1721 Boston Smallpox Epidemic Lessons for the 2020-22 Red Chinese Virus

The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic that Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics by Stephen Coss, published in 2016, offers so many lessons that apply to the Red Chinese use of a bioweapon against the world. I explore just a few below.

1. The Freedom and Liberty to Pursue Knowledge, Including Medical Knowledge, is Critical.

In the Fever of 1721 Coss describes how smallpox broke out in the city of Boston. But rather than as in the past when people just had to allow the horrors rage through their families and kill, disfigure and blind their loved ones, the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather was able to convince the one Boston doctor, Zabdiel Boylston, to experiment with a smallpox vaccination. As with the Covid 19 pandemic today, the medical establishment and politically powerful at the time tried to stop Dr. Boylston, but he persevered, saved hundreds, and began a process that eventually led to the worldwide eradication of smallpox. 

2. The Human Spirit Triumphs over Authoritarianism and Tyranny

A highly trained medical immigrant Scot named William Douglas was contacted by Cotton Mather and other doctors with a paper that explained how the Greeks in Constantinople used a smallpox inoculation, and the example of a Boston African slave named Onesimus who also used the same technique successfully like the Greeks, William Douglas dismissed it as quackery. And he ordered all the other doctors to ignore it. 

Did Boylston stop? Temporarily. But as sick and terrified patients kept showing up at his house begging to be inoculated yet to be struck or to prevent full blown smallpox, he treated them. Even when he was cursed and threatened by other Boston citizens who agreed with William Douglas, he continued to treat sick patients and to inoculate healthy patients. 

There was even an assassination attempt against Cotton Mather on November 14, 1721. Someone threw an incendiary iron ball and lit fuse inside his  house where he was allowing three patients from outside Boston, against official lock down orders. 

Despite the enormous pressure from the medical establishment and local government, Boylston continued to inoculate and treat Boston's citizens.

When Williams found out that Boylston was continuing to perform the procedure, he organized a kangaroo court to forbid him from continuing under penalty of imprisonment. Boylston waited a few days, and then continued to fight the authoritarianism and tyranny of the medical establishment and politicians by treating additional patients.

 3. The Wealthy Boston Merchants Hid the Smallpox  

Coss describes how the wealthy merchants in Boston then kept the lid on the smallpox outbreak to prevent an interruption in the export and import business. The merchants, their representatives in the local assembly and the newspapers, pushed the lie that the lethality of smallpox in Boston was exaggerated and steadily diminishing. They did this over and over until the very end of  the epidemic.

How truthful have current merchants been about the Red Chinese virus?

4. The Law of Unintended Consequences Applies to all Natural and Manmade Disasters

The 1721 Boston Smallpox, like all natural and manmade disasters, resulted in unintended consequences. Coss describes how James Franklin, along with his indentured servant Benjamin Franklin, revolutionized and began to practice freedom of the press. Benjamin Franklin was thrown in prison for challenging the authority of the Crown. But he continued to fight, as did his younger brother Ben.  So, too, did Elisha Cooke, a populist politician who took on the Crown. Cooke had dinners with a young Sam Adams who liked the ideas of freedom and the natural rights of man that he learned at dinners with him.

As today, the more repressive, untruthful and authoritarian the medical and political establishment became in Boston in 1721, the more the citizens resisted and supported Boylston. That process will repeat in 2022.

I encourage you to read the Fever of 1721 for the lessons it offers on disease, panic, lying, greed, authoritarianism, and the eventual triumph of freedom and truth.

As we come to the end of the virility of the Red Chinese Virus, the 1721 Boston smallpox epidemic offers these and many other lessons. We survived that one due to the ingenuity, courage, creativity, and grit of the American mind, spirit, and medical advances.

The same will happen again.