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
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.
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.
