On a Friday morning in 1764, a nineteen-year-old Abigail Smith sent some tobacco to her betrothed: one John Adams esquire, a country lawyer from Braintree.[1] Abigail was a parson’s daughter from nearby Weymouth, a young lady already brimming with the spiritedness and pragmatic optimism for which she would eventually become famous. But she didn’t send tobacco with a light heart; she sent it with fervent prayers that immortal powers would protect the man she loved, for he was about to undergo inoculation for smallpox, and she hoped he would use the tobacco to smoke his letters—a practice then thought to contain contagion.
While fumigation as a method to prevent the spread of disease was largely abandoned in the twentieth century as science explored more effective means by which to protect against contagion, inoculations would go on to be not only the salvation of the American Revolution, but, as the precursors to modern vaccines, would become the gold standard for public health policy’s role in promoting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for generations to come.[2]
Of course, in the spring of 1764, Abigail Smith could know nothing of this. She only knew that the man she planned to marry might not survive his ordeal.
At the time, the process of inoculation against smallpox, more properly referred to as variolation, was a far more dangerous method than the eventual smallpox vaccine would prove to be.[3] Smallpox contracted naturally killed up to thirty percent of its victims, but even two to three percent of those inoculated would still perish, because the process involved inserting a live infection into rent flesh by way of pus-soaked thread.[4]
And for those who survived it, the process was still painful and potentially disfiguring.
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