Few details are known about the
birth of Onesimus, but it is assumed he was born in Africa in the late
seventeenth century before eventually landing in Boston. One of a thousand
people of African descent living in the Massachusetts colony, Onesimus was a
gift to the Puritan church minister Cotton Mather from his congregation in
1706.
Onesimus
told Mather about the centuries old tradition of inoculation practiced in
Africa. By extracting the material from an infected person and scratching it into
the skin of an uninfected person, you could deliberately introduce smallpox to
the healthy individual making them immune. Considered extremely dangerous at
the time, Cotton Mather convinced Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to experiment with the
procedure when a smallpox epidemic hit Boston in 1721 and over 240 people were
inoculated. Opposed politically, religiously and medically in the United States
and abroad, public reaction to the experiment put Mather and Boylston’s lives
in danger despite records indicating that only 2% of patients requesting
inoculation died compared to the 15% of people not inoculated who contracted
smallpox.
Onesimus’
traditional African practice was used to inoculate American soldiers during the
Revolutionary War and introduced the concept of inoculation to the United
States.
Reports
of similar practices in Turkey further persuaded Mather to mount a public
inoculation campaign. Most white doctors rejected this process of deliberately
infecting a person with smallpox--now called variolation--in part because of
their misgivings about African medical knowledge. Public and medical opinion in
Boston was strongly against both Mather and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, the only
doctor in town willing to perform inoculations; one opponent even threw a grenade
into Mather’s home. A survey of the nearly six thousand people who contracted
smallpox between 1721 and 1723 found, however, that Onesimus, Mather, and
Boylston had been right. Only 2 percent of the six hundred Bostonians
inoculated against smallpox died, while 14 percent of those who caught the
disease but were not inoculated succumbed to the illness.
It is
unclear when or how Onesimus died, but his legacy is unambiguous. His knowledge
of variolation gives the lie to one justification for enslaving Africans,
namely, white Europeans’ alleged superiority in medicine, science, and
technology. This bias made the smallpox epidemic of 1721 more deadly than it
need have been. Bostonians and other Americans nonetheless adopted the African
practice of inoculation in future smallpox outbreaks, and variolation remained
the most effective means of treating the disease until the development of
vaccination by Edward Jenner in 1796.
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