The Speckled Monster (60 page)

 

On the thirtieth of November, Selectman William Hutchinson died of the smallpox in Cambridge, contracted in the service of the House of Representatives. He was thirty-eight years old. At his side, Dr. Robie bowed his head and then rose, walking across Harvard Yard to inoculate his first patient: his fellow tutor, Nicholas Sever.

Two days later, the funeral for Mr. Hutchinson in Boston was a great one, deep, dark, and sonorous with mourning pomp. Dr. Boylston did not attend; he saddled up Prince and rode straight up to the beacon on Beacon Hill. Up there in the cold wind, he listened to the tolling of the bells below and sent his own prayer heavenward—for the deceased and for his widow and young children, but mostly, truth be told, for the anguish of Dr. Clark.

He watched the sun set, and thought of a burning angel folding his wings and slinking away. The petty nastiness would not slip away so quietly, he knew that. There were still skirmishes to be fought, and no doubt sputtering ugliness to endure. But the dark fury was subsiding, chased out of town by the steady stream of footsteps, wheels, horse hooves flowing to his door.

Later, he withdrew to the Salutation Inn, where Cheever, Helyer, some Webbs, and several Langdons were gathered around the big fire.

“Where've you been?” cried Cheever, calling for a fresh round of rum punch.

“Giving thanks,” said Zabdiel, stamping snow from his coat and boots, and crossing the room to stretch before the fire.

“Alone?” protested Cheever. “Without us? Without trumpets or harps?”

“I had my horse,” said Zabdiel, gratefully accepting a steaming tankard of hot rum punch from Mr. Dodge, and cupping cold hands around it. “What would I do with a harp?”

“And there you have him,” said Cheever to the crowd. “Dr. Boylston, at the height of celebrating his part in revealing inoculation to be the greatest blessing Providence has ever afforded mankind . . . Be as modest and monosyllabic as you like, my friend, but tell us this: Would you do it again?”

Zabdiel set down his tankard, pulled his pipe from his coat, filled it, and lit it. “Let us hope,” he said, “that I never have to answer that question.”

“Hah!” said Cheever. “Dizzy with optimism at last.” He waved his own pipe in the direction of the front door. “There will be an ‘again,' you know. Because that wide darkness out there would be the sea, just in case you forgot. Sends the golden talents of Ophir streaming our way, for the most part. But every now and again, it spits up the Beast.” He leaned forward to Zabdiel. “When that happens, will you start this whole fury anew? Will you inoculate again?”

Around them, the whole circle of men leaned in.

Zabdiel pulled the pipe from his mouth.
When it shall please Providence to send the distemper among us again,
he had prayed as he sat atop Prince, up on the hill,
may inoculation revive, be better received, and continue a blessing
. He had even liked the words so much that he pulled out his case notebook and scribbled the sentence in the margins. But he did not repeat it aloud.

Instead, he released a slow ring of smoke. “Of course,” he said quietly.

11

IN ROYAL FASHION

 

AT last, the seas smiled again, sending a ship from Boston scudding up the Thames.

Mr. Dummer slit open the long-awaited letter from Dr. Mather and groaned. With a most unfortunate and emphasized certainty, Dr. Mather did not wish his name to be bandied about in print concerning this matter. But he did wish his little treatise to be published.

Applebee's
was rather more pleased at the bad news its editors received from Boston.
Four hundred dead every week!
The epidemic was still raging in Boston, the Tory paper screamed, and the Americans had had precious little but bad luck with their project of inoculation: perhaps, the article insinuated, the preposterous death toll might be laid at the feet of this newfangled practice.

Mr. Dummer was outraged. How could anyone accidentally confuse four hundred dead in a month with four hundred in a week: a number he doubted that London had ever known, except in time of the plague?

Mr. Maitland shrugged it off and put the final touches on his account of inoculation (and his name into the title) and sent it off to the printers.

 

“Poetry is dead, and Physick had replaced it,” grumbled Pope, hard at work on his translation of the Odyssey.

“You are jealous,” teased Lady Mary.

“Only of you, my lady,” he said.

There had been a lull in the inoculation controversy since early December, when the
St. James Evening Post
whispered that “a Noble Duke in Hanover Square” had undergone the operation; two days later, the
Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer
added Charlotte Tichborne, woman of the princess's bedchamber, to the list. Somehow, notice of Mr. Maitland's inoculation of the children of Mr. Colt, colleague of Mr. Dummer at the Middle Temple, escaped the newspapers' notice. Then the Christmas holidays arrived, and smallpox receded from view as halls were decked, and gentlemen made merry.

On February 23, 1722, the wrangling came back with a roar. Under royal sponsorship, Mr. Maitland inoculated six more people. “The curious,” announced the papers, “may be further satisfied by a sight of those persons at Mr. Forster's house in Marlborough Court, at the Upper End of Poland Street and Berwick Street in Soho, where attendance is given every day from ten till twelve before noon, and from two till four in the afternoon.”

Though nominally open to view, the Newgate experiment had essentially been closed to all but the most intrepid: many who were safe from smallpox had refused to attend for fear of jail fever or distaste for the rude antics of the prisoners. The six new subjects, however, were genteel enough to offer safe viewing to anyone not vulnerable to the smallpox. The curious, the suspicious, and the horrified began to drift in, clutching copies of
Mr. Maitland's Account
still damp from the press.

 

That very day, Jeremiah Dummer at last signed and dated his introduction to Cotton Mather's unacknowledged
Account,
and sent it forth, dedicated to Sir Hans Sloane, President, and the rest of the Royal College of Physicians. “Gentlemen,” he began with a sigh, “I receiv'd the following Account of the Method and Success of inoculating the
Small-Pox
in
New-England
from a Person there of great Learning and Probity, who desir'd his Name might be conceal'd.” The gentleman in question, he assured them, had “no other View than a charitable Inclination of doing Good to the World.” To New Englanders, thought Mr. Dummer, that sentence was as good as a name: there was only one Dr. Dogood. But Londoners, no doubt, would likely miss the reference.

To Dr. Mather's arguments he added three observations of his own: first, in Boston, there had been virtually no preparation of patients' bodies, but they seemed to do well in any case. Secondly, the discharge of matter at the incisions was surely a boon to bodies needing to vent poison. And third, for his part, he suspected some of the ease of inoculated smallpox stemmed from knowledge: the dread of a monster that might lurk unseen in every breath could now be dissolved with a welcome—and watched—stroke of a lancet.

Mr. Dummer was not alone in his willingness to press the success of inoculation in New England. The Reverend Mr. Daniel Neal followed suit by reprinting the work of his friend and fellow dissenting minister, Benjamin Colman, along with the still anonymous work of Mr. Colman's associate, Mr. William Cooper.

 

The Princess of Wales spoke to both of them. In one respect, Mr. Dummer had been easier: he was no court intimate, but he was, nonetheless, a gentleman who appeared now and again in the Drawing Room. He proved irritatingly resistant, however, to being opened by her intellectual knife. Though born in the colonies, he had long been a London lawyer and the agent for the province of Massachusetts. He was, in other words, a polished diplomat, trained in the fine art of saying nothing.

Mr. Neal, on the other hand, was not regularly present at court, and required to be summoned. As a proudly dissenting Puritan, though, Mr. Neal prided himself on being outspoken—in a gentlemanly way—in the service of Truth. He told the princess what he knew, and he gave her names. He also reiterated, in his rough way, a recommendation she had found in his work: “The chief scene of action, Your Highness, has hitherto been New England: within these last six months, there having been more persons inoculated in Boston than in all of Europe. It seems reasonable—I might even say
necessary
—that we should become acquainted with their method and success of this practice among ourselves. Surely their inoculator should be called upon to provide an accurate account?”

 

Such forthrightness, the princess remarked that evening, when Mrs. Tichborne carried in a late supper, was no doubt furthered by the fact that the fellow was not a physician; no London doctor would have made such a claim, no matter its truth, to the detriment of the Royal College of Physicians.

The princess sighed, toying with a bit of bread. She prided herself on her ability to ferret out truth—but in her position, it did so often require such a lot of ferreting through flattery, half-masquerades, and tangles of desires, plans, schemes, and frankly Machiavellian maneuvers. Sometimes she grew tired just thinking of it. And then came along a minister who would probably tell the truth if it killed him. Shout it all the louder, for that matter. Oh, for a golden mean.

She held out her glass for a splash more wine. “Mr. Neal's suggestion, now, that the Boston physician—what was his name, Tich?”

“Dr. Boylston, madam.”

“—His suggestion that Dr. Boylston be induced to publish
his
account to the world: surely that would be as valuable as Mr. Maitland's fine account. More valuable—for all their well-meaning—than the twaddling ministers'.” She pushed the tray away. “Remind me to mention it to Sir Hans.”

 

Sir Hans found his next conversation with the princess ruthlessly steered toward Boston, though to be frank, the subject annoyed him as much as it fascinated him.
Sixty!

“I should be glad of a chance, one day, to speak to this Dr. Boylston,” observed the princess. “In this business, the colonies seem to be outstripping the capital entirely.”

“Their goals are different,” said Sir Hans sourly. “They are colonists, Your Highness, fighting for the survival of their children in an epidemic such as London has not seen since the last great visitation of the plague. They are not trying to induce a crowned head to risk his heirs.”

“Their goals are exactly the same,” said the princess. “And their children will survive to adulthood.”

 

Several days later, Sir Hans arrived home in Russell Square to find a hurriedly scrawled note from Claude Amyand, the king's principal sergeant-surgeon in ordinary, awaiting him.

 

Damnation,
thought Sir Hans. Sergeant Amyand, it was clear, wanted to go through with the experiment, to convince the still undecided king and council—“those that were yet diffident,” hah!—as soon as possible. But the princess had misgivings.

As well she might, he concluded, when he saw the children. One was downright scrophulous, and another a mere two months old. And the stakes were so very high: they needed more successes, preferably among children, but they could not afford a single loss. How they were to get through without a single loss, starting with this sorry set, he did not know.

He gave the nod to proceed, and proceeded himself to pray.

Despite his misgivings, all the children went through the smallpox with pleasingly favorable symptoms—save one girl who had no symptoms at all. Upon further inquiry, which he suspected included a well-deserved hiding, she admitted that she had had the smallpox before, but had pretended otherwise so as to get the reward.

 

The Royal Society heard from Boston again. From Dr. Mather again, to be precise, thought Sir Hans, though the minister still chose to maintain his mockery of anonymity. This latest paper, like his treatise, had come through Mr. Dummer, this time via his colleague at the Middle Temple, Henry Newman. Very odd, Sir Hans grumbled to himself, given that Dr. Mather allied himself so closely with their inoculator as to make it sound as if they held the lancet together. For all that, Dr. Mather had written an admirably concise and clear paper, giving a detailed account of inoculation as it was practiced by Dr. Boylston.
Why the devil wouldn't the fellow put his name on it?

The only part that bothered him was Dr. Mather's unqualified praise for the operation. The man went so far as to claim that patients actually had their overall health improve as a result. Sir Hans shook his head. He approved of the operation; he counted himself one of its staunchest supporters. But he was not at all sure such extravagant buoyancy was the best way to win suspicious converts.