William Douglass, Inoculation of the Small Pox as Practised in Boston

The first edition of William Douglass's answer to the Boston inoculators, printed in the shop of James Franklin in 1722. In the summer of 1721 smallpox swept through Boston, and Cotton Mather persuaded Zabdiel Boylston to begin inoculating the town. Douglass, the only academically trained physician in Boston, was alarmed. He believed inoculation would spread the disease rather than check it, and he took the argument into print. "He accordingly published a series of four controversial 'inoculation' pamphlets, three of which were anonymous" (DAB).

The quarrel was also personal. Douglass had earlier lent Mather his own numbers of the Philosophical Transactions, which carried the accounts of inoculation in the Levant by Timoni and Pylarini. Mather then used that evidence on the other side.

This pamphlet began as a letter to the English physician Alexander Stuart. Its postscript concedes the heat of the controversy: "If I have been too rough with any Persons Character, & it afterwards appear that he acted in meer Zeal (tho' mistaken Zeal) for the Good of his Neighbours, I heartily ask his Pardon."

The dispute ran through the Boston newspapers as well, and James Franklin, who published the New England Courant and shared the opposition to inoculation, became the printer for its most prominent opponent. His younger brother Benjamin was by then doing much of the work of the shop. It is reasonable to think he had a hand in setting and printing this pamphlet. Within a year he left Boston for Philadelphia.

This is the Haskell Norman copy.

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