The Speckled Monster

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  November 16, 1721

  William Hutchinson, selectman and representative for Boston, woke in the night with a splitting headache and spinning nausea. Dr. Thomas Robie, physician and tutor of mathematics, astronomy, and natural philosophy at Harvard, was sent for, but he had no alternative diagnosis to offer. Mr. Hutchinson had come down with the smallpox.

  Dr. Clark, his fellows howled. Despite all the speaker’s care to cleanse himself from the contagion after visiting his patients, he has carried the disease in among us, and passed it to Mr. Hutchinson. Who might be next? By morning, so many members of the House were packing in panic that the governor found it necessary to put a dignified face on the chaos by proroguing the General Court until March.

  The following day, November 18, five people rushed to Dock Square in Boston to put themselves in Dr. Boylston’s care.

  Russell Square, Bloomsbury, London

  November 18, 1721

  Mr. Dummer regretted it, said his disappointing little note, but he could not countenance the breach of confidence that Sir Hans had requested. He would send back to Boston directly, begging for permission to use Dr. Mather’s name on his pamphlet.

  Sir Hans took his spectacles off and sighed. Mr. Dummer had intimated that he could make what private use he might of Dr. Mather’s glowing report from Boston, but public proclamation would have to wait the length of two ocean crossings. In winter, no less, when the North Atlantic would scream with icy anger that quelled even the bravest hearts from setting sail for long stretches of weeks. It might well be February before he had an answer.

  He drummed the table with impatient fingers. Why must proclamations that would do good lie silent, while those aimed at nothing but panic could be plastered through the gossip-mongering papers? Spread before him on his breakfast table were two of the vile rags, both proclaiming a further experiment to be made on every last orphan of St. James’s.

  He did not know where such leaks came from. Almost certainly not from anyone within the princess’s counsel, for they were considering inoculating a few children. The princess had suggested an en masse inoculation, but he and Lord Townshend had reasoned her out of it: until the operation should be known to be safe, they could not make it a requirement. It must at least appear to be voluntary. Besides, they needed a success rate of one hundred percent, and some of those children were already on the downhill slope toward death.

  Some! Sir Hans snorted. His inspection of the charity children of St. James’s had presented such a bleak picture of misery that he had postponed the entire affair until a few of the ragamuffins could be given enough food, warmth, and sleep to stand a chance of fighting off even the attenuated infection of inoculation.

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  November 20, 1721

  The appearance of the rash dissolved Mr. Hutchinson’s last refuge of hope. Watching the red speckles thicken, he called for paper and ink and made out his will.

  The following morning, Dr. Robie inspected him in the gray November light and his face grew grim. Already, the rash had sown itself nearly solid.

  “It is not of the best sort, is it?” asked the selectman.

  “I am sorry,” said Dr. Robie. “It will be confluent.”

  Mr. Hutchinson blinked and looked away out the window. “Have you had news of my wife?” he asked. “And the children?”

  “She is distraught for your sake, but still safe. Far in the country, where the air is still clean.”

  Dr. Robie heard a sharp intake of breath. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” said Mr. Hutchinson with a bitter laugh. “What do you think of Dr. Boylston’s operation of inoculation?”

  “I do not know what to think. I cannot conceive how it works.”

  “But does it work?”

  “It would appear that it does.”

  Mr. Hutchinson sighed and turned back to the doctor. “It is just retribution—” Dr. Robie moved to protest, but Mr. Hutchinson waved him off. “You do not know what hell we have put him through, in our pride and vainglory.” He leaned across the table. “It is too late for me. But not for others.” He gripped Dr. Robie by the arm; his own was red and thick. “You must learn to inoculate.”

  The doctor stepped back, but Mr. Hutchinson’s grip strengthened. “Without delay.”

  The dissolution of the General Court dispersed panic throughout the province. Even as deaths tapered off in Boston, people began flocking to Dr. Boylston, begging to be inoculated. On the twenty-second of November, Zabdiel inoculated ten people. The next day, Dr. Robie appeared from Cambridge, ushering in three students from Harvard and a plea that Zabdiel had thought he would never hear from a fellow doctor: Show me how it is done. “With pleasure, sir,” he said, and two heads bent over the glint of his lancet. The next day Dr. Robie returned with eight more students, a fellow, and Mr. Edward Wigglesworth, the Hollis Professor. The day after that, three more students arrived. In three days, Zabdiel inoculated almost the entire student body and faculty of Harvard—most of those, at any rate, who were still untouched by the speckled beast. In addition to the Bromfields and Fitches, Lorings and Lyndes, he had already inoculated, Sewalls, Foxcrofts, and Danforths now came to call: the most exalted names in the province begged for his time, bowing and scraping about convenience.

  They were not alone. Day by day, the number of inoculees rose: 10, then 12, 13, 14—as many as 15 in a day. In the three weeks following the attack on his family, Zabdiel inoculated 119 people in Boston and Roxbury: more than doubling the number in the previous five months. Since the people of Roxbury could no longer come to him, he went to them. When he could, he went to Charlestown and Cambridge as well. Waiting—anything to do with stillness—ceased to be part of his days, which were devoured by inoculating, by checking up on his inoculated patients, by riding back and forth across the Neck, or sailing hither and yon on the Charlestown ferry.

  In Cambridge, Mr. Hutchinson’s skin swelled and frothed, flushing from red to yellow and then fading to an ominous ashen gray.

  The ministers, meanwhile, threw their heads back and roared. Increase Mather published Several REASONS Proving that Inoculating or Transplanting the Small Pox is a Lawful Practice, and that it has been Blessed by GOD for the Saving of many a Life. To it was attached another essay: Sentiments on the Small-Pox Inoculated. The second, as everyone knew, was by Dr. Cotton Mather, though still he refused to put his name on it. His father’s was what was needed, he told himself.

  Mr. Colman provided Some Observations on the New Method of Receiving the Small Pox by Engrafting or Inoculating, and Mr. Cooper—under the guise of “A Minister of Boston”—offered A Letter to a Friend in the Country, Attempting a Solution of the Scruples and Objections of a Conscientious or Religious Nature, Commonly Made against the New Way of Receiving the Small-Pox.

  As Boylston gained the rich, the powerful, and the poor, Dr. Douglass’s practice drained away. His cold method, a strict interpretation of Dr. Sydenham’s theories, was not doing as well as he would like; nor was his liberal use of opiates and the spirit of vitriol. Not that he was doing poorly. There were still so many sick that only the most powerful could be choosy; most people were properly grateful to have a physician (or to have a doctor at all, thought his slave Pompey). “I shall seclude myself from all other company but that of my patients,” sniffed Dr. Douglass to himself as his carriage passed by lines patiently waiting outside Boylston’s door, “and commit to writing—for my own reminiscence and private use—the remarkable cases in what is, after all, still a very extensive practice.”

  On the thirtieth of November, Selectman William Hutchinson died of the smallpox in Cambridge, contracted in the service of the House of Representatives. He was thirty-eight years old. At his side, Dr. Robie bowed his head and then rose, walking across Harvard Yard to inoculate his first patient: his fellow tutor, Nicholas Sever.

  Two days later, the funeral for Mr. Hutchinson in Boston was a great one, deep, dark, an
d sonorous with mourning pomp. Dr. Boylston did not attend; he saddled up Prince and rode straight up to the beacon on Beacon Hill. Up there in the cold wind, he listened to the tolling of the bells below and sent his own prayer heavenward—for the deceased and for his widow and young children, but mostly, truth be told, for the anguish of Dr. Clark.

  He watched the sun set, and thought of a burning angel folding his wings and slinking away. The petty nastiness would not slip away so quietly, he knew that. There were still skirmishes to be fought, and no doubt sputtering ugliness to endure. But the dark fury was subsiding, chased out of town by the steady stream of footsteps, wheels, horse hooves flowing to his door.

  Later, he withdrew to the Salutation Inn, where Cheever, Helyer, some Webbs, and several Langdons were gathered around the big fire.

  “Where’ve you been?” cried Cheever, calling for a fresh round of rum punch.

  “Giving thanks,” said Zabdiel, stamping snow from his coat and boots, and crossing the room to stretch before the fire.

  “Alone?” protested Cheever. “Without us? Without trumpets or harps?”

  “I had my horse,” said Zabdiel, gratefully accepting a steaming tankard of hot rum punch from Mr. Dodge, and cupping cold hands around it. “What would I do with a harp?”

  “And there you have him,” said Cheever to the crowd. “Dr. Boylston, at the height of celebrating his part in revealing inoculation to be the greatest blessing Providence has ever afforded mankind . . . Be as modest and monosyllabic as you like, my friend, but tell us this: Would you do it again?”

  Zabdiel set down his tankard, pulled his pipe from his coat, filled it, and lit it. “Let us hope,” he said, “that I never have to answer that question.”

  “Hah!” said Cheever. “Dizzy with optimism at last.” He waved his own pipe in the direction of the front door. “There will be an ‘again,’ you know. Because that wide darkness out there would be the sea, just in case you forgot. Sends the golden talents of Ophir streaming our way, for the most part. But every now and again, it spits up the Beast.” He leaned forward to Zabdiel. “When that happens, will you start this whole fury anew? Will you inoculate again?”

  Around them, the whole circle of men leaned in.

  Zabdiel pulled the pipe from his mouth. When it shall please Providence to send the distemper among us again, he had prayed as he sat atop Prince, up on the hill, may inoculation revive, be better received, and continue a blessing. He had even liked the words so much that he pulled out his case notebook and scribbled the sentence in the margins. But he did not repeat it aloud.

  Instead, he released a slow ring of smoke. “Of course,” he said quietly.

  11

  IN ROYAL FASHION

  London

  February 1722

  AT last, the seas smiled again, sending a ship from Boston scudding up the Thames.

  Mr. Dummer slit open the long-awaited letter from Dr. Mather and groaned. With a most unfortunate and emphasized certainty, Dr. Mather did not wish his name to be bandied about in print concerning this matter. But he did wish his little treatise to be published.

  Applebee’s was rather more pleased at the bad news its editors received from Boston. Four hundred dead every week! The epidemic was still raging in Boston, the Tory paper screamed, and the Americans had had precious little but bad luck with their project of inoculation: perhaps, the article insinuated, the preposterous death toll might be laid at the feet of this newfangled practice.

  Mr. Dummer was outraged. How could anyone accidentally confuse four hundred dead in a month with four hundred in a week: a number he doubted that London had ever known, except in time of the plague?

  Mr. Maitland shrugged it off and put the final touches on his account of inoculation (and his name into the title) and sent it off to the printers.

  “Poetry is dead, and Physick had replaced it,” grumbled Pope, hard at work on his translation of the Odyssey.

  “You are jealous,” teased Lady Mary.

  “Only of you, my lady,” he said.

  There had been a lull in the inoculation controversy since early December, when the St. James Evening Post whispered that “a Noble Duke in Hanover Square” had undergone the operation; two days later, the Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer added Charlotte Tichborne, woman of the princess’s bedchamber, to the list. Somehow, notice of Mr. Maitland’s inoculation of the children of Mr. Colt, colleague of Mr. Dummer at the Middle Temple, escaped the newspapers’ notice. Then the Christmas holidays arrived, and smallpox receded from view as halls were decked, and gentlemen made merry.

  On February 23, 1722, the wrangling came back with a roar. Under royal sponsorship, Mr. Maitland inoculated six more people. “The curious,” announced the papers, “may be further satisfied by a sight of those persons at Mr. Forster’s house in Marlborough Court, at the Upper End of Poland Street and Berwick Street in Soho, where attendance is given every day from ten till twelve before noon, and from two till four in the afternoon.”

  Though nominally open to view, the Newgate experiment had essentially been closed to all but the most intrepid: many who were safe from smallpox had refused to attend for fear of jail fever or distaste for the rude antics of the prisoners. The six new subjects, however, were genteel enough to offer safe viewing to anyone not vulnerable to the smallpox. The curious, the suspicious, and the horrified began to drift in, clutching copies of Mr. Maitland’s Account still damp from the press.

  That very day, Jeremiah Dummer at last signed and dated his introduction to Cotton Mather’s unacknowledged Account, and sent it forth, dedicated to Sir Hans Sloane, President, and the rest of the Royal College of Physicians. “Gentlemen,” he began with a sigh, “I receiv’d the following Account of the Method and Success of inoculating the Small-Pox in New-England from a Person there of great Learning and Probity, who desir’d his Name might be conceal’d.” The gentleman in question, he assured them, had “no other View than a charitable Inclination of doing Good to the World.” To New Englanders, thought Mr. Dummer, that sentence was as good as a name: there was only one Dr. Dogood. But Londoners, no doubt, would likely miss the reference.

  To Dr. Mather’s arguments he added three observations of his own: first, in Boston, there had been virtually no preparation of patients’ bodies, but they seemed to do well in any case. Secondly, the discharge of matter at the incisions was surely a boon to bodies needing to vent poison. And third, for his part, he suspected some of the ease of inoculated smallpox stemmed from knowledge: the dread of a monster that might lurk unseen in every breath could now be dissolved with a welcome—and watched—stroke of a lancet.

  Mr. Dummer was not alone in his willingness to press the success of inoculation in New England. The Reverend Mr. Daniel Neal followed suit by reprinting the work of his friend and fellow dissenting minister, Benjamin Colman, along with the still anonymous work of Mr. Colman’s associate, Mr. William Cooper.

  The Princess of Wales spoke to both of them. In one respect, Mr. Dummer had been easier: he was no court intimate, but he was, nonetheless, a gentleman who appeared now and again in the Drawing Room. He proved irritatingly resistant, however, to being opened by her intellectual knife. Though born in the colonies, he had long been a London lawyer and the agent for the province of Massachusetts. He was, in other words, a polished diplomat, trained in the fine art of saying nothing.

  Mr. Neal, on the other hand, was not regularly present at court, and required to be summoned. As a proudly dissenting Puritan, though, Mr. Neal prided himself on being outspoken—in a gentlemanly way—in the service of Truth. He told the princess what he knew, and he gave her names. He also reiterated, in his rough way, a recommendation she had found in his work: “The chief scene of action, Your Highness, has hitherto been New England: within these last six months, there having been more persons inoculated in Boston than in all of Europe. It seems reasonable—I might even say necessary—that we should become acquainted with their method and success of this practice
among ourselves. Surely their inoculator should be called upon to provide an accurate account?”

  Such forthrightness, the princess remarked that evening, when Mrs. Tichborne carried in a late supper, was no doubt furthered by the fact that the fellow was not a physician; no London doctor would have made such a claim, no matter its truth, to the detriment of the Royal College of Physicians.

  The princess sighed, toying with a bit of bread. She prided herself on her ability to ferret out truth—but in her position, it did so often require such a lot of ferreting through flattery, half-masquerades, and tangles of desires, plans, schemes, and frankly Machiavellian maneuvers. Sometimes she grew tired just thinking of it. And then came along a minister who would probably tell the truth if it killed him. Shout it all the louder, for that matter. Oh, for a golden mean.

  She held out her glass for a splash more wine. “Mr. Neal’s suggestion, now, that the Boston physician—what was his name, Tich?”

  “Dr. Boylston, madam.”

  “—His suggestion that Dr. Boylston be induced to publish his account to the world: surely that would be as valuable as Mr. Maitland’s fine account. More valuable—for all their well-meaning—than the twaddling ministers’.” She pushed the tray away. “Remind me to mention it to Sir Hans.”