Onesimus’ contribution to medical science

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I hadn’t intended to write another article about vaccines, but I came across a story that I couldn’t pass up, especially during Black History Month.

He was an Africa-born man brought to the American colonies as a slave in 1706. Although most slaves suffered a demeaning life of servi-tude, the man was fortunate to wind up in the home of Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister of North Church in Boston. His birth name is not known, but Mather gave him the name “Onesimus” after a 1st century slave in the Bible, the name meaning “useful, helpful.” Seeing him as highly intelligent, the pastor educated him in reading and writing. Onesimus earned independ-ent wages to support a wife and two sons.

Onesimus relayed to Mather some of the medicinal practices he had witnessed in Africa. Of particular importance was a method of inoculation prac-ticed on him and his countrymen. As Mather would later describe, “People take the juice of smallpox, cut the skin and put in a drop,” essentially the process of variolation I described two weeks ago. Interestingly, this practice was apparent-ly widespread among the slave communities.

With the advent of a smallpox outbreak in Boston in 1721, Mather pro-moted this inoculation procedure, citing Onesimus and African folklore as the source of his information. His suggestion was met with wide resistance from those doubting the legitimacy of African medicine, and he was widely ridiculed for listening to advice from a slave. Moreover, doctors, ministers and city offi-cials suspected a plot to poison white colonists and argued that inoculating healthy individuals would merely serve to spread the disease. Not only that, it was improper to interfere with the working of divine providence.

Despite these widespread suspicions, a doctor, Zabdiel Boyston, tried the procedure on patients, puncturing a smallpox pustule with a needle and scraping the contaminated needle across the skin of a healthy individual. A total of 280 people were inoculated during the 1721-1722 Boston smallpox epi-demic and, of these, only 6 died (2.2%), while among the 5,889 non-inoculated smallpox patients there were 844 deaths (14.4%).

Recognition for Onesimus’ contribution to medical science didn’t come until 2016, when he was placed among the 100 best Bostonians of all time by historian Ted Widmer, who noted that Onesimus reversed many of the prevail-ing racial assumptions by having more medical knowledge than the European medical “experts” in Boston at that time.