The word vaccination has appeared in the news multiple times every day for quite some time now. Most of us have been inoculated against various diseases starting when we were very young and we still get periodic inoculations or vaccines to prevent various illnesses. Of course a lot, if not most, people are waiting for the COVID vaccine right now.
I got to wondering…. what was the first “vaccine” and who came up with the idea? Like most things, if you really did into it, the subject gets complicated…. immunization (the act of making someone immune to infection) dates back hundreds of years. Buddhist monks drank snake venom to develop immunity to snake bites and variolation (smearing of a skin tear with cowpox to create an immunity to smallpox) was practiced in 17th century China. But from what I can tell, the practice of vaccinating people against infection began in 1796 by Edward Jenner. He inoculated a 13 year old boy with cowpox (vaccinia virus) and demonstrated immunity to smallpox. The first smallpox vaccine was developed in 1798.
One of the most interesting stories I uncovered during my extensive research was about a slave named Onesimus.
In 1706 a prominent Puritan minister, Cotton Mather, received a gift from his congregation — a slave from West Africa. Mather gave his slave the name Onesimus, after a Biblical slave whose name meant “useful.” Mather was a powerful figure in the Salem Witch Trials. He believed that slave owners had a duty to convert slaves to Christianity, and to educate them.
In 1721, Smallpox broke out in Massachusetts and was spreading rapidly. The first victims, passengers on a ship from the Caribbean, were shut up in a house identified only by a red flag that read “God have mercy on this house.” As the sickness swept through the city of Boston, killing hundreds, at a time before modern medical treatment or much of an understanding of infectious disease, Onesimus, owned by Mather, suggested a potential way to keep people from getting sick. Onesimus told Mather about the centuries old tradition of inoculation practiced in Africa. By extracting the pus 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. Even though the “operation” was considered extremely dangerous at the time, Cotton Mather convinced Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to experiment with the procedure and over 240 people were inoculated. The process was 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.
The smallpox epidemic wiped out 844 people in Boston — over 14 percent of the population, but it helped set the stage for vaccination. Edward Jenner developed an effective vaccine using cowpox to provoke smallpox immunity in 1796. It isn’t clear whether Onesimus lived to see the success of the technique he introduced to Mather. Not is much in known of his later life except that he partially purchased his freedom, giving money to Mather to purchase another slave. But what is known is that the knowledge he passed on saved hundreds of lives — and led to the eventual eradication of smallpox. Hopefully, we’re on the same path today with COVID…..
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