THE DARK SIDE OF BOSTON TOUR - SMALLPOX EPIDEMIC 1721

So this weekend I was fortunate to join some friends on this walking tour through Boston.  The company that does this tour is called Boston By Foot and they do several walking tours where you learn about a lot of history in Boston.  If you want to check out their website it is www.bostonbyfoot.org and I think I will be doing more of these tours.  


I was going to do the entire tour in one blog but it is just too much information I had to take notes (yes I'm kind of a nerd) and I probably would lose your attention.  So I have decided to do 8 blogs about each of the topics and let me tell you some of them are very interesting...and all of my information may not be exact, I'm going off of what I wrote and memory so here we go:


So apparently in 1721 a small pox epidemic spread across Boston 5,889 Bostonians had it and 844 of them died from this illness.  This worried many people because it was spreading fast and even though houses were quarantined in hopes to isolate this virus but it wasn't working.  Reverend Cotton Mather who was collaborating with a Boston physician William Douglass and many other physicians in the area had discussed the practice of inoculation and it was such a controversy.  The reason why is because it was taking the smallpox virus from one person and introducing it to a healthy person.  Sounds kind of crazy doesn't it???  But the theory was that if a person survived then they would be immune to getting it again.  Mather had learned about this procedure from his slave named Onesimus who was from Africa and this was done to him as a child and they have been doing this for years there as well as several other areas in the world.  


So in June of 1721, Mather pleaded with many physicians in Boston and they all slowly but surely tried this procedure and it worked and people would have the virus for about a week and recover.  By February of 1722, Boston was totally free of smallpox.


So I guess we can say this procedure of inoculation was started so many years ago and this is why we have to get all of these shots as children.  I wonder where we would be if this was never tried?  That was the first stop on this tour and history was never my strongest subject because I always thought it was BOOOORRRRINGGG!!! But this kept my attention and I was ready to go onto the next stop.


Next up.....Governor Thomas Hutchinson and the Stamp Tax Act in 1765.


Well until next time....