The Speckled Monster

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  Isaac Massey fumed about hearing Maitland at Child’s, boasting of the “success and security” of the Newgate experiments, though they had just begun—“as if,” Massey wrote a year later, “he had had twenty years experience without any miscarriage.”

  Sir Hans Sloane was considering a further experiment to test the protective abilities of inoculation by August 22, when he wrote his friend Dr. Richardson that “We intend to try if carrying in people just up of the small-pox will infect these inoculated people or not.” Another letter indicates that he had solidified his plans by September 14.

  The sentences I have had Maitland draft for a report to the Princess of Wales appear in Maitland’s Account, which he dedicated to her. On August 26th, the Daily Journal reported that the Newgate physicians had been ordered to lay an account of the progress before the king. As it was officially a royal experiment, it seems reasonable to assume some such order was made.

  An Hour of Mourning

  In his published account of inoculation, Boylston presented each patient separately, giving the date of his or her inoculation and noting symptoms and interesting developments, placing them in time by the number of days they appeared after inoculation. Into this calendar of hope and woe, I’ve woven other relevant material from Cotton Mather’s and Samuel Sewall’s diaries, the newspapers, Boylston family legend, opponents’ snickerings, and various genealogies. I have not mentioned every inoculation he performed, though I have covered most of them. In general, I follow Boylston using the surrounding material to fill out the social and emotional implications.

  Boylston devoted more space to detailing Mrs. Dixwell’s case than he did to any others except Tommy, Jack, and Jackey, right at the beginning. She was, he said, “a fat Gentlewoman of a tender Constitution” who “came frightened into the Practice” after “passing some Days before by a Door wherein lay a Corpse ready for the Grave, which died of the Confluent Small-Pox, the stench whereof greatly offended and surprised her with Fear of being infected.”

  At least two of her children also had smallpox at that time; I have given it to all four. Boylston only mentions that two were allowed to visit her near the end, when they themselves were recovering from the natural smallpox. I have provided the reasons that the others did not visit. Though I don’t know for certain that the infant Mary died of smallpox about this time, that event lies somewhere between possible and probable. She was certainly dead by 1725, when the three older children were mentioned in a deed as their mother’s heirs, but little Mary was not. Boylston recorded Mrs. Dixwell’s recurrent hysteria near the end; I have linked it to her baby’s fate, as well as her own fears of death. Her husband’s family history is fact.

  Without knowing that Mather’s and Boylston’s records of Sammy Mather’s inoculation were about the same person, it would be hard to guess that was so; I’ve tried to bring out the drama implied by that discrepancy. The boy’s father was frantic with fear. In his eyes, his son’s fevers were not merely life threatening, but the worst on record; his account suggests that the boy’s distress reached hysteria. I have made him speak words he wrote in his diary. Boylston, on the other hand, tersely noted the second fever as “brisk.” He adds the detail of giving Sammy an anodyne—or painkiller, often laudanum (tincture of opium)—along with bleeding him. Laudanum was a common treatment for hysterical nerves.

  Boylston kept very close to the chest about his family; we do not know how he and Jerusha came to the decision for her to return, bringing the girls to be inoculated. He doesn’t even say when they returned, though I am assuming that he inoculated them immediately. He certainly inoculated Zabdiel junior immediately after learning he had been exposed. The Turkish doctors called for a meatless diet while patients were under inoculation; I’ve fed the Boylston family such a dinner drawn from contemporary recipes.

  The house of glazier Moses Pierce is one of the few from this period still standing in Boston; better yet, it is a museum, part of the Paul Revere House complex. I have surmised that Pierce was not inoculated because he had already survived smallpox. As their youngest child (at that time) was buried in 1721, it is likely that his wife, Elizabeth Parminter Pierce, was inoculated because her children had fallen ill.

  Mrs. Bethiah Nichols’s case follows Boylston’s notes closely. Boylston, however, identified her only as “Mrs. N——s” without even the age that is so often helpful in identifying his patients with particular Bostonians: probably due to the serious and personal nature of her complications. However, he inoculated her at a time when he was still almost exclusively inoculating Salutation Alley folks, most of them belonging to either the Webb-Adams or Langdon clans. Bethiah Webb Nichols, daughter of old John Webb—one of Boylston’s first inoculees—fits into this situation in every way possible. She was of childbearing age, she had indeed been in the way of infection for over a month, and she belonged to the tight-knit group of people most inclined to trust him with their lives.

  The selectmen recorded their regulation of funeral bells in their minutes for September 11, 1721; on the twenty-first, they reissued the decree more stridently, suggesting that their previous directive had been ignored. I do not know whether it was ignored on the particular occasion of Frances Bromfield Webb’s funeral: but that funeral, recorded by Samuel Sewall, presented ample opportunities for tension between the inoculators and the anti-inoculators to surface.

  Whether or not Boylston was Frances Webb’s physician is unclear, though he certainly served as physician to many others in her family. I have invented her personality (and given her the common nickname Fanny), but she was certainly much mourned at a very crowded funeral; Mather did indeed preach the sermon.

  The Adams’s inoculations follow Boylston’s account (and Adams/ Webb/Jones genealogies) except that Boylston noted he inoculated “Mr. John Adams, about 35,” that day, along with Mr. Jones’s child, Mrs. Adams (apparently Mr. Adams’s wife, in context) and her child. The Mrs. Adams and child were the particular two Marys identified. Boylston’s John Adams, however, would appear to be a mistake, confusing two brothers among the large and tangled Adams family. Most likely, either “John” was a slip for his brother Samuel, then thirty-two and husband of the thirty-year-old Mrs. Adams and father of the four-year-old girl inoculated that day, or Boylston was badly off in estimating the man’s age, as John was then only twenty-eight. What seems likely is that both men were present and one slipped in for the other in his notes. I have opted for keeping the nuclear family together, and gone with Samuel as the inoculee.

  Boylston called Mrs. Margaret Salter “a weakly hysterical woman” who was “often ill”—an unusually harsh assessment for him. “Tho’ she had the Small-Pox very favourably, as to Number,” he added, “yet she complain’d much of Pain in her Head, and Vapours, which gave me some Trouble; but in a short Time those Symptoms went off, and she soon was well.” I’ve extrapolated her insistent hypochondria and spoiled selfishness from his uncharacteristic impatience.

  One of Boylston’s opponents tells the story of the saddle tarred and feathered on the wrong horse. I have made Boylston and Cheever present, fitting the prank into a specific time and place with plausibly high tension. I have also let Boylston once again display his known horsemanship in calming the horse down. Mobs certainly trailed Boylston; the supposition that the Langdons and Webbs (and Cheever) helped protect him is mine.

  With winter approaching, the firewood supply was a serious enough issue that Mather did indeed consider it, and the selectmen did take up his suggested solution. Finally, while I do not have weather records for individual days of September 1721, it was a wet enough month that powers as high as the governor worried about widespread crop failure. Given that their Old Style dates are a week and a half behind our modern calendar dates, they were well into New England’s leafy autumn fireworks by the time of Mrs. Dixwell’s death.

  The King’s Pardon

  Elizabeth Harrison’s deliberate reexposure as a smallpox nurse closely follows Mr. Maitland
’s account. He does not, however, record the details of his offer or her acceptance, only those of her stay in Hertford. I have assumed that her acceptance was to some degree voluntarily, as the crown seems to have observed its agreement to offer the inoculees full pardons.

  She had every reason to be eager to find a place: no easy task for a woman of no training, no connections, and an unspotted reputation, and nearly impossible for a convicted felon. As bad as Newgate was, the descriptions of the Press Yard sound much more inviting than descriptions of London’s slums at the same period, which do not seem to have been considerably better than the airless, windowless dungeons on the common side of the prison.

  Sloane says that he and Dr. Steigerthal paid out of their own pockets for this extension to the Newgate experiment. I have given Maitland reason to select Elizabeth Harrison for such a nursing position, by giving her an aptitude for caring for the sick.

  The Christ’s Hospital buildings still exist in Hertford, though the school has moved. The students are still called bluecoats; statues donated in 1721 give a good sense of what they looked like.

  Maitland’s accounts of the Batt child and servants, and of the Heaths, is based on his Account, and remains close to his wording where possible. He told these histories separately; I have woven them back into Lizzy Harrison’s story by having him tell her. Going by their difference in status alone, this would be unlikely; shared experiences of such tension as the Newgate experiment, however, can forge otherwise unthinkable bonds.

  Maitland’s final summation comes almost word for word from his Account, though I confess to moving paragraphs and some phrases around, and editing for modern readability: changing the now obscure word imposthumes to abscesses and shifting the destroying angel phrase so as to serve as part of his final word on the subject. The force and the drift of his words, however, remain his.

  Raw Head and Bloody Bones

  Once again, Boylston himself provides much of the raw data for this story, but the emotional impact has to be inferred by looking at what he did—and did not do—to whom, and when, and putting that together with fragmentary evidence from Mather, Douglass, the House of Representatives, the newspapers, and genealogies.

  Dr. Douglass wrote the first of his many anti-inoculation letters to Dr. Alexander Stuart of London on September 25, 1721; it is hard to see how this was not in some way triggered by satisfaction with what he perceived to be proof of inoculation’s failure: Mrs. Dixwell’s death the evening before. The “one or two” deaths he records seem strangely haphazard for one so nigglingly precise—unless he already had Mrs. N—s in mind as a possible second.

  Paxton advertised for his runaway slave in the papers, as noted; his elder son Roger was entered into the Seahorse paybook on September 25. The suggestion that the money and place for Roger would have been especially useful at this time is mine, though it is entirely plausible: Boston trade was at a standstill.

  Mrs. N—s’s complications are drawn from Boylston’s notes—including her miscarriage of an eight or nine weeks’ pregnancy, accompanied by serious hemorrhage, her delirious talk of floating in “the Waters” (for which I have supplied biblical references), and her loss of an eye. Boylston also recorded his midnight visit and his discovery of the fetus (“a small imperfect substance”) in the bed the next morning (though I have added the detail of it being covered in pocks—something Mather claims happened in other circumstances). To the ends of their lives, Boylston’s children remembered the whole family trembling whenever Boylston left, fearful that he would never return.

  Cotton Mather recorded his daughter Abigail’s death—and his reactions to it—in his diary. His Account is dated September 7, but is likely to have been the treatise sent over sea at this time. The Boston papers do not record any ships departing for London post-September 25 until Captain Mark Trecothick’s Friendship was reported on October 2 as having already cleared outward; it is quite possible that this ship carried both Douglass’s letter and Mather’s treatise.

  That Boylston had some kind of crisis of conscience in reaction to Mrs. Dixwell’s death and Mrs. N—s’s complications is apparent from the fact that from the day before Mrs. Dixwell’s death, he ceased inoculating for almost two weeks: the longest gap in his record during the whole epidemic, other than that following his first inoculations of Tommy, Jack, and Jackey, and that following the selectmen’s meeting. Furthermore, it would appear that he went on resisting inoculating for another three weeks: after inoculating Eunice Willard on October 6, he operated on no one else until the Fitches and Lorings convinced him to do so on the thirteenth, and then he ceased again until his brother’s wife, having newly given birth, begged for his help.

  Why he began again with Eunice Willard is unclear. She seems, however, to have been a personality of some force. The Willards were a large and powerful family of the South End; their father (dead by 1721) had been for years the minister of the Old South Church, and an outspoken opponent of the witchcraft trials. Eunice remained a spinster by choice, refusing several suitors and remaining in the family of her older brother Josiah, with whom she was very close. She was both well educated and well off in her own right; her conversation was said to be “entertaining and instructive, without the pedantry which some learned ladies discover too plainly.” In 1737, she donated the sum of £5 to the work-house—equivalent to as much as £500 today. Boylston had already inoculated David and Elizabeth Melvill (also known as Melvin), her nephew and niece by her sister Mary. I have made her give Boylston an invitation to inoculation that a man like him might well not refuse.

  According to Boylston, her inoculation was a good one: at the usual time, she had “a kind, distinct sort, and was soon well.” I have drawn details from the pictures of ease (including sitting up reading and taking a glass of wine with visitors) that Mather and Colman drew of inoculation while lauding it in distinction to the horrors of the natural smallpox.

  The Lorings had their own connections to the Willards, and may have come to him from that direction; however, Loring’s wife Susannah was the widow of Jerusha’s maternal cousin Edward Breck before marrying Loring, and her children from her first marriage were thus blood relations to Jerusha. I have surmised that the family relationship might have tipped the balance in their favor. Boylston, of course, made no mention of a family connection—as he did not with anyone other than his own children (including his brother and sister-in-law).

  Daniel Loring’s elder son Daniel did break out in the symptoms of smallpox the night Boylston was supposed to have inoculated him. Boylston does not say what prevented him. He does say, however, that young Loring’s death revealed one of the problems with assessing the successes and dangers of inoculation: it was very hard to tell whether people had already been infected (because of the long incubation period after exposure).

  While I do not know how or where Boylston came to read the Boston newspaper accounts of the Newgate experiment, it is notable that their appearance coincides closely with his willingness first to inoculate more of his close family, and second, for the flood-gates to open in the Boston gentry’s desperate patronage of him and his operation. That his account appears together with the second notice (the first one of success) suggests that he had some forewarning of that success; Musgrave is a plausible source.

  An advertisement for the camel appears in the same issue of the Boston Gazette as the first announcement of the Newgate trials; I have imagined Tommy’s fascination with it.

  It does not seem likely that Boylston’s departure from Boston to inoculate his sister-in-law in Roxbury on the official Day of Thanksgiving was a coincidence: such days were high holy days. I do not know what happened to the newborn infant—but after the case of Esther Webb, Boylston knew inoculated smallpox was catching. It seems likely the infant boy would have been kept out of harm’s way until his mother’s recovery. He was not inoculated, and infants stood very poor chances in the face of natural smallpox.

  Boylston says a coach fitted with a
bed was provided for his sister-in-law’s return to Boston; I have made Abigail Mather Blague provide it—and Boylston inoculate her young slave girl in return. The girl was definitely inoculated that day, though the reason is my surmise—as is Mrs. Blague’s personality. She was a Mather, however, so it seems likely for her to have been both formidable and generous.

  Kittredge would have it that Mather wrote A Faithful Account; I follow Fitz in sensing that in style, content, and context, this is from the pen of Boylston.

  The Massachusetts House of Representatives’ Journals show both that body’s desire to conclude its business quickly in the face of the epidemic, and its inability to do so.

  Mather’s run-in with Franklin is only attested by Franklin; however, he had another such public shouting match with Samuel Sewall at an earlier point, so while Franklin may have exaggerated, he probably didn’t have to exaggerate very much. Franklin quotes him quoting the loin-smiting passage of the Bible.