Epidemics, Inoculation and God's Will

[Are_grits_groceries]

A deadly virus, a controversial antigen, a hot news story--sounds like the breaking coverage of next week's roll-out of the H1N1 vaccine. Health officials hope that mass inoculations will prevent the spread of swine flu. But stories swirling through legacy, online and social media claim the shots are risky, causing Guillain-Barre syndrome, heart attacks and, in some cases, death.

A similar storm roiled the populace some 300 years ago. In the spring of 1721, a smallpox epidemic gripped Boston--the sixth time that the deadly disease had ravaged the settlement since its founding almost 100 years earlier. During an outbreak in the 1670s, 700 people, or twelve percent of the population, had died from the plague. This time, it would strike 6,000 of the city's 10,500 residents and claim 800 lives.

Even more might have died if Cotton Mather, a leading Puritan cleric and an amateur scientist, had not forcefully advocated for inoculation. The practice was new to the Western world; Mather had read about injecting healthy people with small amounts of a disease and knew slaves who had been inoculated in Africa. But when he suggested the idea to Boston's doctors, all but one of the city's ten physicians decried the procedure as dangerous and misguided.

Mather and his backers persevered, and as the debate deepened, medical fault lines paralleled religious and political divisions. Anglicans led the fight against inoculation, arguing that the practice was medically unsafe and theologically unsound since it challenged God's sovereignty over human life. Eager to win support, the anti-inoculation camp started The New England Courant, a newspaper dedicated to attacking Mather, his allies and their campaign for preventive medicine. Supporters of both the British episcopacy and crown, the Courant's writers opposed the Puritan majority's religious independence and feared its nascent bent for political autonomy.

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2009/10/epidemics_inoculation_and_gods_will.html

Cotton Mather? Who knew?
He believed in witchcraft and modern science.

[Odin2005]

1. Oh, boy, this will get the anti-vaxers frothed up.

:popcorn:

[Libertas1776]

2. From the article:

"God gave human beings the ability to reason in order to better their situation."


BINGO!!! If only more fundies would accept that instead of resorting to prayer sessions and whatnot to cure themselves.

[kestrel91316]

3. John and Abigail Adams were immunized against smallpox,

and the subject of their convalescence is covered in his biography that came out a few years ago.

Variolation, scratching actual smallpox virus into the skin, is a far more dangerous way of protecting against it than vaccination, which is done with the similar but less dangerous cowpox virus. Variola = Variola major, the smallpox virus. Vacca = cow in Latin. Though the term vaccination technically applies only to smallpox immunization, it is commonly used when referring to any immunization (and I am very guilty of this myself).

[kimmerspixelated]

4. I'm sure the experimental vaccines of that era

didn't have dangerous additives mixed in, so therefore they would've been safer by far. Homeopathic medicine was still respected in the mainstream, and the historical vaccines you speak of were probably more homeopathically based and effective in many ways.

I don't know what God has to do with any of it.