Their varying responses constitute an eerily prescient object lesson for today's world, similarly devastated by a virus and divided over vaccination three centuries later.
As a microbiologist and a Franklin scholar, we see some parallels between then and now that could help governments, journalists and the rest of us cope with the coronavirus pandemic and future threats.
Smallpox strikes Boston
Smallpox was nothing new in 1721. Known to have affected people for at least 3,000 years, it ran rampant in Boston, eventually striking more than half the city's population. The virus killed about 1 in 13 residents – but the death toll was probably more, since the lack of sophisticated epidemiology made it impossible to identify the cause of all deaths.
What was new, at least to Boston, was a simple procedure that could protect people from the disease. It was known as “variolation" or “inoculation," and involved deliberately exposing someone to the smallpox “matter" from a victim's scabs or pus, injecting the material into the skin using a needle. This approach typically caused a mild disease and induced a state of “immunity" against smallpox.
Even today, the exact mechanism is poorly understood and not much research on variolation has been done. Inoculation through the skin seems to activate an immune response that leads to milder symptoms and less transmission, possibly because of the route of infection and the lower dose. Since it relies on activating the immune response with live smallpox variola virus, inoculation is different from the modern vaccination that eradicated smallpox using the much less harmful but related vaccinia virus.
The inoculation treatment, which originated in Asia and Africa, came to be known in Boston thanks to a man named Onesimus. By 1721, Onesimus was enslaved, owned by the most influential man in all of Boston, the Rev. Cotton Mather.
Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain {{PD-US}}
Known primarily as a Congregational minister, Mather was also a scientist with a special interest in biology. He paid attention when Onesimus told him “he had undergone an operation, which had given him something of the smallpox and would forever preserve him from it; adding that it was often used" in West Africa, where he was from.
Inspired by this information from Onesimus, Mather teamed up with a Boston physician, Zabdiel Boylston, to conduct a scientific study of inoculation's effectiveness worthy of 21st-century praise. They found that of the approximately 300 people Boylston had inoculated, 2% had died, compared with almost 15% of those who contracted smallpox from nature.
The findings seemed clear: Inoculation could help in the fight against smallpox. Science won out in this clergyman's mind. But others were not convinced.
Stirring up controversy
A local newspaper editor named James Franklin had his own affliction – namely an insatiable hunger for controversy. Franklin, who was no fan of Mather, set about attacking inoculation in his newspaper, The New-England Courant.
(One article from August 1721 tried to guilt readers into resisting inoculation. If someone gets inoculated and then spreads the disease to someone else, who in turn dies of it, the article asked, “at whose hands shall their Blood be required?" The same article went on to say that “Epidemeal Distempers" such as smallpox come “as Judgments from an angry and displeased God."
In contrast to Mather and Boylston's research, the Courant's articles were designed not to discover, but to sow doubt and distrust. The argument that inoculation might help to spread the disease posits something that was theoretically possible – at least if simple precautions were not taken – but it seems beside the point. If inoculation worked, wouldn't it be worth this small risk, especially since widespread inoculations would dramatically decrease the likelihood that one person would infect another?
Franklin, the Courant's editor, had a kid brother apprenticed to him at the time – a teenager by the name of Benjamin.
Historians don't know which side the younger Franklin took in 1721 – or whether he took a side at all – but his subsequent approach to inoculation years later has lessons for the world's current encounter with a deadly virus and a divided response to a vaccine.
Independent thought
You might expect that James' little brother would have been inclined to oppose inoculation as well. After all, thinking like family members and others you identify with is a common human tendency.
That he was capable of overcoming this inclination shows Benjamin Franklin's capacity for independent thought, an asset that would serve him well throughout his life as a writer, scientist and statesman. While sticking with social expectations confers certain advantages in certain settings, being able to shake off these norms when they are dangerous is also valuable. We believe the most successful people are the ones who, like Franklin, have the intellectual flexibility to choose between adherence and independence.
Truth, not victory
What happened next shows that Franklin, unlike his brother – and plenty of pundits and politicians in the 21st century – was more interested in discovering the truth than in proving he was right.
Perhaps the inoculation controversy of 1721 had helped him to understand an unfortunate phenomenon that continues to plague the U.S. in 2021: When people take sides, progress suffers. Tribes, whether long-standing or newly formed around an issue, can devote their energies to demonizing the other side and rallying their own. Instead of attacking the problem, they attack each other.
Franklin, in fact, became convinced that inoculation was a sound approach to preventing smallpox. Years later he intended to have his son Francis inoculated after recovering from a case of diarrhea. But before inoculation took place, the 4-year-old boy contracted smallpox and died in 1736. Citing a rumor that Francis had died because of inoculation and noting that such a rumor might deter parents from exposing their children to this procedure, Franklin made a point of setting the record straight, explaining that the child had “receiv'd the Distemper in the common Way of Infection."
Writing his autobiography in 1771, Franklin reflected on the tragedy and used it to advocate for inoculation. He explained that he “regretted bitterly and still regret" not inoculating the boy, adding, “This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen."
A scientific perspective
A final lesson from 1721 has to do with the importance of a truly scientific perspective, one that embraces science, facts and objectivity.
J. A. Philip; Wikimedia Commons; CC BY 4.0
Inoculation was a relatively new procedure for Bostonians in 1721, and this lifesaving method was not without deadly risks. To address this paradox, several physicians meticulously collected data and compared the number of those who died because of natural smallpox with deaths after smallpox inoculation. Boylston essentially carried out what today's researchers would call a clinical study on the efficacy of inoculation. Knowing he needed to demonstrate the usefulness of inoculation in a diverse population, he reported in a short book how he inoculated nearly 300 individuals and carefully noted their symptoms and conditions over days and weeks.
The recent emergency-use authorization of mRNA-based and viral-vector vaccines for COVID-19 has produced a vast array of hoaxes, false claims and conspiracy theories, especially in various social media. Like 18th-century inoculations, these vaccines represent new scientific approaches to vaccination, but ones that are based on decades of scientific research and clinical studies.
We suspect that if he were alive today, Benjamin Franklin would want his example to guide modern scientists, politicians, journalists and everyone else making personal health decisions. Like Mather and Boylston, Franklin was a scientist with a respect for evidence and ultimately for truth.
When it comes to a deadly virus and a divided response to a preventive treatment, Franklin was clear what he would do. It doesn't take a visionary like Franklin to accept the evidence of medical science today.
Mark Canada, Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Indiana University Kokomo and Christian Chauret, Dean of School of Sciences, Professor of Microbiology, Indiana University Kokomo
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
I talk a lot about science to people who are not scientists. It's generally a lot of fun because most folks are science-curious even if they don't think about it a lot on their own time. But whether I'm talking about alien life, black holes, or the weirdnesses of quantum mechanics, there is always one really important idea that I try to get across that generally no one is interested in:
Standards of evidence. It's the most important boring idea in the universe.
Networks of scientists led to scientific societies
The development of modern science was a long, slow process that required input from most of the world's cultures ranging from ancient Greece and medieval Islam to India and China and eventually Renaissance Europe.
One of the most critical elements in Europe was the gradual build-up of international communities of scholars. While we usually think of science as being driven forward through the inspiration of one singular genius after another, that's only part of the story. For every Galileo and Newton there were hundreds of people you never heard of. They formed a network of thinkers and tinkerers writing letters to each other and making visits across the continent. In this way, they exchanged notes on things like the best way to carry out an experiment on boiling liquids or a new way to consider the mathematics of problems in celestial mechanics.
Unless you are a scientist, you probably have very little idea of how science knows what it knows, or even more important, how it knows what it doesn't know.
While they might not have known it at the time, what these scholars were also doing was setting up the foundations for an international order of scientific knowledge that would rest upon mutually agreed standards of evidence.
Eventually these networks became formalized. Scientific academies started popping up in places like Italy where the Academy of the Mysteries of Nature was founded in Naples in 1560. Later the Royal Society in England, formally known as the The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, was established in 1660. The French Academy of Sciences was formed just six years later. Over the years, these institutions and others would lead the way in establishing "best practices" for how to carry out scientific research and how to make sure that the conclusions a scientist drew from that research were supported by the evidence.
Scientific societies led to standards of evidence
Credit: Karlis Reimanis via Unsplash
I'm telling you this not because I think the history is so cool (though it is). Instead, what matters is seeing how the idea of standards of evidence was born in its scientific form. It came from people arguing in public over what should count as public facts or better yet public knowledge. Science didn't drop out of the sky fully formed. It was, and is, the fruit of a very human, very collective effort. The goal of that effort was to determine the best way to ask nature questions and ensure that you're getting correct answers.
This was not, by the way, a smooth process. There were lots of wrong turns in figuring out what counted as meaningful evidence and what was just another way of getting fooled. But over time, people figured out that there were standards for how to set up an experiment, how to collect data from it, and how to interpret that data. These standards now include things like isolating the experimental apparatus from spurious environmental effects, understanding how data collection devices respond to inputs, and accounting for systematic errors in analyzing the data. There are, of course, many more.
In this way, scientists figured out which standards were useful in linking evidence to conclusions.
Why standards matter
Science is now the most powerful force shaping human life. Without it, there could never be seven billion of us living on the planet at the same time. It has shaped and reshaped how we eat, how we travel, how we deal with sickness, how we communicate, and how we go to war. It is also how we are pushing Earth into new and dangerous (for us) climate states. But despite all this ubiquity and power, unless you are a scientist, you probably have very little idea of how science knows what it knows, or even more important, how it knows what it doesn't know.
Most of us don't understand what it means to have standards of evidence or how these standards get applied. That means that we can't see how the same methods that gave us our cell phones also gave us our understanding of climate change. When a pandemic hits, we can't see how the science is going to be an evolving process as those standards of evidence get used to sort through the firehose of real-time data. And when it comes to things like UFOs or "Ancient Aliens," we won't see that holding fast to those standards is the only thing that can keep us from being fooled by a conclusion that we may want to be true as opposed to accepting the one that actually is true.
Admittedly, standards of evidence is not the most thrilling topic in the world. But it very well may be the most important.
