Africans Inoculating Americans Against Smallpox in 1706: did West African Knowledge Win the War of 1776?

I started my career as a U.N. volunteer in Afghanistan. In 1972, my wife Michelle and I were working for UNICEF in a mountain valley in Northern Afghanistan. We lived in a Balkh Province village called Shadyan, where Alexander the Great married the beautiful Roxanne 2300 years ago. A wandering vaccinator came down the valley, moving from village to village to immunize villagers against smallpox – for a small fee. He would scratch children’s arms with a thorn, infecting the wound with pus taken from the pustule of a smallpox victim. This was "Live Vaccine.” The technique is known in medical circles as “variolation” and it was first imported into Britain in 1720 by a lady who saw its use in Constantinople. For centuries throughout Turkey, the Caucasus and Central Asia, variolation had been widely known and widely used.

“West Africans were using variolation hundreds of years ago, and they brought it to America in 1706.”

In those days Afghans with pockmarked faces from smallpox were common. Their siblings had died. Afghanistan was an isolated corner of Central Asia with few resources, high mortality and little contact with the outside world. Mazar-i-Sharif, capital of North Afghanistan received few foreign visitors, most of them Russians. We were often the first foreigners that Afghan villagers had ever seen, let alone talked with (yes, we spoke Dari). Our job was seeking methods for UNICEF to reach children in remote areas of Afghanistan, in mountain valleys with no roads where doctors never travelled. Ten years later - partly thanks to “variolation” – WHO declared that smallpox had been eradicated worldwide. On May 8th 1980, the 33rd World Health Assembly officially declared the world free of this disease.

The use of cowpox vaccination to make people immune to smallpox is credited to the British scientist Edward Jenner (1747-1823), one of those remarkable Enlightenment scholars with multiple interests. Jenner graduated M.D. from St Andrews in 1792 but was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1788 as a zoologist, thanks to his careful study of the cuckoo that showed how blind cuckoo nestlings push other eggs and chicks out of the nest thanks to a depression in their back that allows them to cup eggs. Amazing!

Physician Edward Jenner (1747-1823)

But it was smallpox that made Edward Jenner famous. Milkmaids were generally immune to smallpox, and Scottish doctors thought the pus in the blisters that milkmaids received from cowpox protected them from smallpox. Other doctors used cowpox inoculation, but it was Jenner who provided the scientific proofs. On May 14th 1796, Jenner tested his hypothesis by inoculating the eight-year-old son of his gardener with pus scraped from cowpox blisters derived from a cow called Blossom.

Giulio Monteverd’s statue of Jenner inoculating his son. (Wellcome) The pox was that important!

Vaccination took a while to become accepted as a valid protection against smallpox. Only in 1840 did the British government ban variolation – the use of smallpox to induce immunity – and start providing free vaccinations using cowpox. In 1980, 140 years later, WHO declared smallpox vanquished.

West Africans were using variolation hundreds of years ago, and they brought it to America in 1706. On December 15th 2020 Gillian Brockell, lead history writer for the Washington Post, published a fascinating article describing Africans using this very same inoculation technique to protect Americans from smallpox. What happened in Afghanistan, also happened in Africa and in America.

In her WP article “The African roots of inoculation in America: Saving lives for three centuries”, Gillian compared the African-American nurses in the frontline today in fighting Covid, with the Africa inoculators who were innovators in fighting smallpox. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/12/15/enslaved-african-smallpox-vaccine-coronavirus/

“The concept of inoculation arrived in America from Africa” writes Brockell. “In fact, in the 1700s, Africans taught their technique for protecting themselves against smallpox to the very European settlers who enslaved them. It’s a once-hidden history recounted most recently by historian Ibram X. Kendi in “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” and journalist Isabel Wilkerson in “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” You may remember from high school history the name Cotton Mather. He was an important Puritan minister and intellectual of his day, and the son of Increase Mather, who founded Harvard College. Cotton Mather was also an enslaver. At the time, about 1,000 people of African descent lived in the Massachusetts colony; many were indentured servants, but increasingly, they were enslaved for life.

“In 1706, Mather’s congregation gave him as a gift an enslaved African he called Onesimus (the man’s original name is unknown). As was a “standard question” of the day, Mather asked Onesimus if he had had smallpox yet, according to Kendi.

“Yes and no,” Onesimus replied.

“He explained to Mather that when he was a child in Africa, the pus of a smallpox victim had been scraped into his arm with a thorn — he still had the scar — to give him a mild case of the disease; now he was forever immune. It was a common practice where he came from and had been for hundreds of years, he told Mather.”

“Cotton Mather was a true puritan. A towering if controversial figure, especially following the Salem witch hysteria to which his preaching and writings greatly contributed,” writes Stacy M. Brown her article about smallpox vaccinations, publisher in the Madison Times on February 2nd 2019. https://themadisontimes.themadent.com/article/a-slaves-african-medical-science-saves-the-lives-of-bostonians-during-the-1721-smallpox-epidemic/

Reverend Cotton Mather was a White slave owner of his time: not the sort of cleric I would want at my dinner table, and evidently a Christian Hypocrite if he was prepared to accept Onesimus as a gift. But Mather was smart enough to appreciate his slave’s intelligence and to understand the value of his knowledge about inoculation.

Onesimus bought his freedom and is forgotten by history. But the information he gave Mather proved useful five years later when a smallpox epidemic struck Boston, Massechusetts. Mather wrote an “Address to the Physicians of Boston” in June 1721, urging them to try the inoculation technique. Only one physician responded: Zabadiel Boylston announced that he had inoculated two enslaved Africans and his own son.

Other West African slaves confirmed what Onesimus had told him; and after reading about similar variolation practices in Turkey, Mather became an avid proponent of inoculation. Brockell reports that William Douglass (the only man in Boston with an actual medical degree) thought that Africans were trying to kill their masters by tricking them into infecting themselves with smallpox. Mather and Boylston were vilified for suggesting Africans might have valuable scientific knowledge. Apparently someone even threw a grenade into Mather’s home.

Smallpox vaccinations in a clinic in Africa

This reminds me how very stubborn White Scientists often are. Even today, their imagination is often limited when confronted by new ideas. An African professor once told me: ”The weakness of Western scientists is their refusal to imagine alternative solutions, ideas for which they have seen no proof.” I have known doctors deny the expertise of osteopaths and chiropractors, and who are afraid of Chinese practices like acupuncture that might threaten their own status. Medicine merits humility. Back in the 18th century, medical practitioners killed far more patients than they cured.

“The Boston epidemic lasted nearly two years, writes Brockell. “Afterward, a survey found that of the people Mather and Boylston had persuaded to get inoculated, only 2 per cent died. And the death rate among the population who hadn’t been inoculated and caught smallpox? Fourteen per cent. In 1777, as the Revolutionary War exploded across the young country, so did a new epidemic of smallpox. Gen. George Washington, an admirer of science and technology who had survived smallpox in his teens, had his entire army inoculated.”

George Washington was a pragmatist. He was not blinded by the supposed ‘knowledge’ of science and he had no medical degree to limit his imagination. What he did have was personal experience of catching smallpox himself when he was 19 years of age – luckily for him it was a light attack, although it kept him bed-bound for 24 days.

“Washington knew what smallpox was like and he knew how it could incapacitate his Army,” writes Elizabeth Fenn, a professor of early American history of the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82.

There was a smallpox epidemic in Boston, which Washington was besieging in 1775. To protect his troops, General Washington decided to variolate all his soldiers on a rota system, installing a quarantine recovery-station in the village of Brookline. In this way he saved his army from the epidemic, while British soldiers were falling sick and dying.

Washington pursued his inoculation strategy through 1776, 1777 and again in 1778 when he found that some soldiers were still un-vaccinated: “Notwithstanding the Orders I had given last year to have all the Recruits innoculated, I found upon examination, that between three and four thousand Men had not had the Small Pox,” wrote Washington in January 1778, “That disorder began to make its appearance in Camp, and to avoid its spreading in the natural way, the whole were immediately innoculated.”

https://www.history.com/news/smallpox-george-washington-revolutionary-war

George Washington was taking advantage of West African medical knowledge, and it saved his army.

How therefore should we judge the contribution of West Africans to the Independence of America?