page_title: 1721 Boston smallpox outbreak
section_title: Smallpox in Boston
hierarchical_section_title: 1721 Boston smallpox outbreak / Smallpox in Boston
caption_attribution_description: English: "A South-East View of the City of Boston in North America," by J. Carwitham (active 1720-1740), after an unknown artist. Hand-coloured engraving. Printed for Bowles &amp; Carver, No. 69 St. Paul's Church Yard, London. Courtesy of the Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
context_page_description: In 1721, Boston experienced its worst outbreak of smallpox. 5,759 people out of around 10,600 in Boston were infected and 844 were recorded to have died between April 1721 and February 1722. The outbreak would motivate Puritan minister Cotton Mather and Harvard physician Zabdiel Boylston to variolate hundreds of Bostonians in the Thirteen Colonies' earliest experiment with public inoculation. Their efforts would inspire further use and research of variolation for immunizing people from smallpox, placing the Massachusetts Bay Colony at the epicenter of the Colonies' first inoculation debate and profoundly impacting Western society's medical treatment of the disease. The outbreak also permanently changed social and religious public discourse about disease, as Boston's newspapers published various pamphlets opposing and supporting the inoculation efforts.
context_section_description: On 22 April 1721 the British passenger ship HMS Seahorse arrived at Boston from Barbados, after one stop at Tortuga, with a crew of sailors who'd just survived smallpox. Customs' quarantine hospital at Spectacle Island was tasked with containing individuals who had contagious diseases, with a case of smallpox contained successfully the previous fall. But one of Seahorse's sailors fell ill in Boston Harbor a day after arrival, and exposed other sailors to variola. Boston's water bailiff inspected Seahorse and discovered another two or three cases of smallpox in various stages before ordering the ship to leave the harbor. Despite the sailor being hurriedly quarantined in the lodging house where he fell ill, nine other sailors at Boston Harbor exposed to him came down with smallpox in early May. The sailors were quarantined on Spectacle Island's very-rudimentary hospital but staff and customs were unable to contain the virus. On 26 May Cotton Mather wrote in his diary: "The grievous calamity of the small pox has now entered the town."
  Boston's last smallpox outbreak was in 1703, and a new generation of non immune children and young adults were vulnerable. By June the town was faced with a major public health crisis and the religious public became increasingly worried that they were the subjects of divine punishment. Around 900 people fled Boston into the countryside, likely spreading the virus. The General Court, colonial Massachusetts' legislating body, moved from Boston to Cambridge at summer's end, but smallpox cases began appearing in Cambridge in August. James Franklin's The New England Courant was founded in August amid the outbreak and the issue of smallpox and preservation from it became front page news. The Courant was ordered in early October by the town council to publish a house-by-house count on those affected so far by smallpox: 2,757 cases, 1,499 recoveries and 203 deaths were counted. The outbreak peaked in October when 411 people died in that month alone.  Judge Samuel Sewall recorded in his diary the deaths of his friends and neighbors like one Madam Checkly on 18 October. Thanksgiving sermons were also affected by the outbreak, and on 26 October most congregations held a single sermon at 11 in the morning out of fear of smallpox spreading during gatherings. The next day Judge Sewell attended the funeral of local child Edward Rawson before attending the burial of one of Sewell's own tenants, while a local college student and "many others" were buried that Friday night. 8% of Boston's population would die during the epidemic, and hundreds of other Bostonians would recover with severe scarring or disabilities.
caption: City of Boston's harbor and skyline ca. 1723-30
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