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Smallpox, Contagion, and Community in Eighteenth-Century Boston

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Smallpox, Contagion, and Community in Eighteenth-Century Boston Layers of Protection: Smallpox, Contagion, and Community in Eighteenth-Century Boston An honors thesis for the Department of History Elise A. Weir Tufts University, 2015 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to the Tufts University Summer Scholars Program for providing funding that allowed me to complete this research. Thank you to the Massachusetts Historical Society for granting me permission to quote and cite unpublished manuscripts. Thank you to Connie Reik at Tisch Library for her assistance, and finally, thank you to Professor Alisha Rankin, Professor Benjamin Carp, and Professor David Ekbladh for serving on my committee, reading countless drafts, and providing invaluable guidance and support. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………ii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1 One: Official Public Health Measures and the Complex Threat of Smallpox……………. 19 Two: Smallpox, Inoculation, and the Community…………………………………………...47 Three: Smallpox and the Household: Protecting the Family and Reconfiguring Domestic Healing………………………………………………………………………78 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………….106 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………...112 iii Introduction In early January, 1764, John Scollay and Benjamin Austin, both selectmen, turned onto Fish Street in Boston’s North End. Having received word that a member of one Mr. Adams’ family lay ill with smallpox, they proceeded to his home to investigate. The selectmen had every reason to believe the veracity of the report: several days before, they had overseen the burial of Joseph Bulkley, also of Fish Street, after he died of smallpox. Upon arriving at Mr. Adams’ home, the selectmen’s fears were confirmed. Mrs. Adams had indeed contracted smallpox. Perplexed, the selectmen reported that Mrs. Adams, having recently given birth, had “not been out of her Chamber for five Weeks past,” and had very few visitors besides her family. She therefore “could make no conjecture how she had taken the Infection.”1 The selectmen tried to induce Mrs. Adams to consent to being removed from her home and isolated in the town hospital at New Boston, but she refused. Thus in accordance with the law, the selectmen ordered Mr. Adams “to shut up his House immediately” and hang a red flag from the edifice, a symbol to all that smallpox lived within those walls. Mr. Adams was to send away any members of his family who might contract the virus, and a guard was ordered to stand watch starting at dawn each day to ensure than none but the physician entered or exited the infected home.2 Four days later, on January 17th, Mrs. Adams died. She was the second victim of what would be a prolonged outbreak. The selectmen ordered that she be buried in a “tarr’d Sheet and Coffin… in the dead of the Night” to reduce the risk of susceptible townspeople coming in 1 A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Containing the Selectmen’s Minutes from 1764 through 1768, vol. 20, Records Relating to the Early History of Boston (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1889; Internet Archive, 2007), 1- 4 ,https://archive.org/details/recordsrelatingt20bost. 2 Ibid. 1 contact with her body.3 Before this could be done, however, John Gray, himself a guard for the home of another smallpox victim on Fish Street, entered Mrs. Adams’s room and touched her corpse, a violation of the selectmen’s orders. After an investigation, the incensed selectmen concluded that Gray had acted with a “malicious design to spread the Infection of the Small Pox,” and ordered him imprisoned in “the Stone Jayl.”4 Amidst the uproar of Gray’s offence, the selectmen procured a wet nurse to care for Mrs. Adams’s infant child, now without its mother.5 Two days later, both child and nurse were sent to the hospital at New Boston, presumably in an effort to halt the spread of the virus.6 Meanwhile, some Bostonians urged the selectmen to allow inoculation in the town, hoping the procedure would protect their families from what threatened to be a devastating outbreak.7 Despite the selectmen’s best efforts, the outbreak continued for several months after Mrs. Adams’s death; by the time it subsided, 170 of the town’s roughly 15,000 people had died and 4,977 people were inoculated.8 In total, over 35% of Boston’s population contracted smallpox, either naturally or via inoculation, in 1764.9 The experiences of the Adams family in 1764 underscore the fear and suffering that smallpox wrought, as well as the strong community response that outbreaks elicited in eighteenth-century Boston. When Mrs. Adams broke out in the telltale pocks that accompanied 3 Ibid.,12. 4 Ibid., 25. 5 Ibid., 13; See also John B. Blake, Public Health in the Town of Boston 1630-1822 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 90-91. 6 Record Commissioners Containing Selectmen’s Minutes from 1764 through 1768, 17. The Selectmen’s records do not state explicitly that the nurse and baby were sent to the hospital because one or both had smallpox. Once the baby and nurse were sent to the hospital, Mr. Adams was ordered to “continue Smoking and cleansing the House,” suggesting that it could be cleansed since all those infected with smallpox were removed. 7 See for example, “To the Publishers of the Boston Evening-Post,” The Boston Evening-Post, January 30, 1764, accessed July 14, 2014, Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers (108B71A08DE16FB0). 8 Massachusetts Sanitary Commission, “Report of a general plan for the promotion of public and personal health, devised, prepared, and recommended by the Commissioners appointed under a resolve of the Legislature of Massachusetts, relating to a sanitary survey of the State” (New York: Arno Press, 1972, originally printed Boston, 1850), 70; Blake, Public Health, 94-95, 244 (Appendix I, Table I); on Boston’s total population see Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 14. 9 MA Sanitary Commission, “Report of a general plan,” 70. 2 the virus, it triggered a series of official procedures that formed the core of Boston’s public health system. Mrs. Adams’s mandated isolation, the boarding up of her home, and her child’s eventual removal to an isolation hospital were all policies established by law and overseen by Boston’s selectmen, to whom Bostonians were required to report cases of smallpox.10 The selectmen’s supervision of Mrs. Adams’s burial, as well as their efforts to provide for the care of her infant, point to the active role officials in Boston played in trying to halt the spread of smallpox and provide for townspeople affected by the disease. The Adams family tried to preserve the domestic sphere of healing by insisting Mrs. Adams endure the illness in her home. Still, they navigated the town’s regulatory system that made health and sickness a broader political and social issue. Meanwhile, Bostonians were expected to adhere to public health policies for the good of the community. For his defiance of official orders and perceived threat to the community, John Gray faced a criminal hearing and incarceration. Mrs. Adams’s fellow townspeople could not legally inoculate, though many wanted to, until the requisite number of inhabitants fell ill. As this case highlights, smallpox outbreaks engaged the entire community of Boston as inhabitants, from the selectmen to the single family, sought to protect their town from the ravages of smallpox. This thesis studies how Bostonians conceptualized the threat of smallpox and the ways in which they sought to protect their community from this threat in the eighteenth century. Boston warrants particular attention given the prominent role it played in the introduction of inoculation and because its strict public health regulations managed to largely halt outbreaks, but at the same time allowed the controversies of inoculation to persist throughout the eighteenth century. As this thesis demonstrates, the entity of the town was central to how denizens of eighteenth-century 10 “An Act to Prevent Persons Concealing the Small-Pox,” in Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, vol. 2, Acts 1715-1741 (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1874; Internet Archive, 2009), 621-622, https://archive.org/stream/actsresolvespass1541mass#page/n5/mode/2up. 3 Massachusetts conceptualized their community and experienced outbreaks. Thus, a local frame is required to accurately reflect the nuances of community responses to smallpox. This thesis examines protective efforts in Boston from three levels: the government, the broader community, and the household, including overlap among the three. In Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution, Terry Bouton introduces the concept of “concentric rings of protection” when analyzing how rural communities in post-independence Pennsylvania mobilized to protect against state policies that they perceived to be economically ruinous and contrary to democratic ideals. Each ring, Bouton explains, encompassed specific groups of people and performed a distinct protective function to shield the community.11 A similar frame can be applied to Boston during smallpox outbreaks, with the government, the community, and the household forming Boston’s protective system against smallpox. Here, however, the system of protection is better described as layers of protection, and state policies were themselves protective. Rather than being distinct rings, in Boston these layers had fluid boundaries, and they overlapped, conflicted, and reinforced one another to provide a multifaceted but contentious system of protection for the town as it confronted the threat of smallpox. The government provided the first layer by crafting overarching regulatory policies, such as quarantine, isolation, and inoculation bans. These policies stemmed from a desire to not only protect the lives of inhabitants, but also from concerns about the broader costs of smallpox on a town faltering economically and struggling to provide for its indigent population.
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