ountry and
mankind, and to speak of them would lead me beyond my limited--subject.
There would be little pleasure in dwelling on the name of Benjamin
Church; and as for the medical politicians, like Elisha Cooke in the
early part of the century, or Charles Jarvis, the bald eagle of Boston,
in its later years, whether their practice was heroic or not, their
patients were, for he is a bold man who trusts one that is making
speeches and coaxing voters, to meddle with the internal politics of his
corporeal republic.

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