I cannot believe them altogether unnecessary. Our towns are small, our houses scattered, most of them having a garden between them, so that we have been able to trace the action of contagion. We have tried many experiments with smallpox in New England, and persuade ourselves that we have some pretensions of knowing more of that disease than you in Europe.
During the war with England, smallpox broke out in the American army, and inoculation was so freely resorted to that scarcely a man escaped the lancet. Washington had his New England soldiers inoculated at Cambridge in 1776, and it was difficult to find men to keep guard over the sick; that is to say, men who had passed through smallpox and were not considered liable to infection, a curious evidence of the rarity of the natural disease in the communities from which the army had been recruited.[64]
Cotton Mather’s triumph over Boston was complete—complete beyond his intention; for it came to be as thoroughly inoculated as any town in these days is vaccinated. Dr. Waterhouse, writing on 28th October, 1788, said—
We find that in 1752 there were but 170 persons liable to smallpox in Boston, and in 1754, when there was a general inoculation in the town, I question whether there was a quarter of that number that did not receive the infection viâ naturæ vel artis. In the years 1776, ’77, and ’78 they inoculated pretty freely throughout the State. Two days ago, I was at the review of part of the militia of the county of Suffolk, and of 520 men, I scarcely think there were a hundred above twenty-five years of age that had not passed through smallpox by means of inoculation; and of 2000 reviewed a week or two before, in the county of Middlesex, there was not a greater proportion of the same age liable to take the disease. Since 1764 the dread of smallpox has lessened considerably; and since 1778 we meet the disorder with as little fear as any people you can mention.
In another letter, dated 15th October, 1787, the Doctor said—
I do not believe there is at present a single person infected by smallpox in all the four New England Governments, that is, not one in a million of people.[65]
However it may have been elsewhere, inoculation was conducted in Boston with a formality and deliberation that might have satisfied Dimsdale himself. There was an inoculation hospital erected on Sewell’s Point, which juts into Charles River, remote by a mile and a half from the common road, and situated in pleasant grounds with trees and walks. Three weeks were devoted to inoculation and the subsequent sickness, and before dismissal, wrote Dr. Waterhouse—
The patients are washed all over in soap suds, then rubbed with brandy, and lastly washed in vinegar; they put on fresh clothes, and bury those they wore during their stay in the hospital. But even then they are smoked and fumigated with sulphur in the smoke-house, which is about twice the size of a common sentry-box. This smoke-house has a hole in its side for the patient to put his head out of during the operation. Although this seems formidable on paper, yet patients submit cheerfully, and with no slight merriment.
There are perhaps 150 under inoculation at present at Sewell’s Point, not one of them paupers. They are principally children, perhaps thirty or forty of them of the first people in the commonwealth. The charge for the whole process is 8 dollars, or 36s. sterling, including every expense from incision to dismission. In some places they inoculate for half that sum. You must conceive the whole business conducted with a good deal of gaiety, where a patient, when ill, is as apt to be pitied as if sea-sick with a sailing party. The established system of mirth and good humour contributes not a little to the welfare of the patients.