Cotton Mather, Smallpox, Hypocrisy

As we all know, Cotton Mather was and still is a figure of great controversy. He had a leading role in instigating and perpetuating the fear that gripped Salem and presided over many sham hearings accusing innocent citizens of witchcraft. His upbringing was one that strongly influenced his paranoia. His father’s, for lack of a better term, craziness clearly rubbed off on the minister. In the years, following the events in 1692 in Salem, Mather continued to be a prominent voice in Massachusetts society. Yet, his controversy followed him. Mather was, as evidenced by the witch trials, petrified of the unknown and the “other.” He saw himself as placed on a pedestal by God himself. He allowed people to blame other citizens of witchcraft and allowed faulty evidence in the trials. Simply put, he viewed any action as not typical of Puritan society as acts of evil and thus, witchcraft. Nonetheless, Mather continues. His fear followed him and one of those fears was hypochondria. His fear of sickness was gravely real. In fact, it was this fear that thrust Mather back into the spotlight in Massachusetts in the early 1700s. Before we had vaccines, people used to inoculate themselves against diseases. This means they would create a small wound and crudely insets secreted fluids from a person who was mildly infected with a disease. The logic worked the same as a vaccine. It introduced a portion of the disease in an amount that the body could fend off and provide future immunity to. However, inoculation could be dangerous. It often led to the transfer of unwanted diseases and created infections far worse than the disease itself. However, Mather was fascinated by the idea of inoculation. Smallpox had plagued the Boston area multiple times before Mather and during Mather’s lifetime. Mather first heard of the idea of inoculation from one of his slaves in 1706, who claimed to have been inoculated from smallpox in Africa. He read more upon the practice and found a paper from one doctor who endorsed the strange prescription. At the time, inoculation was viewed as a savage practice. It was seen as one that was only done by those people untouched by the Western world. Inoculation practices have been noted in Aztec, ancient Chinese, African, and Indian culture and this stigma around the practice led to another massive swoon of controversy in Mather’s life. Unsurprisingly, there was strong and fierce opposition to Mather’s endorsement of inoculation. Notable reverends and scientific minds of the time rebuked the practice and claimed it to be “unholy.” Puritan society was outraged. They saw the practice was sinful and one that God had never once endorsed in the Bible. After all, preventing a disease is something that would go entirely against Puritan’s belief of predestination. In Calvinistic society, people believe that God had planned every event in a person’s lifetime out and that from conception, they were either saved to go to Heaven or damned to Hell and there was nothing they could do. If you caught a disease like smallpox, then it was planned by God and a sign that you had been damned. Preventing the will of God through science was a debate that started here and only continued to grow, and grow, and grow until present where we still need to question how far science should go. It wasn’t until another wave of smallpox rolled through Boston that the practice of inoculation started to be defended more and more, especially by theologians. People were able to see the positive results of inoculation first-hand and many came around to the idea, thus preserving Mather’s reputation. As fascinating as this story of the birth of modern medicine through ancient means is, one thing struck me the most and that was the hypocrisy of Cotton Mather. Had it been presented in Mather’s witch trials that an accused witch had practiced inoculation he or she had learned from a slave, they surely would have been found guilty, as it was an act against God in Puritan society. Yet, not even two decades later, Mather had found himself advocating for an idea that the church at the time had vehemently claimed as evil. I think it not without reason that I can say that the Mather from the trials would have accused the Mather from the inoculation controversy as a witch. Practicing medicine only previously known to been used by people the Puritans considered to be “savage” is one of the biggest one-eighties I have read historically, especially given Mather’s reputation. This shows why history is so dynamic. People change. History will always remember both the good and the bad, but more often than not, only the bad. Cotton Mather will forever remain as a divisive, yet fascinating figure from one of the most tumultuous times in American history.