The Speckled Monster (79 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.