Several reasons proving that inoculation or transplanting the small pox, is a lawful practice, and that it has been blessed by God for the saving of many a life / by Increase Mather. Sentiments on the small pox inoculated. By Cotton Mather. Reprinted from the original folio single sheet printed at Boston in 1721 ; with an introduction by George Lyman Kittredge.

  • Increase Mather
Date:
1921
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Several reasons proving that inoculation or transplanting the small pox, is a lawful practice, and that it has been blessed by God for the saving of many a life / by Increase Mather. Sentiments on the small pox inoculated. By Cotton Mather. Reprinted from the original folio single sheet printed at Boston in 1721 ; with an introduction by George Lyman Kittredge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    was Have you had the smallpox?” and we may be sure that Mather would not long defer such an inquiry. Our first information on that point, however, comes from a communication to the Royal Society in the form of a letter addressed by Mather on July 12,1716, to John Woodward, M.D., the distinguished English palaeontologist, then Professor of Physic at Gresham College. Mather had just read in the Philosophical Transactions for April-June, 1714/ an account of inoculation as practised in Constantinople, given in a letter to Woodward sent from that city in the preceding December by Dr. Eman¬ uel Timonius (Timoni).1 2 This report, Mather found, accorded with facts already known to him, and accordingly, in his letter of July 12, 1716, after summarizing the previous history of the disease in New England and com¬ menting on the epidemic of measles in 1713, he wrote as follows 1. No. 339, XXIX, 72-82. 2. De La Motiaye visited Timonius, “un de mes grands amis,” in 1712, and conversed with him on the subject of inoculation. “II tachoit,” LaMotraye writes, “de faire re- vivre cette pratique qui etoit autrefois si fort en vogue dans toute. la Grece. ... II entendit avec satisfaction ce que j’avois observe [earlier in the same year] en Circassie a cet egard” (Voyages de S' de La Motraye, Hague, 1727, II 1155 cf. II, 98-99).
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