n
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!

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 di