Old records shed new light on the outbreak of smallpox in the 1700s

A highly contagious disease that occurs far from the American coast causes a rapidly spreading and deadly outbreak that infects the masses. Shots are available, but the split public suffers from being jabed.

Are you familiar with it?

Newly digitized records, including a pastor’s diary scanned and posted online by the Boston Congregation Library and Archives, shed new light on the catastrophic outbreak. smallpox It struck the city in the 1700s.

And three centuries later, the similarities with the coronavirus pandemic are amazing.

“How much has changed,” said Zachary Bodnar, a CLA archivist who worked closely with the New England Historical Family Tree Society to lead the digitization effort.

“The fact that we’ve found these similarities in past records is a very interesting similarity,” Bodnar said in an interview. “Sometimes, the more we learn, the more we think we are still the same.”

Smallpox has been eradicated, but not before millions of people around the world became ill and killed. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the last spontaneous outbreak of smallpox in the United States occurred in 1949. The World Health Organization’s decision-making department declared the eradication of smallpox in 1980, and no cases of smallpox have been reported since then.

However, it was a clear and present danger after the British ship HMS Seahorse carried it to Boston in April 1721. By the winter of 1722, it will infect more than half of the city’s population of 11,000 and kill 850.

A much earlier outbreak, also imported from Europe, indiscriminately killed Native Americans in the 1600s. Today, digitized church records help provide a complete picture of how settlers responded when it was their turn to withstand the plague.

The world’s first proper vaccination did not occur until the end of the century when a British country doctor named Edward Jenner inoculated an 8-year-old boy against smallpox in 1796.

Prior to that, doctors used inoculation, or commonly called variolation, to introduce trace amounts of smallpox virus into the skin. This procedure, or a variation thereof, has been practiced in Asia since ancient times. Jenner’s vaccination pioneer, using less lethal strains of the virus that infects cattle instead, was a major scientific advance.

However, as with the 2021 COVID-19 vaccine, digitized documents show that some people were skeptical about smallpox inoculation in the 18th century.

Pastor Cotton Mather, one of the most influential ministers of the time, was actively promoting vaccination. As a sign of how resistant some settlers are to new technologies Someone threw an explosive device through his window November 1721.

Fortunately, it didn’t explode, but researchers at Harvard University say it was attached with this menacing message.

Among the recently digitized records of the Congregational Church is a handwritten diary scribbled by Rev. Ebeniser Stoller, Rev. of Cambridge, Massachusetts. When smallpox struck Boston again on March 11, 1764, Stoller wrote a prayer in his diary after arranging to vaccinate his child.

A deeply devout staller, His diary showI believed in science.

“Bless your name for the discoveries made to ease the severity of distemper. Give your blessing to the means used,” he wrote.

Three weeks later, Stoller thanked God.

For archivist Bodner, it is a testament to the insight contained in the church records.

“They are fascinating,” he said. “They are essentially town records. They tell not only the daily accounting stories of the church, but also the stories of what people were doing and what was happening at the time.”

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