Benjamin Franklin Whipped Up an Anti-Vaccination Panic
Only 2% of those variolated by Zabdiel Boylston died. That was way better than the 15% death rate of Bostonians who had naturally contracted the disease. Nonetheless, Boston’s City Council condemned inoculation, and Dr. Boylston was assaulted on the streets and forced to hide. As the anti-vaccine panic spread, Cotton Mather had a crude bomb thrown into his house. Fortunately, it was so crude and constructed in what turned out to be such an ineptly dumb fashion, that it failed to explode. Tied to it was a note that read: “Cotton Mather, I was once of your meeting, but the cursed lye you told of – you know who, made me leave you, you dog, and damn you, I will inoculate you with this, with a pox on you!“
Religion drove much of the opposition. For example, a Boston clergyman declared that inoculation was sinful because it was “not in the Rules of Natural Physick“. In what comes across as a bizarre twist to modern sensibilities, angry and violent Bostonian anti-vaccine mobs even forced the inoculated into quarantine on Spectacle Island, four miles offshore in Boston Harbor. One of America’s first newspapers, the New England Courant, pumped out a steady stream of satirical anti-vaccine articles. Its editor was Benjamin Franklin. The future Founding Father was sixteen-years-old at the time, and like many teenagers, he did not miss the opportunity to troll.
