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The Pox And The Covenant: Mather, Franklin, And The Epidemic That Changed America's Destiny (2000)

by Tony Williams(Favorite Author)

3.22 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1402236050 (ISBN13: 9781402236051)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

review 1: Interesting and lively account of smallpox epidemic in Puritan Boston and debate among Mather, Franklin and various others on vaccination and the role of the church. Williams has no trouble bringing this period to life but his depiction of Cotton Mather as a man of science and reason taking on the superstitious peasantry is simply bizarre in light of Mather's role as unrepentant chief supporter and instigator of the Salem Witch Trials of the late 1600's -- which Williams completely and utterly glosses over. Sort of like discussing Dr. Mengele's brilliant medical career. An unforgivable lapse.
review 2: The debate over inoculation as a cure for smallpox raged in Boston in 1721-2 with vicious personal attacks on each side's proponents in the early colonial news... morepapers. On one side were James and in a small way a young Ben Franklin and the other Cotton Mather. Of course, the heroes of the Enlightenment the Franklins supported the innovation and that fundamentalist hidebound Puritan Cotton Mather rejected it. Wait, was Cotton Mather on the right side of history in this one? It was Cotton who discovered that Africans living in Boston seemed to be immune to small pox due to inoculations in their home country and that the Turks had been using them to not die from the "common way" of getting small pox and if you don't die, immunity. When a smallpox epidemic began in Boston in 1721, Cotton supported Dr. Boylston's inoculations of over 100 people, with all but two surviving the epidemic. In contrast, a quarter of the people who fell ill in "the common way" died. However the detractors, like the Franklins refused to look at the evidence and mounted the attacks on Mather and other supporters of inoculations. On the book jacket it said that this was the "Epidemic that Changed America's Destiny." It is true that within a decade or so the majority of those who opposed inoculations came around to believe in them, but that is not the change in destiny the author was talking about. It fact that when Boylston and Mather inoculated people they violated the Board of Selectmen's banning of the procedure. The author sees this as a further eroding of the covenant between the Puritan ministers and the people. Already the ministers were coming under attack and losing their moral authority and this defiance and insistence on proceeding against the law and the general consensus of the community was their undoing. I have probably told you too much, however these reviews are mostly a way for me to remember the books and stories I've read. Tony Williams chose an interesting subject that I knew little about and I very much enjoyed reading it. I hope to read his other history, Hurricane of Independence.laws In the less

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