Boston Smallpox Inoculation

April 22, 1721

Cotton Mather, having heard of inoculation from an enslaved African named Onesimus, persuaded Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to try it during Boston's epidemic. The town threw a bomb through Mather's window. But of the inoculated, one in fifty died; of the rest, one in six. America had taken a small, contested step toward medicine.