The Smallpox Pamphlet
In the Boston smallpox of 1721, Cotton Mather persuaded Zabdiel Boylston to try inoculation and William Douglass, the only university-trained physician in town, denounced it in a series of pamphlets. James Franklin's new press printed them; his fifteen-year-old apprentice, Benjamin, set the type. This is the earliest object in the collection from a Franklin press.
It is also the beginning of an argument Benjamin would settle for himself. He lost his son Francis to smallpox in 1736 and never forgave himself for delaying the boy's inoculation; in 1761 he put the case for it into Poor Richard's almanac, and every farmhouse in Pennsylvania read it. Extremely rare.
DOUGLASS, William (1691-1752)]. Inoculation of the Small Pox as practised in Boston
One of Douglass's four inoculation pamphlets, three of them anonymous, printed by James Franklin during the epidemic in which Benjamin served his apprenticeship. Douglass was personally aggrieved: he had lent Mather the very numbers of the Philosophical Transactions that described the practice. The earliest object in the collection from a Franklin press, and the beginning of a medical argument — inoculation — that Benjamin would take up in his own almanac forty years later.