Essay analyzes Cotton Mather's promotion of inoculation during smallpox outbreaks, indicating historical public health principles.
When smallpox returned to Boston in 1721, Cotton Mather was quick to promote the African practice of inoculation. This essay returns to the Antinomian Controversy of 1636-38 to resituate Mather’s inoculation advocacy in a longer history of Puritan public health concepts. I argue that the minister drew on a decades-old paradigm when he endorsed the procedure.
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Elizabeth Apple (2026) studied this question.
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