By Paul Carrier
There were many pivotal years in the annals of early America. They mark such events as the founding of the various colonies, recurring conflicts between settlers and Native Americans, the Salem witch trials, the French and Indian War and the buildup to the American Revolution, among others.
But one year that never seems to make the cut is 1721, which we don’t associate with much of anything. Author Stephen Coss hopes to change all that with The Fever of 1721, a compelling account that unfolds in Boston (with some spillover into the years that followed).
Coss contends that 1721 was not only an interesting year in America but a remarkable one, thanks to three vitally important developments. It was a year that revolutionized medicine; witnessed the birth of “America’s first independent newspaper”; and sowed the seeds of liberty, more than 50 years before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
The eponymous fever of the title was a smallpox epidemic — the first to hit Boston in about two decades. It upended medical conventions when Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, acting on the advice of noted Puritan minister Cotton Mather, successfully tested the wildly unpopular idea of inoculating healthy people with fluid from the blisters of smallpox victims, to induce a mild case of the disease and immunize the recipient against a full-blown attack.
In a less literal sense, the fever that struck in 1721 took other forms. There was an intense push for political autonomy in Massachusetts when the royal governor tried to subjugate the colony. Freedom of the press blossomed, ending an era in which bland, sheepish newspapers had been notoriously subservient to royal and religious authorities. Even the public’s rabid hostility to the medical innovation introduced by Boylston was, in itself, feverish.
The book’s structure is both a strength and a weakness. By placing the smallpox outbreak in the larger context of what was happening on other fronts in Boston, Coss provides a more expansive perspective than if he had focused exclusively on the epidemic itself. At the same time, though, the fact that the book's focus shifts from sphere to sphere can make it seem a bit disjointed at times, although each section is compelling in its own right.
Just as the highlights of 1721 are forgotten in our day, so too some of the key players are not exactly household names in the 21st century.
Boylston is one such unknown, although he is remembered by students of medical history. Elisha Cooke, a wealthy radical, developed the earliest American political machine, stood up to royal Gov. Samuel Shute, and became “the most significant and powerful Boston politician in the decades preceding the American Revolution.” And printer James Franklin launched the New-England Courant, an unusually outspoken, sometimes scandalous, newspaper that attacked inoculation, probably to boost sales as the history-making newspaper was getting its footing.
Others who figure in Coss’ narrative have a more visible legacy. Mather, who is remembered for his role in the witch trials of 1692, was trying to rebuild his tarnished reputation by 1721. A lifelong interest in science and medicine led him to discover evidence that inoculation had worked in Africa and Constantinople, prompting him to propose it to Boston’s physicians. Then there’s James Franklin’s younger brother Benjamin, who was a mere printer’s apprentice when he made his pseudonymous debut in the New-England Courant as Silence Dogood, ostensibly an opinionated, middle-aged widow with a satirical bent.
It’s a fascinating mix: Puritans vs. Anglicans, formally educated elitists vs. less-privileged upstarts, royalists vs. democrats, a renegade doctor vs. Boston’s hidebound medical establishment. Coss successfully explores the startling fact that 1721 Boston, a town of only 11,000 souls, was roiled by turmoil on many fronts: religious, political, medical and journalistic. Increasingly, the colony’s theocracy was being called into question, but Puritans continued to call the shots in a town that did not celebrate Christmas and that had only two official holidays: Harvard’s Commencement Day and Election Day.
The squabbling between Shute and the Massachusetts House of Representatives was endless and vicious, offering an early glimpse of the spirit that culminated in revolution decades later. And although James Franklin was misguided in his opposition to inoculation, Coss says he bravely broke new ground as a publisher and ran afoul of the government with a newspaper that represented “an exercise in press freedom unlike any that America had seen.”
In the end, though, Boylston’s accomplishment sits at the heart of Coss’ story. In one month alone, nearly a quarter of Boston’s population contracted smallpox, and the epidemic lasted much longer than that. People were dying at the rate of about 13 per day. But Boylston proved his critics wrong by showing that inoculation worked, a fact that was soon replicated in London. By the time the epidemic petered out, Boylston had inoculated 280 people, with a death rate of 2.4 percent. By contrast, those who contracted smallpox “naturally” had a death rate of 14 percent.
Boylston’s successful inoculation trial, which paved the way for vaccination years later, has been described as the earliest important American experiment in preventative care, and the greatest American contribution to the advancement of medical science prior to the 19th century. Coss gives the fever that Boylston tackled, as well as Boston's non-medical “outbreaks” of reform and revolt, their due.
