An enslaved African taught Boston how to stop smallpox, and white doctors bombed the house for it
His name was Onesimus. That was not the name his mother gave him. It was the name his enslaver, the Puritan minister Cotton Mather, put on him after buying him in 1706. He was an African man, most likely Akan, from the region we now call Ghana. And he carried inside his head a piece of medical knowledge that would save hundreds of lives in a city that treated him as property.
One day Mather asked him whether he had ever had smallpox. Onesimus gave an answer that stopped the minister cold. Yes, and no. He explained that he had undergone an operation in Africa that had given him something of the smallpox and would preserve him from it forever, and that whoever had the courage to use it was free from the fear of the disease. He described the procedure plainly, take the juice of smallpox, cut the skin, and put in a drop. Then he told Mather the most important part of all. This was practised widely among his people. Africa had been doing this for generations.
Then in 1721 smallpox tore into Boston. Over half the city was infected, roughly 11,000 people. Hundreds fled. Mather remembered what Onesimus had told him and urged the city’s physicians to try it. Only one, Zabdiel Boylston, was willing. He inoculated his own son, two enslaved people in his household, and between 180 and 250 Bostonians.
The results ended the argument. Among the inoculated, about 2 percent died. Among the rest of the city, over 14 percent died, 844 people. Those who received the African technique were roughly six times more likely to live.
And how did Boston respond to being handed its own survival by an African? With rage. Much of the fury was simply that white Bostonians could not accept that valuable medical knowledge could come from an African mind. William Douglass, the only man in Boston holding a medical degree, and James Franklin, brother of Benjamin Franklin, launched a public campaign against it in the newspapers. Someone threw an explosive device through Cotton Mather’s window, with a note attached that read, you dog, I’ll inoculate you with this, with a pox to you.
Now follow where this knowledge went. This procedure, variolation, was the direct foundation of everything that came after. Edward Jenner developed his smallpox vaccine in 1796 building on the principle of inoculation. Smallpox was eventually eradicated from the face of the earth in 1980, the only human disease ever completely wiped out. That chain of events runs back, link by link, to an African man explaining his people’s medicine to the man who owned him.
Onesimus bought part of his freedom from Mather and then disappeared from the record almost entirely. We do not know what became of him or where he was buried. In 2016 a Boston magazine finally named him among the hundred greatest Bostonians of all time, nearly three hundred years too late.
They said Africa had nothing to teach the world. Then an African man in chains explained how to survive a plague, and a city that despised him lived because of it.
#HistoricalAfrica