One great event stands out in the medical history of this eighteenth century; namely, the introduction of the practice of inoculation for small-pox.  Six epidemics of this complaint had visited Boston in the course of a hundred years.  Prayers had been asked in the churches for more than a hundred sick in a single day, and this many times.  About a thousand persons had died in a twelvemonth, we are told, and, as we may infer, chiefly from this cause.

In 1721, this disease, after a respite of nineteen years, again appeared as an epidemic.  In that year it was that Cotton Mather, browsing, as was his wont, on all the printed fodder that came within reach of his ever-grinding mandibles, came upon an account of inoculation as practised in Turkey, contained in the “Philosophical Transactions.”  He spoke of it to several physicians, who paid little heed to his story; for they knew his medical whims, and had probably been bored, as we say now-a-days, many of them, with listening to his “Angel of Bethesda,” and satiated with his speculations on the Nishmath Chajim.

The Reverend Mather,—­I use a mode of expression he often employed when speaking of his honored brethren,—­the Reverend Mather was right this time, and the irreverent doctors who laughed at him were wrong.  One only of their number disputes his claim to giving the first impulse to the practice, in Boston.  This is what that person says:  “The Small-Pox spread in Boston, New England, A.1721, and the Reverend Dr. Cotton Mather, having had the use of these Communications from Dr. William Douglass (that is, the writer of these words); surreptitiously, without the knowledge of his Informer, that he might have the honour of a New fangled notion, sets an Undaunted Operator to work, and in this Country about 290 were inoculated.”

All this has not deprived Cotton Mather of the credit of suggesting, and a bold and intelligent physician of the honor of carrying out, the new practice.  On the twenty-seventh day of June, 1721, Zabdiel Boylston of Boston inoculated his only son for smallpox,—­the first person ever submitted to the operation in the New World.  The story of the fierce resistance to the introduction of the practice; of how Boylston was mobbed, and Mather had a hand-grenade thrown in at his window; of how William Douglass, the Scotchman, “always positive, and sometimes accurate,” as was neatly said of him, at once depreciated the practice and tried to get the credit of suggesting it, and how Lawrence Dalhonde, the Frenchman, testified to its destructive consequences; of how Edmund Massey, lecturer at St. Albans, preached against sinfully endeavoring to alter the course of nature by presumptuous interposition, which he would leave to the atheist and the scoffer, the heathen and unbeliever, while in the face of his sermon, afterwards reprinted in Boston, many of our New England clergy stood up boldly in defence of the practice,—­all this has been told so well and so often that I spare you its details.  Set this good hint of Cotton Mather against that letter of his to John Richards, recommending the search after witch-marks, and the application of the water-ordeal, which means throw your grandmother into the water, if she has a mole on her arm;—­if she swims, she is a witch and must be hanged; if she sinks, the Lord have mercy on her soul!