The Speckled Monster (76 page)

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):

 

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.

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.