they are
sufficiently Prepared & Inoculated & Until it is apparent that they
haven taken the infection."

Of all the advertisements of small-pox hospitals, inoculation, etc.,
which appear in the newspapers through the eighteenth century, none is
more curious, more comic than this from a Boston paper of 1772:

"Ibrahim Mustapha Inoculator to his Sublime Highness & the
Janissaries: original Inventor and sole Proprietor of that
Inestimable Instrument, the Circassian Needle, begs leave to
acquaint the Nobility & Gentry of this City and its Environs that
he is just arrived from Constantinople where he has inoculated
about 50,000 Persons without losing a Single Patient. He requires
not the least Preparation Regimen or Confinement. Ladies and
Gentlemen who wish to be inoculated only acquaint him with how many
Pimples they choose and he makes the exact number of Punctures with
his Needle which Produces the Eruptions in the very Picquers.
Ladies who fancy a favorite Pitt may have it put in any Spot they
please, and of any size: not the Slightest Fever or Pain attends
the Eruption; much less any of those frightful Convulsions so usual
in all the vulgar methods of Inoculation, even in the famous Peter
Puffs. This amazing Needle more truly astonishing and not less
useful than the Magnetic one, has this property in common with the
latter, that by touching the point of a common needle it
communicates its wonderful Virtues to it in the same manner that
Loadstone does to Iron. And that no part of this extensive
Continent may want the Benefit of this Superlatively excellent
Method, Ibrahim Mustapha proposes to touch several Needles in order
to have them distributed to different Colonies by which means the
Small Pocks may be entirely eradicated as it has been in the
Turkish Empire."

Generous Ibrahim Mustapha! despite the testimony of the Janissaries and
the entire Turkish Empire, I cannot doubt that in your early youth you
frequently kissed the Blarney Stone, hence your fluent tongue and your
gallant proposition to becomingly decorate with pits the ladies.

Besides the scourge of small-pox, the colonists were afflicted
grievously with other malignant distempers,--fatal throat diseases,
epidemic influenzas, putrid fevers, terrible fluxes; and as the art of
sanitation was absolutely disregarded and almost