More on the History of Vaccines

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece about the history of the word “vaccine”. I talked about Edward Jenner and his experiments with cowpox. Although I had heard this story many times, I had never heard the story of the arrival of variolation (the technique of using pus from already-infected smallpox patients to inoculate healthy people against the disease) to the US.

In 1706, an enslaved West African man was purchased and named Onesimus. Onesimus let his owner know that he could prevent smallpox infection in a person by rubbing an open wound of a healthy person with pus from a person infected with smallpox. In fact, people elsewhere in the world had been doing it to protect themselves from smallpox.

Onesimus’ owner, Cotton Mather, teamed up with Boston physician Zabdiel Boylston in

“Of the 242 people he inoculated, only six died—one in 40, as opposed to one in seven deaths among the population of Boston who didn’t undergo the procedure.”

Luckily, hundreds of years of medical research have led to vaccines that are now much more effective and much, much safer. However, Onesimus’ strategy paved the way for Edward Jenner’s cowpox experiments in 1798 and all of the developments that came after. Today, smallpox is the only infections disease that’s been completely wiped out, thanks to the technology Onesimus brought to the US.

Source:

https://www.history.com/news/smallpox-vaccine-onesimus-slave-cotton-mather?fbclid=IwAR07VyFK1x6OHvTZuKh8GbND99yRacdTO3DebT8y7jttdMEs-4qwOgG2p7I