At 4:00 P.M. sharp, Mr. Cooke called the meeting back to order and gave the floor once again to Dr. Douglass.
“This afternoon, gentlemen, I should like to begin by offering a case of conscience—merely as food for thought, since it is properly the purview of ministers. Smallpox, now, has been recognized for many thousands of years as a divine scourge, revealing the wrath of God Almighty and goading the wicked into repentance. Is it a Christian’s endeavor to wrest that rod so lightly from the hand of Providence?”
Boylston studied Dr. Douglass for a moment. “May a Christian not employ new medicines, humbly giving thanks to God for his good Providence in revealing new discoveries to a miserable and suffering world? By your argument,” he said, “you condemn all of progress in medicine as unchristian.”
Behind his desk, Mr. Cooke sighed. “Let us set aside theology for the moment, until we might convene a more appropriate gathering of experts.”
Dr. Douglass did his best to keep his scowl to himself: would both Cooke and Clark undercut him all day? “My intent exactly,” he said, shifting directions. “Let us return to the subject of more worldly experience, on which Mr. Boylston has based much of his evidence. I now offer you the testimony of another man with firsthand knowledge of the operation.”
Some men had been drowsing, and two had frankly sunk into postprandial naps. Now heads swiveled; eyes snapped to attention. Who else was messing with inoculation?
“Monsieur le docteur Laurence Dalhonde, may I ask you to step forward?”
A coolly elegant man rose and made his way onto the floor in a gentle cloud of lavender. The heat had wilted many of the men in the room, staining their dark suits even darker with perspiration. But Dr. Dalhonde did not appear to have sweated so much as a drop.
“Dr. Dalhonde, how long have you been practicing medicine?”
“S’il vous plaît,” he said with icy hauteur, “je préfère parler le français.” If you don’t mind, I prefer to speak French. A refugee from the religious persecution in France, he kept close within the French community. He had never bothered to learn much English, which he regarded as a boorish language.
“Très bien,” said Dr. Douglass smoothly. “I will translate.” Not for nothing had he spent those years studying in Paris, he thought. He repeated his question.
“I have been practicing for thirty years or thereabouts,” answered Dr. Dalhonde.
“Have you ever practiced inoculation?”
The doctor’s look of horror needed no translation. “Non,” he replied with contempt. “Jamais.”
In spite of himself, a small smile tickled the corners of Dr. Douglass’s mouth. “When did you first encounter this infamous practice?”
“Twenty-five years ago,” said Dr. Dalhonde.
“That’s not possible,” cried Boylston. “It had not—”
The room erupted into a buzz of chatter. Mr. Cooke rapped the desk his gavel.
Boylston took a step toward the selectman. “But—”
Mr. Cooke cut him off. “Dr. Boylston, you had your say this morning. You will have your say again later this afternoon. Just now, however, we wish to hear Dr. Dalhonde.”
Dr. Boylston made one more move to speak.
“Uninterrupted, if you please,” specified Mr. Cooke, waving him back to his place.
Boylston gave him a curt nod, and stepped back.
“Proceed, s’il vous plaît,” said Mr. Cooke.
With a smug bow, Dr. Douglass turned back to Dr. Dalhonde. “Perhaps, M. le Docteur, you could be so good as to describe those events.”
It was delightfully damning testimony. Not from an unknown Italian Papist whiling away the years among Turks. From a respected French Calvinist standing there, flesh and blood, in front of them.
Twenty-five years earlier, it transpired, Dr. Dalhonde had been with the French army in Italy, near Cremona, when this very operation had been attempted upon no fewer than thirteen soldiers. On three of them, said Dr. Dalhonde, the operation had had no effect, but on the other ten, the results had been horrible.
“And what, monsieur,” asked Dr. Douglass, “were these horrible results?”
“Death, sir. Death and destruction.”
Another buzz stirred the room; again, Mr. Cooke pounded it into submission.
“Four men died in agony. Another six barely recovered, troubled for life with swellings and tumors in the glands of the throat.”
“And was that your only experience with inoculation?”
“Mais non. I experienced it a second time twenty years ago.” That had been in Flanders, said Dr. Dalhonde, when the duc de Guiche had consigned a captain of the dragoons to his care. The man had been suffering terribly from the smallpox, truly terribly, covered not just with pocks, but with boils and ulcers. “He grasped my coat,” said Dr. Dalhonde, shaking his head at the memory, “and cried out piteously in these very words: ‘Ten years ago I was inoculated five or six times’—”
“That’s impossible,” Boylston burst out once more, loosing catcalls from the rim of the room.
“Silence,” roared Mr. Cooke, rapping furiously with his gavel. “One further peep, Dr. Boylston, and you will be dismissed from this meeting. Is that clear?”
Boylston bowed, and Dr. Dalhonde picked up the thread of his story. “ ‘Ten years ago,’ said this poor captain, ‘I was inoculated five or six times, but the cursed invention had no effect. Must I therefore perish? Can you do nothing for me?’ ”
Revulsion chiseling his face, Dr. Dalhonde paused to glare at Boylston.
“Alas,” he continued, “I could not. The man survived: but some of the ulcers never left him. One of them, on his arm—just where he said he had endured this diabolical operation—lamed him for life.”
A sigh trailed through the room.
Dr. Dalhonde did not wait for Dr. Douglass’s next prompt. “I had one final encounter with this diabolical procedure, only a few years afterward. In Spain, at the Battle of Almanza in 1707. Smallpox was eating through the army with such speed and strength that veteran soldiers who scorned to fear battle were quaking in their boots. At last, terror drove two Muscovites to dare this operation.
“One had no reaction at all. The other had a light smallpox and then recovered. Six weeks later, however, he was seized with a frenzy. His entire body swelled until he died. At first, they believed it was poisoning, so two of the personal physicians of the king of Spain, and a third who was in the entourage of His Royal Highness, le duc d’Orleans, opened the body. His lungs had ulcerated, which convinced them that it was no new poison, but the slow working of that previous infection.”
“Merci, M. le Docteur,” said Dr. Douglass, through the muttering swirling around them. “Merci beaucoup.”
Dr. Dalhonde bowed and retreated to his seat.
Dr. Douglass, meanwhile, fixed the company with the glare of a falcon. “Let us review the salient points of the doctor’s eloquent testimony.
“Manifestly, inoculation maims and kills. Not always, you will notice, immediately, but sometimes as much as six weeks, or even years, later. Mr. Boylston has painted grand dreams of success, but all he can really tell you is that he has not killed anyone yet—though by his own admission, he has come close. His son and two slaves are alive a month later. But who can say where they will be in another month’s time? In a year? Ten years?”
The company was silent; Boylston stared rigidly forward.
“And what profit is promised in return for this risk?” Dr. Douglass continued. “It is a shield, the inoculator has said, that may save extravagant thousands. But Dr. Dalhonde has given eyewitness testimony that it is not: one of his own patients who suffered the operation numerous times came to him deathly ill of the natural smallpox. By which we may conclude that it not only leaves one as vulnerable as a newborn, but considerably worse: covered with ulcers that rot limbs to the core.”
He paused for a breath, and Boylston jumped in. “If people had had their limbs rotting off, sir, or ha
d been dying, or proved liable to smallpox after inoculation, I ask you—I ask you all—is it conceivable that this operation could have grown in popularity in such a great city as Constantinople for forty long years?
“Against this practice, you recount secondhand stories that make no sense with respect to the evidence given by no lesser body than the Royal Society. Let me make a counteroffer: In addition to the three patients you have heard about, who have already recovered, I have inoculated seven more persons, whose rashes have not yet come out.”
Gasps of outrage shivered through the room like arrows, but he ignored them till they fell away. “I invite all you to visit these inoculated patients as they progress through their illness.” Jeers and gibes tossed upward into the dome. Boylston glanced at Mr. Cooke, but he made no effort to quell the noise, so Boylston raised his voice to speak through it. “What makes this practice so valuable, in my opinion, is that it offers an escape from the violence, rage, and hazard of the disease taken in the natural way.”
Around him, the hooting died. “Before you condemn inoculation out of hand, compare for yourselves the experience of these patients with that of the many poor souls suffering smallpox in the natural way.”
“I cannot say I recommend such a course,” said Dr. Douglass from behind Boylston, “due to the danger of spreading infection.”
“How?” cried Boylston, spinning around in frustration.
Dr. Douglass smiled. “Let me explain: Dr. Dalhonde has testified that inoculation produces many kinds of sores, beyond pocks. It is not just the existence of such sores that must concern us, but their location, their nature, and their consequences.” He lowered his voice, so that men had to crane forward to hear him. “Some of the sores are not pocks, but swellings and tumors in the glands of the groin, armpits, and neck.”
He imagined his voice stretching long and razor sharp; he cooled it to ice to deliver the coup de grace. “The very places,” Douglass continued, “where one finds the sores of the black plague.”
A sigh, a little breath, came out came from all thirty men ringed around him at once. Fear shirred the air with a vision of streets stacked with flyblown corpses gnawed by starving dogs, of children turning their backs on parents and parents thrusting children from their doors. The smallpox, true, could kill whole villages and towns with equal virulence, especially in this new world, but smallpox was a disease they knew. The plague, in Boston, was unknown save in nightmares.
Not in France, though. Was it not devastating Marseilles and Aix-en-Provence? And wasn’t France the very place that Dr. Dalhonde had encountered inoculation? Were the two indeed connected?
Two clouds of death, one of yellow-white sores, the other purple-black, seemed to take shape and hover in the dome overhead; slowly, they began to stream and stretch toward one another, in a perfect, whirling storm of devastation.
Dr. Douglass kept his eyes on Boylston. With mounting glee, he watched him fit the steps of Dr. Douglass’s masterful argument together. Watched him link this assault with the carefully laid trail of articles in the Boston News-Letter. Watched him move from the paper to its owner, editor, and chief writer, John Campbell, another Scot. Watched him surmise the sly ease with which Dr. Douglass had slipped such “news” into Campbell’s insatiable maw during the half-drunken cheer of the Scots Charitable Society, meeting in an upper room at the Green Dragon.
“Are you suggesting, sir” croaked Boylston, “that the operation of inoculation causes the plague?”
“You have made the leap yourself,” said Dr. Douglass.
“Ridiculous!” exclaimed Boylston. “Excessively ridiculous!”
“Not according to Timonius and Pylarinus, in whom you have otherwise put such trust. Both say that inoculation can produce the very abscesses, swellings, and tumors that Dr. Dalhonde has witnessed.”
“And they both insist they are rare,” Boylston retorted. “And neither makes any mention of the plague whatsoever.”
“Perhaps,” said Dr. Douglass, “they did not need to in Constantinople, where the plague can kill as many as a hundred thousand people in a year.”
The intake of breath was audible. Of all the world’s queenly cities, Constantinople was the one most haunted by the plague. It was also the city where inoculation had originated. Was this not further evidence that the two were linked?
“One disease does not transform into another,” said Boylston, his anger at last making him reckless. “You might as well say that inoculation turns men into women.”
This time, Dr. Douglass noted with satisfaction, his flippancy was greeted with silence.
“Indeed, sir?” Dr. Douglass smoothed his voice to glassy calm. “On what grounds do you say so?”
“Lots of diseases cause glandular swellings,” said Boylston. “If you begin shouting plague at every glandular swelling in the country, you’ll be chasing a thousand people a week.”
“Have you ever seen a case of the plague?”
Boylston caught his breath. “No, I have not.”
“Not one? Not one and twenty?” sneered Dr. Douglass.
“None,” said Boylston.
“Then you have no grounds for making such a statement,” said Dr. Douglass briskly. “A spark in one of your inoculated patients might escape your attention until our whole town was burning with a fire that would make this plague of smallpox look like a child’s bonfire on the beach.”
He turned from Boylston to the men. He began his final assault quite gently, as if he regretted what he must say. “Unfortunately, as you have seen, Mr. Boylston’s experiment proves to be quite flawed. He has based it, as he admits, on articles that appeared in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. Unfortunately, he failed to recognize that they were meant as no more than virtuoso amusements.
“I do not blame Dr. Mather in this,” he added. “No doubt the reverend has operated all along under a pious and charitable design of Doing Good.” He inflected his voice in the merest shadow of a Mather imitation. Yes—a smile or two lifted at the mockery, and not just among the Scots. “Even the best of men have some foible, and that of Dr. Mather is credulity in his amateur zeal for medicine.” He hardened his voice.
“But what should we say of Mr. Boylston, who professes to practice the medical arts?” He shook his head. “Mr. Boylston has displayed not only credulity but criminal rashness. This sort of quackery is only fit for a stage in a country market town; he defends it with nothing more than the hearsay of old Greek women and African slaves.
“In short, he is mischievously propagating infection, not just anywhere, but in the market square at the very heart of town. Already he has convinced seven hapless souls to risk their lives and health on the basis of a few scanty experiments. How many more can we let him infect? And with what?”
Boylston opened his mouth to speak, but Mr. Cooke brought his gavel down. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I think we have heard enough. The time has come when I must beg you to consult among yourselves, weighing carefully all the evidence you have heard here today. The selectmen would like to have your recommendation in deciding a proper course of action.”
Politely but firmly, Boylston was requested to withdraw to the anteroom. Barely a quarter of an hour passed before he was recalled.
Dr. Douglass could not look at him, for fear of trumpeting his triumph aloud. Instead, he watched Mr. Cooke smooth the sheet he had written out with such care and forethought the day before. It had passed, with no emendations.
Fixing Boylston with a baleful stare, Mr. Cooke announced, “On the subject of inoculation, sir, the doctors of this town have made the following recommendation to the selectmen.” He looked back down and read:
“In considering the operation called inoculation: it appears by numerous instances first, that it has proved the death of many persons soon after the operation and brought distempers upon many others which have in the end proved deadly to them.
“Second, that the natural tendency of infusing such malignant fi
lth into the mass of blood is to corrupt and putrify it, and if there be not a sufficient discharge of that malignity at the place of incision, or elsewhere, it lays a foundation for many dangerous diseases.
“Third, that the operation tends to spread and continue the infection in a place longer than it might otherwise be.
“Fourth, that the continuing the operation among us is likely to prove of most dangerous consequence.”
Mr. Cooke looked up at Boylston. “Your fellow physicians, in other words, have deemed the operation so wicked as to be criminal. In consideration of which, the selectmen have unanimously agreed that should you persist in this practice, we will have no choice but to charge you with felony poisoning and deliberate spreading of infection.” Boylston’s face could have been carved from stone. “Furthermore, should any of your patients come to grief, we will be forced to pursue a charge of murder.”
The last word rang through the silent room.
In the speaker’s chair, Dr. Clark stirred and stood. “You have, sir, put this town at the gravest risk. Some might say you have betrayed the noblest goals of our profession, to heal and not to harm. It is fervently to be hoped that you will abide by these resolutions.”
At last Boylston stirred. With stiff courtesy, he bowed to Mr. Cooke and again to the gathered company. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said stonily, “for your consideration. Should any of you wish to gather further information at first hand, my offer of visitation still stands.” The recoil was visible. “Good day.” With that, he turned on his heel and strode out.
Zabdiel drove himself down the stairs the way he had once, as a boy, driven himself up from deep water toward air and glittering light just as his lungs were on the point of explosion. Down, down, down, he went, through a gauntlet of waiting men whose silence turned to the hissing of serpents as he passed; the news was spreading fast. Down through the doors and into the street.
The late afternoon light was fading under the burden of ever longer, thicker shadows. Thankfully, there was no mob lying in wait outside. A side effect, he thought wryly, of the selectmen’s need to keep this meeting secret, so as to heighten the ambush. At this point, he would take whatever accidental good he could find in the world.
The Speckled Monster Page 32
