Onemisus

When you notice the smallpox vaccine scar on your arm, do you ever think about the miracle of modern medicine that saves hundreds of thousands of lives from infectious diseases every year? Europe had experienced virulent smallpox epidemics for centuries before European explorers and colonists brought the disease to North America in the 16th through 18th centuries, when immigration was at a fever pitch—no pun intended. We should all be familiar with how smallpox exterminated entire communities of Indigenous Americans because they had no natural resistance to it. Some of us might be familiar with the infamous “gift” of smallpox-infected blankets given by British soldiers to tribes during the French and Indian War. While the details of this incident remain a source of historical debate, smallpox was common in the colonies during the 17th and 18th centuries. The worst outbreak in Boston came in 1721, infecting half the population of 10,000 and killing 850 by February 1722.

Puritan minister Cotton Mather, sometimes called America’s first evangelist and chief instigator and defender of the Salem Witch trials in the late 17th century, learned of a smallpox inoculation method from a man named Onemisus during this outbreak. The original Onemisus was the slave of a Christian named Philemon, whom Saint Paul wrote about in the New Testament. The Bostonian Onemisus was an African slave owned by Cotton Mather, believed to have been brought to the colonies from Ghana. Despite his lack of moral common sense, Mather was wise enough to heed the advice of one of his slaves, who told him how smallpox had been avoided by the inhabitants of his native country for decades. The inoculation process involved taking a less virulent form of the Variola virus from a recovering smallpox patient and introducing it into an open cut on an otherwise healthy person.

Next time you notice the smallpox scar on your arm, you can still pay tribute to Edward Jenner, who later developed a vaccine from cowpox, but Onemisus should come to mind first and foremost. He introduced the vaccination process to the British colonies years before Jenner was born, thus saving many of our ancestors’ lives.

This is a truth every body should remember.