Smallpox Inoculation

The earliest attempts at smallpox inoculation — a technique called variolation, in which a small dose of live smallpox was scratched under the skin to trigger a milder, survivable case, and the direct precursor to Jenner's vaccine — came with a charge that sounds surprisingly contemporary. It was blasphemous. On 8 July 1722, the Anglican minister Edmund Massey climbed into the pulpit of St Andrew's Holborn in London and denounced the practice as a "Diabolical Operation" that "tends... to anticipate and banish Providence out of the World." His reasoning: disease was God's tool for punishing sin, and warding it off by human artifice was an act of impious interference with divine judgement.

The previous year in Boston, a Puritan minister called Cotton Mather had pushed the same technique during a deadly outbreak. Mather had first heard about it from Onesimus, an enslaved West African in his household who described the practice as routine in his homeland. Mather persuaded a local physician, Zabdiel Boylston, to try it. Together they inoculated more than 240 residents. Mortality among them dropped from roughly 14% (the typical death rate for natural infection) to about 2%. The response was not gratitude. Mather's house was firebombed. Boylston was chased by mobs. A demonstrably risk-reducing practice was portrayed as an impious attempt to "play God," and public acceptance was slowed for decades.

The underlying concern — that human artifice was muscling in on divine providence — has re-emerged with every major biomedical intervention since. Inoculation won. The question of who mediates between nature and human will has never stopped being contested.