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!

Thus did America receive this great discovery, destined to save thousands
of lives, via Boston, from the hands of one of our own Massachusetts
physicians.

The year 1735 was rendered sadly memorable by the epidemic of the
terrible disease known as "throat distemper," and regarded by many as the
same as our "diphtheria." Dr. Holyoke thinks the more general use of
mercurials in inflammatory complaints dates from the time of their
employment in this disease, in which they were thought to have proved
specially useful.

At some time in the course of this century medical practice had settled
down on four remedies as its chief reliance. I must repeat an incident
which I have related in another of these Essays. When Dr. Holyoke,
nearly seventy years ago, received young Mr. James Jackson as his
student, he showed him the formidable array of bottles, jars, and drawers
around his office, and then named the four remedies referred to as being
of more importance than all the rest put together. These were "Mercury,
Antimony, Opium, and Peruvian Bark." I do