Although Cotton Mather is best known for his role in the Salem Witch Trials, he also pioneered smallpox inoculation in North America, using a traditional African method he learned from a man named Onesimus who Mather enslaved. This week, you’ll hear about Boston’s history with smallpox, including multiple epidemics, the controversy surrounding Mather’s inoculation movement, and the final outbreak in the 20th century. We first covered this topic way back in Episode 2, but these days we’re better at researching, writing, and recording, so this episode should be a step up.
Smallpox
- The beginnings of plant hybridization, Zirkle, Conway, 1895, quoting Cotton Mather
- The Inoculation Controversy in Boston: 1721-1722, John B. Blake
- The Fight Over Inoculation During the 1721 Boston Smallpox Epidemic, Matthew Niederhuber
- How an African slave helped Boston fight smallpox, Ted Widmer, Boston Globe
- The Story of Smallpox in Massachusetts, the 1932 Annual Oration of the Massachusetts Medical Society, By Samuel Bayard Woodward, M.D.
- John Adams describes his own smallpox inoculation in a letter to Abigail in 1764.
- A WBUR piece on the 1901 smallpox epidemic
- The Last Smallpox Epidemic in Boston and the Vaccination Controversy, 1901–1903, Michael R. Albert, M.D., Kristen G. Ostheimer, M.A., Joel G. Breman, M.D., D.T.P.H., New England Journal of Medicine
- The 100 Best Bostonians of All Time, according to Boston Magazine.
Boston Book Club
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is Boston on Fire: a History of Fires and Firefighting in Boston, by Stephanie Schorow. Do you remember a couple of weeks ago, when everybody’s phone alarms were going off to let us know that the 911 system was down? Apparently, a major data center at a company called CenturyLink went down, and it knocked out 911 service across a wide swath of the country. During the midst of the excitement, a fire started in a building on Endicott Street in the North End. Because 911 wasn’t working, a quick thinking bypasser pulled the alarm in one of Boston’s bright red fire alarm boxes.
At the time, Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub reported:
The resident used a box at Cooper and Endicott streets known as Box 1212. According to the Boston Fire Historical Society, that location was the site of the first ever fire alarm signaled by a street box, for a fire around 8:25 p.m. on April 29, 1852 – just one day after Boston turned on the world’s first municipal fire-box system.
The city’s street fire-box system still uses the same basic mechanism as employed in the 1852 boxes: A spring-based system inside the box generates Morse Code-like signals to the a central alarm station that indicate the box’s number, and so its location, without the need for fancy electronics or even an external power supply. The fire-alarm office has been located in the Fenway since 1925.
William Channing, MD, and Moses Farmer, an electrical engineer, developed the system that now includes some 1,250 street boxes. They obtained a patent for their work in 1857.
The story of Channing and Farmer’s work on the fire alarm telegraph system makes up the bulk of chapter 4 in Schorow’s 2003 book. She begins with the earlier systems of “hallooing” a fire, blowing a trumpet, or ringing church bells to signal a fire. Then, she moves on to the development of the telegraph alongside early railroads, to attempts to automate church bells using electromagnetic pulses, to the partnership between Channing and Farmer that led to the patented “American Fire Alarm Telegraph.”
And that’s just one chapter in Stephanie Schorow’s history of firefighting in Boston, which ranges from the early 17th century to the late 20th. It covers stories we’ve discussed on the show, like the 1834 Ursuline convent riot and fire or the tragedy at Cocoanut Grove, as well as stories we haven’t gotten to yet, like the great fire of 1872 or the 1972 Vendome collapse. Pick this one up to whet your appetite for future episodes about fires and firefighting in Boston.
Upcoming Event
This month marks the centennial of the 1919 Great Molasses Flood. It’s another story that, like smallpox, we find so fascinating that we had to go back and write a remastered episode about it. This time, however, instead of making you listen to us tell the tale of this misunderstood tragedy again, we’ll point you to a lecture by the author of the foremost reconstruction of what happened. Stephen Puleo is the author of Dark Tide, and he’ll be speaking at the Copley branch of the BPL on the centennial of the disaster. Here’s a preview, from the event listing:
Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters was playing cards in Boston’s North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like roaring surf, one of them said later. Like a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence, said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window-“Oh my God!” he shouted to the other men, “Run!”
A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston’s waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outset traveled at 35 miles an hour. It demolished wooden homes, even the brick fire station. The number of dead wasn’t known for days. It would be years before a landmark court battle determined who was responsible for the disaster.
Puleo will speak in the Rabb Lecture Hall on the lower level of the Johnson Building. The event begins at 6pm on January 15. Admission is free and registration is not required.