The Speckled Monster (80 page)

Dr. Douglass wrote the first of his many anti-inoculation letters to Dr. Alexander Stuart of London on September 25, 1721; it is hard to see how this was not in some way triggered by satisfaction with what he perceived to be proof of inoculation's failure: Mrs. Dixwell's death the evening before. The “one or two” deaths he records seem strangely haphazard for one so nigglingly precise—unless he already had Mrs. N—s in mind as a possible second.

Paxton advertised for his runaway slave in the papers, as noted; his elder son Roger was entered into the
Seahorse
paybook on September 25. The suggestion that the money and place for Roger would have been especially useful at this time is mine, though it is entirely plausible: Boston trade was at a standstill.

Mrs. N—s's complications are drawn from Boylston's notes—including her miscarriage of an eight or nine weeks' pregnancy, accompanied by serious hemorrhage, her delirious talk of floating in “the Waters” (for which I have supplied biblical references), and her loss of an eye. Boylston also recorded his midnight visit and his discovery of the fetus (“a small imperfect substance”) in the bed the next morning (though I have added the detail of it being covered in pocks—something Mather claims happened in other circumstances). To the ends of their lives, Boylston's children remembered the whole family trembling whenever Boylston left, fearful that he would never return.

Cotton Mather recorded his daughter Abigail's death—and his reactions to it—in his diary. His
Account
is dated September 7, but is likely to have been the treatise sent over sea at this time. The Boston papers do not record any ships departing for London post-September 25 until Captain Mark Trecothick's
Friendship
was reported on October 2 as having already cleared outward; it is quite possible that this ship carried both Douglass's letter and Mather's treatise.

That Boylston had some kind of crisis of conscience in reaction to Mrs. Dixwell's death and Mrs. N—s's complications is apparent from the fact that from the day before Mrs. Dixwell's death, he ceased inoculating for almost two weeks: the longest gap in his record during the whole epidemic, other than that following his first inoculations of Tommy, Jack, and Jackey, and that following the selectmen's meeting. Furthermore, it would appear that he went on resisting inoculating for another three weeks: after inoculating Eunice Willard on October 6, he operated on no one else until the Fitches and Lorings convinced him to do so on the thirteenth, and then he ceased again until his brother's wife, having newly given birth, begged for his help.

Why he began again with Eunice Willard is unclear. She seems, however, to have been a personality of some force. The Willards were a large and powerful family of the South End; their father (dead by 1721) had been for years the minister of the Old South Church, and an outspoken opponent of the witchcraft trials. Eunice remained a spinster by choice, refusing several suitors and remaining in the family of her older brother Josiah, with whom she was very close. She was both well educated and well off in her own right; her conversation was said to be “entertaining and instructive, without the pedantry which some learned ladies discover too plainly.” In 1737, she donated the sum of £5 to the work-house—equivalent to as much as £500 today. Boylston had already inoculated David and Elizabeth Melvill (also known as Melvin), her nephew and niece by her sister Mary. I have made her give Boylston an invitation to inoculation that a man like him might well not refuse.

According to Boylston, her inoculation was a good one: at the usual time, she had “a kind, distinct sort, and was soon well.” I have drawn details from the pictures of ease (including sitting up reading and taking a glass of wine with visitors) that Mather and Colman drew of inoculation while lauding it in distinction to the horrors of the natural smallpox.

The Lorings had their own connections to the Willards, and may have come to him from that direction; however, Loring's wife Susannah was the widow of Jerusha's maternal cousin Edward Breck before marrying Loring, and her children from her first marriage were thus blood relations to Jerusha. I have surmised that the family relationship might have tipped the balance in their favor. Boylston, of course, made no mention of a family connection—as he did not with anyone other than his own children (including his brother and sister-in-law).

Daniel Loring's elder son Daniel did break out in the symptoms of smallpox the night Boylston was supposed to have inoculated him. Boylston does not say what prevented him. He does say, however, that young Loring's death revealed one of the problems with assessing the successes and dangers of inoculation: it was very hard to tell whether people had already been infected (because of the long incubation period after exposure).

While I do not know how or where Boylston came to read the Boston newspaper accounts of the Newgate experiment, it is notable that their appearance coincides closely with his willingness first to inoculate more of his close family, and second, for the flood-gates to open in the Boston gentry's desperate patronage of him and his operation. That his account appears together with the second notice (the first one of success) suggests that he had some forewarning of that success; Musgrave is a plausible source.

An advertisement for the camel appears in the same issue of the
Boston Gazette
as the first announcement of the Newgate trials; I have imagined Tommy's fascination with it.

It does not seem likely that Boylston's departure from Boston to inoculate his sister-in-law in Roxbury on the official Day of Thanksgiving was a coincidence: such days were high holy days. I do not know what happened to the newborn infant—but after the case of Esther Webb, Boylston knew inoculated smallpox was catching. It seems likely the infant boy would have been kept out of harm's way until his mother's recovery. He was not inoculated, and infants stood very poor chances in the face of natural smallpox.

Boylston says a coach fitted with a bed was provided for his sister-in-law's return to Boston; I have made Abigail Mather Blague provide it—and Boylston inoculate her young slave girl in return. The girl was definitely inoculated that day, though the reason is my surmise—as is Mrs. Blague's personality. She was a Mather, however, so it seems likely for her to have been both formidable and generous.

Kittredge would have it that Mather wrote
A Faithful Account;
I follow Fitz in sensing that in style, content, and context, this is from the pen of Boylston.

The Massachusetts House of Representatives'
Journals
show both that body's desire to conclude its business quickly in the face of the epidemic, and its inability to do so.

Mather's run-in with Franklin is only attested by Franklin; however, he had another such public shouting match with Samuel Sewall at an earlier point, so while Franklin may have exaggerated, he probably didn't have to exaggerate very much. Franklin quotes him quoting the loin-smiting passage of the Bible.

The story of the attack on the Boylstons' home is based on family legend; I have tried to disentangle obvious exaggerations from probabilities and plausibilities, and fit the latter into a sensible pattern based on known facts. Boylston family legend has it that “one evening while [Zabdiel's] wife and children were sitting in the parlor, a lighted hand grenade was thrown into the room, but the fuse striking against some furniture fell off before an explosion could take place, and thus providentially their lives were saved.” Because the grenade is said to have lost its fuse—as Mather's certainly did—and because Mather made a fuss that left a long, still readable trail while the Boylstons did not, it has sometimes been assumed that the attack on the Boylston home is Ward Nicholas Boylston's confusion of his family's story with the Mathers' story.

Against that, Ward Nicholas knew his great-uncle Zabdiel and his mother's cousins (Zabdiel's children), who were present, as well as his own grandfather (Zabdiel's brother Thomas), who was in a position to know the truth. While Ward Nicholas often exaggerates, I think complete confusion or creation of this attack de novo is unlikely. Thomas Hutchinson (who was ten in 1721, and later became governor of the province) later wrote that Boylston's “family was hardly safe in his house, and he often met with affronts and insults in the streets.” Boston had a bad reputation as a town prone to mob violence; it was so bad in 1721 that the General Court had passed a riot act earlier that year. As the dying reached its height—and people began running to be inoculated—street violence certainly picked up. Furthermore, much more of the violence and hatred seems to have been aimed at Boylston than Mather. I think a rain of stones against the Boylston house, possibly topped off by some kind of poorly made grenade or bomb—the same as might have been used against Mather—is not only plausible, but probable.

If the attack on the Boylstons' home took place the same night as that on the Mathers'—which seems likely, given the nature of crowds—Boylston responded by inoculating once more the following morning. Quietly putting his head down and going right ahead with his practice, while refusing to pursue vengeance (legal or otherwise), seems as much a part of Boylston's personality as shouting and demanding justice from the authorities seem a part of Mather's. I do not know that Pierce replaced the broken windows, but it seems plausible for exactly the reason stated.

Ward Nicholas also says that Zabdiel visited patients “only at midnight, and in disguise.” Boylston's own notes record visiting Mrs. N——s at midnight, when called on an emergency; no doubt there were others. On such occasions, he may well have wrapped himself in a cloak against weather and recognition—but a false nose and glasses seem as unlikely as the notion of taking
no
precautions in the face of threatening mobs.

As for hiding, Ward Nicholas records that “the only place of refuge” left to Zabdiel “at one time was a private place in the house where he remained secreted fourteen days, unknown to any of his family but his wife.” Given Zabdiel's inoculation records, this is not possible. It is possible, however, that he did not go out much in the two weeks following Mrs. Dixwell's death. I have made him hide the one and only time it would have seemed necessary: when a potential lynch mob was actually storming the house. The place is my own invention.

Finally, Ward Nicholas noted that “parties entered his house by day and by night searching for him.” Again, this seems an exaggeration—though without a police force, it would be hard to stop mobs from doing so. I have created a search I think more likely: a more calm search on the part of authorities—looking for Boylston ostensibly in order to protect him, and also for the out-of-town inoculees that these authorities had recently declared illegal.

Mather recorded in his diary the 3:00 A.M. attack on his house—along with a description of the “grenado” and the threatening strip of paper wrapped around it. The governor and council convinced the House to offer a £50 reward for information about the culprit (in Britain, this would have meant roughly £5,000 in today's money, though colonial currency was notoriously unstable). Though the reward was handsome, no one came forward.

The Royal Society's minutes reveal that Alexander Stuart read the first of Douglass's letters to him from Boston on November 16, the same day that Sloane reported Maitland's conclusions from Hertford. French and English drafts of this report are extant in Sloane's papers in the British Library; Miller has argued from internal evidence that the French drafts were meant for the Prince and Princess of Wales (who preferred to do their official reading in that language, though they had learned at least some English by this point).

I do not know for sure why Dummer held back from publishing Mather's report, especially since someone—possibly Dummer himself—seems to have leaked news of its positive nature to Sloane; the possibility that they were urging the use of Mather's name seems a plausible reason.

Dr. Douglass's retreat from the public eye and his defensive admission that his own plan of treatment had not gone as well as he hoped are drawn from his own (later) words.

Hutchinson's illness, will making, and death, the consequent panic and proroguing of the General Court, Robie's inoculating, and Boylston's sudden popularity are all documented. I have woven these events together; the connections are more plausible than a sudden cluster of coincidences. I have specifically made Hutchinson's case confluent and have surmised that Robie was his doctor: I do not think it was coincidence that Robie began inoculating the very day that Hutchinson died—and one week after Boylston began inoculating Robie's students and fellow Harvard faculty members en masse. One month earlier, Boylston noted that several people who had refused inoculation then died of the natural smallpox, spending their final breath urging their friends to “hasten into” the operation; I have made Hutchinson one of these people.

Sewall recorded that Hutchinson's funeral was a “great” one. I do not know whether Boylston went or not, nor do I know that he joined the Salutation Inn crowd later. His sentiments there, however, are his own.

Maitland's
Account,
Dummer's belated (and anonymous) release of Mather's
Account,
and the further trials on six genteel subjects all hit London's notice at virtually the same time.

I do not know when precisely the princess became specifically interested in Boylston. She kept close abreast of inoculation publications, however, and Neal was summoned to speak with her soon after his publication. (I have surmised that she also spoke to Dummer.) Neal's suggestion that Boylston be asked for his account is the first I have been able to locate. In the end, it was the princess and Sloane who convinced Boylston to put pen to paper; I have let Neal plant this suggestion in her brain. In the matter of inoculation, I have also deduced some measure of competition arising between the colonies and the capital, along with respect and curiosity—as history showed them to have in so many other matters.