstrable ties to Salutation Alley: they either belonged to the extended Webb or Langdon clans, or were their neighbors or tenants. Of the last three, John Helyer was Cotton Mather’s parishioner at the Old North Church; though I have not located either his workplace (he was a cooper) or his home at this time, he was close enough to Boylston to be one of the only two nonfamily members inoculated before publicly advertising the operation. I strongly suspect, though I cannot prove, that Helyer, like Cheever, was among the regulars at the Salutation Inn, and a close friend of Boylston’s. Samuel Mather, of course, was Dr. Mather’s son. The sole remaining inoculee was Samuel Valentine, nineteen-year-old son of John Valentine, His Majesty’s advocate general of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The Valentines belonged to King’s Chapel, Boston’s lone Church of England establishment; they lived in the South End, on Marlborough (now Washington) Street, near the governor’s house.

Other than the Boylstons, who belonged to the Brattle Street Church, and Samuel Valentine, who belonged to King’s, all these inoculees belonged either to Mather’s Old North Church or John Webb’s New North Church. In short, inoculation was a family, neighborhood, and congregational affair. (Even after the practice began to spread, almost all the inoculees belonged to the four churches of the ministers who signed the letter in defense of Boylston: Old North, New North, Brattle Street, and Old South. Mr. Cook’s First, or “Old” Church provided a conspicuously low number of inoculees, as did King’s Chapel.)

Lady Mary’s biographer, Isobel Grundy, has presented overwhelming evidence from England showing that two main factors were crucial in convincing people to overcome rampant fears and put themselves or their children under inoculation: significant family losses from smallpox (parents, siblings, or children), and close personal ties to one of the inoculators or patrons of inoculation. So far as I have been able to trace, Boylston’s list of inoculees follows suit—with the possible exception of Samuel Valentine, whose inoculation had clear political as well as personal import.

Unfortunately, for different reasons, both Boylston and Mather kept such family and neighborhood ties out of their writings on inoculation. The personal ties and emotional drives pushing early inoculation in Boston have to be reconstructed from what is known of the personalities involved and the intricate webs of family, workplace, and timing. The main sources are Boylston’s Historical Account, Mather’s diary, and various newspaper articles, along with genealogies, official town and province records, and the Thwing and Boston Church Records databases. Luckily, Bostonian Puritans were inveterate record keepers. I have pieced these fragments together into a plausible chain of events and emotions.

Here’s what’s indisputably historical:

Esther Webb and a servant or slave of the Cheevers were two of the first people Boylston inoculated, when he resumed inoculating. (All the dates and identities of inoculees are accurate; their courses through inoculated smallpox follow Boylston’s notes on their cases.) Esther nursed her parents and uncle through their inoculations, but her own came too late; she came down with confluent smallpox, caught in the “natural” way, probably from her patients. (It is virtually impossible that her inoculation could have produced her illness, as she was showing symptoms within twenty-four hours.)

Boylston never said why he did not inoculate Esther Webb with her parents on July 19. Later, however, when a similarly large household in Roxbury begged to be inoculated simultaneously, he refused, dividing them up into two groups five days apart, so that everyone would not reach the spiking heights of the first fever all at the same time. I have given him the same reason in this earlier case. If he had indeed intended to inoculate Esther and her younger siblings three to five days after her parents, the selectmen’s threat of a murder charge foiled their plan by a day or two.

Furthermore, if the Webbs’ cases of inoculated smallpox followed the timing of Ricketts’s “modified smallpox,” then August 5 turns out to have been one of the earliest days it would have been possible to feel certain that the parents (the last of his first set of inoculees) would survive unscathed. It looks a lot as if after the meeting, Boylston was not waiting for the selectmen to relent so much as he was waiting until he had his own firm evidence that inoculation at the very least did not harm, before he tried it again. When he did, he immediately inoculated people he might have helped to put in harm’s way.

Samuel Mather was the first and last person Boylston inoculated in secret; it was his grandfather Increase Mather who first suggested—and then pressed—for secrecy. His father vacillated for two weeks, finally allowing the operation the very day that Sammy’s roommate at Harvard, William Charnock, died. (I follow Mather for the date of August 15, as his diary entry was written that day; Boylston’s date of August 12 was printed six years later, from his notes, and is more open to error.) I have surmised that Mather maneuvered his way into the secret inoculation. Sly manipulating was part of his character; he seems to have been adept at disguising his machinations from himself, reading their results as the work of Providence. His inoculation-as-duty argument comes from a later pamphlet; it dovetails with his need to urge Boylston back into inoculating.

We do not know where the inoculation took place, but given Mather’s need for secrecy, it may well have taken place on neutral ground, so that neither party would seem to be visiting the other. Boylston did inoculate Edward Langdon that same day. Langdon was soon to become a deacon in Mather’s church; a few days before, Mather was privately worrying about his “pious barber”—likely to have been Langdon. Even from this distance in time, a visit to the barber’s shop seems a great cover for a surreptitious meeting.

Dr. Mather did indeed let Providence open the Bible for him; he says it fell open to John 4:50, “Go thy way, thy son liveth.” As if realizing that others would suspect a little Matherian help, he protested to his diary that Providence had not only not had help, but had had to work against a paper lodged behind the page. Many of Mather’s thoughts in this chapter are drawn from diary entries I do not otherwise give; where possible, I stay close to his language. I have, however, put the apropos lamentations of Rachel (Jeremiah 31:15) into his mouth.

I have streamlined the confused and often vicious shouting in the newspaper, but Douglass’s insults appear as he wrote them; Colman penned the distressed rebuttal that his fellow ministers signed.

Ben Franklin was, as written, the fifteen-year-old apprentice of his brother James Franklin, and thus responsible for delivering the Courant. In his Autobiography, he recalled having become a vegetarian when he was about sixteen. He wasn’t too precise about dating childhood events, but I may have shifted this one up by six months or a year. By 1722, he was writing (anonymously) the famous set of “Silence Dogood” essays that are by far the best pieces published in the whole run of the Courant. I have made him slyly suggest a few bits of phrasing a little earlier. The words of warning he hears whispered in his ear is taken from a much later musing over this period, again in his Autobiography.

I don’t know precisely how or when the selectmen discovered Samuel Valentine’s inoculation; I am fairly certain that their reaction was similar to the one I have given them, in intent and force. Both the squabbling and the fear at the assembly of the General Court out on the Neck in the George Inn are apparent in the House of Representatives’ Journal.

Newgate

Charles Maitland seems to have been a neat and deliberate man, down to his handwriting; he kept a detailed journal of this experiment, and published it as part of his book, Mr. Maitland’s Account of Inoculating the Small Pox—one of the chief sources of London’s earliest experiments with inoculation (Lady Mary’s included). Much of this chapter, especially the sections from Maitland’s point of view, quotes or closely paraphrases this journal. Alcock’s bout of jail fever, his pricking of his pocks, Mary North’s untimely bath, and even the three women’s synchronized menstrual cycles all come from the surgeon’s notes.

For all his precision and caution, Maitland could also lose his patience and even his temper now and again—just visible in bursts of irritation with John Alcock and Mary North.

According to Sir Hans Sloane, Maitland at first refused to conduct this experiment, and had to be coaxed into it by Sloane himself, after the Princess of Wales had already begged permission for it from the king. As is implied in several sources, I’ve therefore given Sir Hans supervisory charge of the whole, while delegating day-by-day control to Maitland. Sir Hans’s lecture during the operation itself quotes (with slight editing to fit the situation) from his later essay on inoculation.

About twenty-five men seem to have been present at the inoculation; many more visited in the ensuing weeks. One of these was the German Dr. Boretius, who noted that the prisoners trembled as Mr. Maitland drew out his lancet—as a result of other prisoners’ tales that their blood was to be drained.

Dr. Wagstaffe published an anti-inoculation treatise in which he included his own journal of the experiment (he visited the prison almost every other day). Maitland wrote an answering pamphlet. Their exchanges here are based on the arguments and acidic tone of those pamphlets, keeping close to original language where possible.

In Boston, the chief anti-inoculation argument was that the operation spread the distemper—and put patients and others at risk for other diseases, such as the plague. In London, the chief argument of the opposition—at least at this early stage—was that the operation was a sham: that it communicated chicken pox, or something like it, not genuine or “true” smallpox: and therefore did not confer immunity. As in Boston, the participants quickly politicized the controversy, and the newspapers gleefully joined in.

Elizabeth Harrison’s thoughts have been lost; along with the nickname Lizzy, I have given her an interest in nursing consistent with her later history.

I do not know the shape of the hall where the inoculation took place, or whether a barrier was erected to separate prisoners and spectators. It is clear, however, from many witnesses, that the prisoners were on display, rather like exotic animals at a zoo, for much of the day. Contemporary mental hospitals put their patients on display (often for a fee) in much the same way.

That Lady Mary was the “Mr. Cook, an eminent Turkey Merchant” whose “very ample testimony” Maitland “cannot forbear mentioning” in his Newgate journal is an intriguing possibility. I have pursued the notion for the fun of it—as Lady Mary certainly did with similar larks at other times in her life. A year later, she wrote a defense of the Turkish practice under the literary disguise of “a Turkey Merchant.” (Isaac Massey quickly retorted that the piece was by “a sham Turkey Merchant”—though he did not appear to know who was behind the mask.) In Turkey, she had delighted in the habit of wandering about incognito in Turkish clothing—though usually dressed as a woman. She did maintain, however, that she had once sneaked into the Hagia Sofia disguised as a Turkish man. (She also visited it on an officially sanctioned tour, but that is no reason to discount such an escapade.) There were, however, a few Londoners named Mr. Cook who engaged in trade with Turkey at the time—though even that does not necessarily preclude such an adventure on the part of Lady Mary.

Isaac Massey fumed about hearing Maitland at Child’s, boasting of the “success and security” of the Newgate experiments, though they had just begun—“as if,” Massey wrote a year later, “he had had twenty years experience without any miscarriage.”

Sir Hans Sloane was considering a further experiment to test the protective abilities of inoculation by August 22, when he wrote his friend Dr. Richardson that “We intend to try if carrying in people just up of the small-pox will infect these inoculated people or not.” Another letter indicates that he had solidified his plans by September 14.

The sentences I have had Maitland draft for a report to the Princess of Wales appear in Maitland’s Account, which he dedicated to her. On August 26th, the Daily Journal reported that the Newgate physicians had been ordered to lay an account of the progress before the king. As it was officially a royal experiment, it seems reasonable to assume some such order was made.

An Hour of Mourning

In his published account of inoculation, Boylston presented each patient separately, giving the date of his or her inoculation and noting symptoms and interesting developments, placing them in time by the number of days they appeared after inoculation. Into this calendar of hope and woe, I’ve woven other relevant material from Cotton Mather’s and Samuel Sewall’s diaries, the newspapers, Boylston family legend, opponents’ snickerings, and various genealogies. I have not mentioned every inoculation he performed, though I have covered most of them. In general, I follow Boylston using the surrounding material to fill out the social and emotional implications.

Boylston devoted more space to detailing Mrs. Dixwell’s case than he did to any others except Tommy, Jack, and Jackey, right at the beginning. She was, he said, “a fat Gentlewoman of a tender Constitution” who “came frightened into the Practice” after “passing some Days before by a Door wherein lay a Corpse ready for the Grave, which died of the Confluent Small-Pox, the stench whereof greatly offended and surprised her with Fear of being infected.”

At least two of her children also had smallpox at that time; I have given it to all four. Boylston only mentions that two were allowed to visit her near the end, when they themselves were recovering from the natural smallpox. I have provided the reasons that the others did not visit. Though I don’t know for certain that the infant Mary died of smallpox about this time, that event lies somewhere between possible and probable. She was certainly dead by 1725, when the three older children were mentioned in a deed as their mother’s heirs, but little Mary was not. Boylston recorded Mrs. Dixwell’s recurrent hysteria near the end; I have linked it to her baby’s fate, as well as her own fears of death. Her husband’s family history is fact.

Without knowing that Mather’s and Boylston’s records of Sammy Mather’s inoculation were about the same person, it would be hard to guess that was so; I’ve tried to bring out the drama implied by that discrepancy. The boy’s father was frantic with fear. In his eyes, his son’s fevers were not merely life threatening, but the worst on record; his account suggests that the boy’s distress reached hysteria. I have made him speak words he wrote in his diary. Boylston, on the other hand, tersely noted the second fever as “brisk.” He adds the detail of giving Sammy an anodyne—or painkiller, often laudanum (tincture of opium)—along with bleeding him. Laudanum was a common treatment for hysterical nerves.

Boylston kept very close to the chest about his family; we do not know how he and Jerusha came to the decision for her to return, bringing the girls to be inoculated. He doesn’t even say when they returned, though I am assuming that he inoculated them immediately. He certainly inoculated Zabdiel junior immediately after learning he had been exposed. The Turkish doctors called for a meatless diet while patients were under inoculation; I’ve fed the Boylston family such a dinner drawn from contemporary recipes.

The house of glazier Moses Pierce is one of the few from this period still standing in Boston; better yet, it is a museum, part of the Paul Revere House complex. I have surmised that Pierce was not inoculated because he had already survived smallpox. As their youngest child (at that time) was buried in 1721, it is likely that his wife, Elizabeth Parminter Pierce, was inoculated because her children had fallen ill.

Mrs. Bethiah Nichols’s case follows Boylston’s notes closely. Boylston, however, identified her only as “Mrs. N——s” without even the age that is so often helpful in identifying his patients with particular Bostonians: probably due to the serious and personal nature of her complications. However, he inoculated her at a time when he was still almost exclusively inoculating Salutation Alley folks, most of them belonging to either the Webb-Adams or Langdon clans. Bethiah Webb Nichols, daughter of old John Webb—one of Boylston’s first inoculees—fits into this situation in every way possible. She was of childbearing age, she had indeed been in the way of infection for over a month, and she belonged to the tight-knit group of people most inclined to trust him with their lives.

The selectmen recorded their regulation of funeral bells in their minutes for September 11, 1721; on the twenty-first, they reissued the decree more stridently, suggesting that their previous directive had been ignored. I do not know whether it was ignored on the particular occasion of Frances Bromfield Webb’s funeral: but that funeral, recorded by Samuel Sewall, presented ample opportunities for tension between the inoculators and the anti-inoculators to surface.

Whether or not Boylston was Frances Webb’s physician is unclear, though he certainly served as physician to many others in her family. I have invented her personality (and given her the common nickname Fanny), but she was certainly much mourned at a very crowded funeral; Mather did indeed preach the sermon.

The Adams’s inoculations follow Boylston’s account (and Adams/ Webb/Jones genealogies) except that Boylston noted he inoculated “Mr. John Adams, about 35,” that day, along with Mr. Jones’s child, Mrs. Adams (apparently Mr. Adams’s wife, in context) and her child. The Mrs. Adams and child were the particular two Marys identified. Boylston’s John Adams, however, would appear to be a mistake, confusing two brothers among the large and tangled Adams family. Most likely, either “John” was a slip for his brother Samuel, then thirty-two and husband of the thirty-year-old Mrs. Adams and father of the four-year-old girl inoculated that day, or Boylston was badly off in estimating the man’s age, as John was then only twenty-eight. What seems likely is that both men were present and one slipped in for the other in his notes. I have opted for keeping the nuclear family together, and gone with Samuel as the inoculee.

Boylston called Mrs. Margaret Salter “a weakly hysterical woman” who was “often ill”—an unusually harsh assessment for him. “Tho’ she had the Small-Pox very favourably, as to Number,” he added, “yet she complain’d much of Pain in her Head, and Vapours, which gave me some Trouble; but in a short Time those Symptoms went off, and she soon was well.” I’ve extrapolated her insistent hypochondria and spoiled selfishness from his uncharacteristic impatience.

One of Boylston’s opponents tells the story of the saddle tarred and feathered on the wrong horse. I have made Boylston and Cheever present, fitting the prank into a specific time and place with plausibly high tension. I have also let Boylston once again display his known horsemanship in calming the horse down. Mobs certainly trailed Boylston; the supposition that the Langdons and Webbs (and Cheever) helped protect him is mine.

With winter approaching, the firewood supply was a serious enough issue that Mather did indeed consider it, and the selectmen did take up his suggested solution. Finally, while I do not have weather records for individual days of September 1721, it was a wet enough month that powers as high as the governor worried about widespread crop failure. Given that their Old Style dates are a week and a half behind our modern calendar dates, they were well into New England’s leafy autumn fireworks by the time of Mrs. Dixwell’s death.

The King’s Pardon

Elizabeth Harrison’s deliberate reexposure as a smallpox nurse closely follows Mr. Maitland’s account. He does not, however, record the details of his offer or her acceptance, only those of her stay in Hertford. I have assumed that her acceptance was to some degree voluntarily, as the crown seems to have observed its agreement to offer the inoculees full pardons.

She had every reason to be eager to find a place: no easy task for a woman of no training, no connections, and an unspotted reputation, and nearly impossible for a convicted felon. As bad as Newgate was, the descriptions of the Press Yard sound much more inviting than descriptions of London’s slums at the same period, which do not seem to have been considerably better than the airless, windowless dungeons on the common side of the prison.

Sloane says that he and Dr. Steigerthal paid out of their own pockets for this extension to the Newgate experiment. I have given Maitland reason to select Elizabeth Harrison for such a nursing position, by giving her an aptitude for caring for the sick.

The Christ’s Hospital buildings still exist in Hertford, though the school has moved. The students are still called bluecoats; statues donated in 1721 give a good sense of what they looked like.

Maitland’s accounts of the Batt child and servants, and of the Heaths, is based on his Account, and remains close to his wording where possible. He told these histories separately; I have woven them back into Lizzy Harrison’s story by having him tell her. Going by their difference in status alone, this would be unlikely; shared experiences of such tension as the Newgate experiment, however, can forge otherwise unthinkable bonds.

Maitland’s final summation comes almost word for word from his Account, though I confess to moving paragraphs and some phrases around, and editing for modern readability: changing the now obscure word imposthumes to abscesses and shifting the destroying angel phrase so as to serve as part of his final word on the subject. The force and the drift of his words, however, remain his.

Raw Head and Bloody Bones

Once again, Boylston himself provides much of the raw data for this story, but the emotional impact has to be inferred by looking at what he did—and did not do—to whom, and when, and putting that together with fragmentary evidence from Mather, Douglass, the House of Representatives, the newspapers, and genealogies.

Dr. Douglass wrote the first of his many anti-inoculation letters to Dr. Alexander Stuart of London on September 25, 1721; it is hard to see how this was not in some way triggered by satisfaction with what he perceived to be proof of inoculation’s failure: Mrs. Dixwell’s death the evening before. The “one or two” deaths he records seem strangely haphazard for one so nigglingly precise—unless he already had Mrs. N—s in mind as a possible second.

Paxton advertised for his runaway slave in the papers, as noted; his elder son Roger was entered into the Seahorse paybook on September 25. The suggestion that the money and place for Roger would have been especially useful at this time is mine, though it is entirely plausible: Boston trade was at a standstill.

Mrs. N—s’s complications are drawn from Boylston’s notes—including her miscarriage of an eight or nine weeks’ pregnancy, accompanied by serious hemorrhage, her delirious talk of floating in “the Waters” (for which I have supplied biblical references), and her loss of an eye. Boylston also recorded his midnight visit and his discovery of the fetus (“a small imperfect substance”) in the bed the next morning (though I have added the detail of it being covered in pocks—something Mather claims happened in other circumstances). To the ends of their lives, Boylston’s children remembered the whole family trembling whenever Boylston left, fearful that he would never return.

Cotton Mather recorded his daughter Abigail’s death—and his reactions to it—in his diary. His Account is dated September 7, but is likely to have been the treatise sent over sea at this time. The Boston papers do not record any ships departing for London post-September 25 until Captain Mark Trecothick’s Friendship was reported on October 2 as having already cleared outward; it is quite possible that this ship carried both Douglass’s letter and Mather’s treatise.

That Boylston had some kind of crisis of conscience in reaction to Mrs. Dixwell’s death and Mrs. N—s’s complications is apparent from the fact that from the day before Mrs. Dixwell’s death, he ceased inoculating for almost two weeks: the longest gap in his record during the whole epidemic, other than that following his first inoculations of Tommy, Jack, and Jackey, and that following the selectmen’s meeting. Furthermore, it would appear that he went on resisting inoculating for another three weeks: after inoculating Eunice Willard on October 6, he operated on no one else until the Fitches and Lorings convinced him to do so on the thirteenth, and then he ceased again until his brother’s wife, having newly given birth, begged for his help.

Why he began again with Eunice Willard is unclear. She seems, however, to have been a personality of some force. The Willards were a large and powerful family of the South End; their father (dead by 1721) had been for years the minister of the Old South Church, and an outspoken opponent of the witchcraft trials. Eunice remained a spinster by choice, refusing several suitors and remaining in the family of her older brother Josiah, with whom she was very close. She was both well educated and well off in her own right; her conversation was said to be “entertaining and instructive, without the pedantry which some learned ladies discover too plainly.” In 1737, she donated the sum of £5 to the work-house—equivalent to as much as £500 today. Boylston had already inoculated David and Elizabeth Melvill (also known as Melvin), her nephew and niece by her sister Mary. I have made her give Boylston an invitation to inoculation that a man like him might well not refuse.

According to Boylston, her inoculation was a good one: at the usual time, she had “a kind, distinct sort, and was soon well.” I have drawn details from the pictures of ease (including sitting up reading and taking a glass of wine with visitors) that Mather and Colman drew of inoculation while lauding it in distinction to the horrors of the natural smallpox.

The Lorings had their own connections to the Willards, and may have come to him from that direction; however, Loring’s wife Susannah was the widow of Jerusha’s maternal cousin Edward Breck before marrying Loring, and her children from her first marriage were thus blood relations to Jerusha. I have surmised that the family relationship might have tipped the balance in their favor. Boylston, of course, made no mention of a family connection—as he did not with anyone other than his own children (including his brother and sister-in-law).

Daniel Loring’s elder son Daniel did break out in the symptoms of smallpox the night Boylston was supposed to have inoculated him. Boylston does not say what prevented him. He does say, however, that young Loring’s death revealed one of the problems with assessing the successes and dangers of inoculation: it was very hard to tell whether people had already been infected (because of the long incubation period after exposure).

While I do not know how or where Boylston came to read the Boston newspaper accounts of the Newgate experiment, it is notable that their appearance coincides closely with his willingness first to inoculate more of his close family, and second, for the flood-gates to open in the Boston gentry’s desperate patronage of him and his operation. That his account appears together with the second notice (the first one of success) suggests that he had some forewarning of that success; Musgrave is a plausible source.

An advertisement for the camel appears in the same issue of the Boston Gazette as the first announcement of the Newgate trials; I have imagined Tommy’s fascination with it.

It does not seem likely that Boylston’s departure from Boston to inoculate his sister-in-law in Roxbury on the official Day of Thanksgiving was a coincidence: such days were high holy days. I do not know what happened to the newborn infant—but after the case of Esther Webb, Boylston knew inoculated smallpox was catching. It seems likely the infant boy would have been kept out of harm’s way until his mother’s recovery. He was not inoculated, and infants stood very poor chances in the face of natural smallpox.

Boylston says a coach fitted with a bed was provided for his sister-in-law’s return to Boston; I have made Abigail Mather Blague provide it—and Boylston inoculate her young slave girl in return. The girl was definitely inoculated that day, though the reason is my surmise—as is Mrs. Blague’s personality. She was a Mather, however, so it seems likely for her to have been both formidable and generous.

Kittredge would have it that Mather wrote A Faithful Account; I follow Fitz in sensing that in style, content, and context, this is from the pen of Boylston.

The Massachusetts House of Representatives’ Journals show both that body’s desire to conclude its business quickly in the face of the epidemic, and its inability to do so.

Mather’s run-in with Franklin is only attested by Franklin; however, he had another such public shouting match with Samuel Sewall at an earlier point, so while Franklin may have exaggerated, he probably didn’t have to exaggerate very much. Franklin quotes him quoting the loin-smiting passage of the Bible.

Just Retribution

The story of the attack on the Boylstons’ home is based on family legend; I have tried to disentangle obvious exaggerations from probabilities and plausibilities, and fit the latter into a sensible pattern based on known facts. Boylston family legend has it that “one evening while [Zabdiel’s] wife and children were sitting in the parlor, a lighted hand grenade was thrown into the room, but the fuse striking against some furniture fell off before an explosion could take place, and thus providentially their lives were saved.” Because the grenade is said to have lost its fuse—as Mather’s certainly did—and because Mather made a fuss that left a long, still readable trail while the Boylstons did not, it has sometimes been assumed that the attack on the Boylston home is Ward Nicholas Boylston’s confusion of his family’s story with the Mathers’ story.

Against that, Ward Nicholas knew his great-uncle Zabdiel and his mother’s cousins (Zabdiel’s children), who were present, as well as his own grandfather (Zabdiel’s brother Thomas), who was in a position to know the truth. While Ward Nicholas often exaggerates, I think complete confusion or creation of this attack de novo is unlikely. Thomas Hutchinson (who was ten in 1721, and later became governor of the province) later wrote that Boylston’s “family was hardly safe in his house, and he often met with affronts and insults in the streets.” Boston had a bad reputation as a town prone to mob violence; it was so bad in 1721 that the General Court had passed a riot act earlier that year. As the dying reached its height—and people began running to be inoculated—street violence certainly picked up. Furthermore, much more of the violence and hatred seems to have been aimed at Boylston than Mather. I think a rain of stones against the Boylston house, possibly topped off by some kind of poorly made grenade or bomb—the same as might have been used against Mather—is not only plausible, but probable.

If the attack on the Boylstons’ home took place the same night as that on the Mathers’—which seems likely, given the nature of crowds—Boylston responded by inoculating once more the following morning. Quietly putting his head down and going right ahead with his practice, while refusing to pursue vengeance (legal or otherwise), seems as much a part of Boylston’s personality as shouting and demanding justice from the authorities seem a part of Mather’s. I do not know that Pierce replaced the broken windows, but it seems plausible for exactly the reason stated.

Ward Nicholas also says that Zabdiel visited patients “only at midnight, and in disguise.” Boylston’s own notes record visiting Mrs. N——s at midnight, when called on an emergency; no doubt there were others. On such occasions, he may well have wrapped himself in a cloak against weather and recognition—but a false nose and glasses seem as unlikely as the notion of taking no precautions in the face of threatening mobs.

As for hiding, Ward Nicholas records that “the only place of refuge” left to Zabdiel “at one time was a private place in the house where he remained secreted fourteen days, unknown to any of his family but his wife.” Given Zabdiel’s inoculation records, this is not possible. It is possible, however, that he did not go out much in the two weeks following Mrs. Dixwell’s death. I have made him hide the one and only time it would have seemed necessary: when a potential lynch mob was actually storming the house. The place is my own invention.

Finally, Ward Nicholas noted that “parties entered his house by day and by night searching for him.” Again, this seems an exaggeration—though without a police force, it would be hard to stop mobs from doing so. I have created a search I think more likely: a more calm search on the part of authorities—looking for Boylston ostensibly in order to protect him, and also for the out-of-town inoculees that these authorities had recently declared illegal.

Mather recorded in his diary the 3:00 A.M. attack on his house—along with a description of the “grenado” and the threatening strip of paper wrapped around it. The governor and council convinced the House to offer a £50 reward for information about the culprit (in Britain, this would have meant roughly £5,000 in today’s money, though colonial currency was notoriously unstable). Though the reward was handsome, no one came forward.

The Royal Society’s minutes reveal that Alexander Stuart read the first of Douglass’s letters to him from Boston on November 16, the same day that Sloane reported Maitland’s conclusions from Hertford. French and English drafts of this report are extant in Sloane’s papers in the British Library; Miller has argued from internal evidence that the French drafts were meant for the Prince and Princess of Wales (who preferred to do their official reading in that language, though they had learned at least some English by this point).

I do not know for sure why Dummer held back from publishing Mather’s report, especially since someone—possibly Dummer himself—seems to have leaked news of its positive nature to Sloane; the possibility that they were urging the use of Mather’s name seems a plausible reason.

Dr. Douglass’s retreat from the public eye and his defensive admission that his own plan of treatment had not gone as well as he hoped are drawn from his own (later) words.

Hutchinson’s illness, will making, and death, the consequent panic and proroguing of the General Court, Robie’s inoculating, and Boylston’s sudden popularity are all documented. I have woven these events together; the connections are more plausible than a sudden cluster of coincidences. I have specifically made Hutchinson’s case confluent and have surmised that Robie was his doctor: I do not think it was coincidence that Robie began inoculating the very day that Hutchinson died—and one week after Boylston began inoculating Robie’s students and fellow Harvard faculty members en masse. One month earlier, Boylston noted that several people who had refused inoculation then died of the natural smallpox, spending their final breath urging their friends to “hasten into” the operation; I have made Hutchinson one of these people.

Sewall recorded that Hutchinson’s funeral was a “great” one. I do not know whether Boylston went or not, nor do I know that he joined the Salutation Inn crowd later. His sentiments there, however, are his own.

In Royal Fashion

Maitland’s Account, Dummer’s belated (and anonymous) release of Mather’s Account, and the further trials on six genteel subjects all hit London’s notice at virtually the same time.

I do not know when precisely the princess became specifically interested in Boylston. She kept close abreast of inoculation publications, however, and Neal was summoned to speak with her soon after his publication. (I have surmised that she also spoke to Dummer.) Neal’s suggestion that Boylston be asked for his account is the first I have been able to locate. In the end, it was the princess and Sloane who convinced Boylston to put pen to paper; I have let Neal plant this suggestion in her brain. In the matter of inoculation, I have also deduced some measure of competition arising between the colonies and the capital, along with respect and curiosity—as history showed them to have in so many other matters.

Sloane’s conversations with the Princess of Wales and the king are based on his own reports. He does not give locations or specific times, but he does include the most important parts of the dialogue. The princess asked his advice about inoculating the princesses, he refused, and she followed up by asking if he would dissuade her. The king (who was famous for tiring out others on long walks in the park, regardless of the weather) asked whether inoculation would work and, when told accidents might happen, retorted that any physic might at times go wrong. I do not know whether Sunderland (or anyone else) was present, but as Sunderland was certainly close in the king’s counsels and suddenly decided to inoculate his son just before the princesses’ operation, it’s a plausible supposition.

Beyond Amyand, Maitland, Sloane, and Steigerthal, I do not know who was present at the inoculation of the princesses at St. James’s. I’ve drawn this scene from Amyand’s and Maitland’s reports to the Royal Society of what they did, and from contemporary and modern assessments of the royal family’s character and habits. Princess Amelia was called Emily by the family; she took after the king in loving dogs, horses, hunting, and brisk walks outdoors; the prettiest of the three sisters, she was an extrovert and a flirt. Princess Caroline was a shy mother-hen who doted on her oldest sister and her mother. Pierre and Anne-Caroline are my imagination, though they fit in with the princesses’ personalities. Princess Anne had become Handel’s pupil at age eight, and often played for the family.

The accounts of the Sunderland, Amyand, Bathurst, Berkeley, Townshend, Tichborne, and De La Warr children follow factual reports by their physicians and surgeons. Arbuthnot—one of the attending doctors—provided the best account of the death of Bathurst’s servant (though anonymously, in Mr. Maitland’s Account . . . Vindicated); Dr. Wagstaffe supplied other details. The newspapers reported that the princess spent the evening of April 25 with her daughters, while the king and the prince went to Handel’s opera.

Lady Mary’s literary masquerade as a Turkey merchant, taking on the physicians, is genuine. It is not clear when she wrote it, though Grundy argues it was well before the edited version appeared in print. Lady Mary’s run-in with Sloane is my supposition. She attended, however, many of the inoculations performed under the supervision of Sloane, Steigerthal, Arbuthnot, and Mead, and by Maitland and Amyand (though she did not give many particular names). Given the level of her ire, it seems improbable that she did not have regular disagreements with these men in person—she certainly knew Sloane, Arbuthnot, Mead, and Maitland well enough to speak her mind frankly before them. That one or several of them faced her with her literary “crime” also seems probable: by the following spring, someone had convinced her that the two deaths she here calls murders were not, in fact, due to inoculation.

Wagstaffe, Edmund Massey, and Isaac Massey were the leading opponents of inoculation in London.

Jurin made his report to the Royal Society at the time stated, later publishing it in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions, as well as separately in a pamphlet.

As for the princesses’ inoculation, I do not know who beyond the medical men attended the inoculation of Prince William at Leicester House—but that, even more than the princesses’ operation, was an occasion of state importance: the little prince was third in line for the throne.

Lady Mary gave very few specific names of those who begged her presence and got it—though she said repeatedly that she was run off her feet in complying. The duchess of Ancaster, however, is a very good bet: Jane Brownlow Bertie was a childhood friend who had specific smallpox memories with Lady Mary. I have, however, given her the title of duchess about one month earlier than she acceded to it (by the death of her father-in-law); when her daughter was inoculated on May 11, 1723 (the same day as the prince), she was the marchioness of Lindsey. I have written the scene to bring to life the unbalancing difference between the hooting and jeering of crowds, and the anxious supplications of parents Lady Mary recorded in her diary. Her final words I have borrowed from the closing sentence of her inoculation piece in her Embassy Letters.

Meetings and Partings

Whether or not Lady Mary and Zabdiel Boylston met remains one of the great enigmas of this tale. In solving the mystery, I have been more speculative in this chapter than in the others. I have built the story, however, on tantalizing fragments of evidence.

In brief, Boylston embarked for London in December 1724 on Captain Barlow’s ship. During his year-and-a-half stay, he did not perform any inoculations, but he was in high demand to attend them. At the time, so was Lady Mary. Many of the same people who welcomed him warmly into the Royal Society were her close friends. So, although I have uncovered no evidence of their meeting, it is hard to imagine that they did not.

Here are the historical details:

Boylston’s brief remembering of the end of the epidemic, through the summer of 1723, is accurate in the events, though I have supplied emotions and reactions that make sense. In May he inoculated six people who were soon packed off to Spectacle Island; Robie noted that they had been “forced” there by the “Boston mob.” Boylston was hauled before a town meeting. Though Boylston did write the medical excuse that got James Franklin released to the press yard, I do not know if it was Josiah Franklin who asked him to do so. Samuel Adams of Revolutionary fame was born as noted. The grim numbers are drawn from Boylston and Douglass, both quoting official town statistics.

Boylston family legend has it that Sir Hans Sloane invited Boylston to London. While I have found no hard evidence of such an invitation, it seems plausible enough. Sloane certainly chaired the first meeting of the Royal Society that Boylston attended—soon after his arrival in London. Boylston himself intimates that both Sloane and the Princess of Wales encouraged him to write up his account of inoculation early in the spring, again, quite soon after his arrival.

Additionally, Boylston’s submission of a paper to the Royal Society before he took ship suggests that someone was pushing him to bolster his résumé, so to speak—or, as I have surmised, that someone at the Royal Society elicited a paper from him, assuming he would realize that what the Fellows really wanted to know about was inoculation. Both the bolstering (if it was that) and the writing are out of character for Boylston. In contrast to Mather, he took little pleasure in writing papers and letters to the Royal Society once he was a member—and did so only rarely. In no other instance did he write to publish without some kind of duress: self-defense, royal command, or (as is obvious in his few later communications with the Royal Society) a burdensome sense of duty too long neglected.

The instigator might well have been Cotton Mather, who wrote Boylston letters of introduction to Sloane and Jurin, suggesting a royal presentation. Sloane, however, was an even more inveterate collector of knowledge than Mather. He wrote voluminously to many people, and he was also the orchestrator of the English trials of inoculation—certainly at the princess’s behest, but also, apparently, to satisfy his own professional curiosity. He may well have taken it upon himself to make such an invitation, or to solicit it through contacts like Mather—especially if it already had royal force behind it.

For the few words Boylston reads from Sloane’s “letter,” I have used standard phrases of politeness that Boylston later employed in the dedication of his book.

Boylston’s report home to Colman confirms that he was in part an emissary to the governor for the moderates of Boston. This may have been another inducement for him to go—though his aloofness from Boston politics make it unlikely that this diplomatic mission was his primary reason for heading to London.

I do not know whether Sloane or anyone else found Boylston’s submission of a paper on ambergris funny. The merchant Thomas Hollis certainly thought Boylston “ingenuous” by London’s worldly standards. Back in Boston, though, the “ambergrease”/bear’s grease confusion was real: though it may have been a deliberate prank rather than a muddle-headed mistake, as the man then in charge of the Courant was none other than Benjamin Franklin.

It is not clear whether or not Boylston’s family went with him, but the few extant clues suggest that they did not. His son Zabby certainly remained at Harvard, where he got into enough trouble drinking and carousing to be reprimanded by the president. None of the few notices of Boylston in London mention anything about his wife or children being there as well—though Hollis twice found fit to mention Boylston’s horses. Furthermore, his advertisements appear to offer to rent part of his garden and the right to sell its produce out of his shop—but not to rent the house, stables, or shop itself. Finally, his first extant letter back to London—to Sir Hans—notes his joyous return to family, friends, and country.

A number of his horses, however, did go and caused something of a stir, at least among the Americans in London. I have assumed that Jack went with him, as servant and groom, and possibly Jackey as well. Curiously, I have found no scrap of evidence indicating whether or not he returned to America with the horses. That he took them at all is intriguing—it cannot have made for a small shipping charge or an easy crossing. Even more intriguing is Hollis’s note that he was refusing to part with them even for very handsome sums, coupled with his own later offer (through Jurin) to send the royal children saddle pads, in what sound like surprisingly familiar terms. This suggests the possibility that he intended his horses as princely gifts, and quite possibly presented them—though again, I have turned up no evidence.

Family legend also has Boylston inoculating the first two royal princesses (Emily and Caroline); his great-nephew Ward Nicholas Boylston insisted upon this point, though it is patently impossible (Amyand did it, and Boylston was in Boston at the time, in any case). Dr. Boylston was, however, in London at the time that Princess Mary was inoculated. He may well have been invited to be present, given the royal family’s penchant for having all possible experts dancing attendance: he was, after all, far and away the world’s most experienced inoculator outside Turkey and western Africa. Sergeant Amyand did the cutting, once again, but Boylston’s possible presence as witness seems a likely—and understandable—source for his great-nephew’s later insistence that Boylston inoculated a princess or two.

I have drawn his encounters with Prince William and Prince George from their known personalities and interests, matched with Zabdiel’s own pride in his horses. That he spoke to William is suggested—though not proven—by a letter he later sent to Dr. Jurin, offering to send “Prince William and the young princesses” saddle pads—a specific kind of American training saddle. In context (it occurs as an afterthought, in a postscript) it reads as if he has met the children—particularly William—and discussed horses with them. This certainly fits in with family legend that he met the royal family—and was given a reward for his work. (The stated sum, £1,000, is likely an exaggeration, however, as that was the lavish sum given by the king to Maitland for traveling to Hanover and inoculating Prince Frederick.)

Lady Mary’s encounter with her father as he arrived unannounced in her dressing room was burned into the memory of her daughter, who was present; she in turn, passed the story on to her children. It was the only time that young Mary (later Lady Bute) recalled laying eyes on her grandfather. In the family tale, the visit stands alone, unconnected to any particular event: I have linked it to his decision to inoculate his heirs. In Lady Bute’s much later memory, she seems at the time to have been of an age to make this connection plausible.

The letters from Mather to Jurin, Boylston to Colman, Lady Mary to her sister and Boylston’s final letter to Sloane are genuine. Jerusha’s “Come home to me,” however, is supposition, though surely some sort of plea must have been made.

Both Lady Mary and Boylston are hard to trace across the year 1725-26. What little information I’ve given for Boylston is what can be gleaned from later writings and genealogies. For Lady Mary, I have relied upon Isobel Grundy’s biography—though I interpret the Richardson painting (c. 1725) differently. Her clothing comes very close to the Turkish costume described in her Embassy Letters—though the décolletage and the waistline have been altered to suit European style. The black boy is often referred to as a “page,” which may well have been his job; the disturbing gleam of a silver collar around his neck, however, surely indicates that he was a slave, whether or not he was hers. His identity has never been discovered. The Wortleys are not known to have had a black servant, though he may well have been “borrowed” from friends who did.

Richardson was a regular at the Royal Society’s unofficial home at the Grecian, and his closest friends included many of the Society’s staunchest advocates of inoculation: Arbuthnot, Cheselden, Mead, Sloane, and Dr. Frederick Slare. Another of the painter’s dearest friends was Alexander Pope. (Both Richardson and Cheselden spent time with Pope at his villa in Twickenham; Pope stayed with Richardson when he was in London.) All of these people, with the exception of Cheselden and Slare, were also Lady Mary’s good friends. Boylston certainly met all of the Fellows, and may well have crossed the Atlantic in part to learn the new method of lithotomy from Cheselden. Although I cannot finger a time or place when all these people came together, the circumstantial evidence that Boylston circulated among these people is very strong. It lends some credence, too, to the possibility that the painting in question does indeed commemorate the battle against small-pox. Such portraits were often commissioned by patrons other than the sitter; Pope, for one, was known to have commissioned and treasured other portraits of Lady Mary. Small groups of friends gathering to watch an artist at work in his studio was a common and convivial pastime among the leisured classes.

From her letters, Lady Mary appears to have been giddily in love in the summer of 1725; by the spring of 1726, this infatuation had faded, apparently unconsummated and possibly unrequited. Again, her beloved’s identity is lost. While she gazed elsewhere, Alexander Pope was gazing at her.

To her family, Lady Mary maintained that the infamous quarrel between her and the poet began when, with ill-chosen timing, he declared his passionate love for her, and she laughed at him. Pope scholars tend to dismiss this event as fiction; Lady Mary scholars tend to accept it as at least a contributory factor.

Smallpox did kill Lady Townshend that spring; with terribly irony, it also took another of Lady Mary’s girlhood friends who had refused inoculation. In the latter case, however, I have avoided introducing a new character, but preserved the historical irony by substituting Philippa Mundy in the place of Sarah Chiswell—probably another of the Sisters in Affliction. (As Lady Mary’s live-in companion, Chiswell played her own part in the Paradise adventures; presumably because she was present. No letters survive to trace her role.)

Boylston presented his book to the Royal Society to great acclaim. The sentence I have him read is his (though I have edited and abridged it slightly and added the phrase also called inoculation). The image of taming the smallpox, in other words, is Boylston’s; I am, however, responsible for making him restate that idea more succinctly as “we have tamed the smallpox.” The standing ovation is my crystallization of all his other applause—I do not know precisely what went on in that room in Crane Court, though it was clearly highly complimentary.

His ensuing election as a Fellow is recorded fact.