Smallpox inoculation in colonial New Jersey: a contemporary account.

IN Colonial America, theological presuppositions, occult notions, and superstitions plagued medical science -y physicians treated fits, fevers, and fluxes instead of specific diseases; bleeding, sweating, and vomiting were standard treatments for illness ranging from the ague to consumption; quacks, midwives, and preachers practiced "physick" alongside skilled doctors. It is little wonder that early settlers had more to fear from the perils of pathogenic organisms than from hostile Indians and natural calamities. The most dreaded scourge of all was smallpox—a disease that ravaged the population of North America (both indigenous and immigrant) throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But if variola was indeed a microscopic agent of death and decimation, it was also a stimulus to the advancement of medical science. It was, after all, a smallpox epidemic that prompted the publication of the first medical essay printed in North America and provided the occasion for the initial major test of variolization in the annals of Western medical history. Inoculation for the prevention of smallpox originated in Boston in 1721 , when, at the prompting of Cotton Mather, Zabdiel Boylston inoculated his only son and two Negro servants, thereby launching a campaign in which 240 individuals eventually were treated. Recurring epidemics were grim