The Speckled Monster (88 page)

Wyman, Thomas B., Jr. “Pedigree of the Family of Boylston.”
New England Historical and Genealogical Register
7 (1853): 145-50.

 

This pamphlet was Boston's first separately printed defense of inoculation; it was printed after August 25, 1721, when Mather notes an intention to publish it in his diary, and before September 4 of that year, when the
New England Courant
announced plans to publish a rebuttal.

The title page gives no author but does identify Dr. Zabdiel Boylston as its publisher. The pamphlet has three parts: first, a lengthy abridgement of the two articles by Timonius and Pylarinus; second, a series of defenses of inoculation given in answer to particular arguments voiced against it; and third, some theological reflections on the lawfulness of protecting oneself against disease. The first and third parts are undoubtedly by Cotton Mather. The first is the long abridgment or loose transcription of the Royal Society's inoculation papers that he sent to the town's physicians, and which later shows up in his
Angel of Bethesda
. The third part, as George Lyman Kittredge notes in “Lost Works of Cotton Mather,” addresses Mather's subject of expertise (Puritan theology) in his inimitable style.

Kittredge also claimed the second part for Mather, on the grounds that it quotes the same unnamed black man's story of African inoculation that is to be found in Mather's smallpox treatise (later incorporated into
Angel of Bethesda
). Zabdiel Boylston, however, is far more likely to have been the primary author of the second section—though he may have been collaborating with Mather at some level. First, it is written in the first person by someone who pointedly distinguishes himself from the author of the preceding abridgement, i.e., Mather. Named on the title page as the publisher, Boylston is the person most likely to be the “I” of this writing. Second, it appears to have been written by someone with firsthand experience of inoculation. Third, Mather later quoted two paragraphs from this section and identified them as by the inoculating doctor, i.e. Boylston (CMA, pages 25-26). Finally, the reasoning, the frustration, and the sarcastic humor in this section are all echoed elsewhere by Boylston.

As for quoting the same black man, I think it likeliest that Boylston heard the same story from the same source, and then later relied on Mather's transcription when he came to putting it into print. Mather was fascinated by the Creole-influenced English; Boylston smoothed it over into something more like standard English. He also surrounded the passage with different observations and arguments than Mather did. Furthermore, Boylston prized firsthand examination of witnesses and evidence, as his frustration with the doctors who refused to visit his inoculated patients makes clear. It seems far-fetched that he would not have made the same examination of surviving witnesses, before attempting the operation on his own son. It is possible, however, that he merely lifted the quotation from Mather. Either way, its use does not argue convincingly against Boylston's authorship of this section.

I have regarded this second section as the work of Zabdiel Boylston.