nearly
six thousand persons who had taken smallpox naturally, and had received
only the usual medical treatment, nearly one thousand had died. Yet even
here the gainsayers did not despair, and, when obliged to confess the
success of inoculation, they simply fell back upon a new argument,
and answered: "It was good that Satan should be dispossessed of his
habitation which he had taken up in men in our Lord's day, but it was
not lawful that the children of the Pharisees should cast him out by the
help of Beelzebub. We must always have an eye to the matter of what we
do as well as the result, if we intend to keep a good conscience toward
God." But the facts were too strong; the new practice made its way in
the New World as in the Old, though bitter opposition continued, and in
no small degree on vague scriptural grounds, for more than twenty years
longer.(324)

(324) For the general subject, see Sprengel, Histoire de la Medecine,
vol. vi, pp. 39-80. For the opposition of the Paris faculty of Theology
to inoculation, see the Journal de Barbier, vol. vi, p. 294; also the
Correspondance de Grimm et Diderot, vol. iii, pp. 259 et seq. For bitter
denunciations of inoculation by the English clergy, and for the noble
stand against them by Madox, see Baron, Life of Jenner, vol. i, pp. 231,
232, and vol. ii, pp. 39, 40. For the strenuous opposition of the same
clergy, see Weld, History of the Royal Society, vol. i, p. 464, note;
also, for its comical side, see Nichol's Literary Illustrations, vol.
v, p. 800. For the same matter in Scotland, see Lecky's History of the
Eighteenth Century, vol. ii, p. 83. For New England, see Green, History
of Medicine in Massachusetts, Boston, 1881, pp. 58 et seq; also chapter
x of the Memorial History of Boston, by the same author and O. W.
Holmes. For a letter of Dr. Franklin's, see Massachusetts Historical
Collections, second series, vol. vii, p. 17. Several most curious
publications issued during the heat of the inoculation controversy have
been kindly placed in my hands by the librarians of Harvard College and
of the Massachusetts Historical Society, among them A Reply to Increase
Mather, by John Williams, Boston, printed by J. Franklin, 1721, from
which the above scriptural arguments are cited. For the terrible
virulence of the smallpox in New England up to the introduction of the
inoculation, see McMaster, History of the People of the United States,
first edition, vol. i, p. 30.

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