BOOK
REVIEW: "THE POX AND THE COVENANT"
|
A HERO OF FAITH AND SCIENCE |
|
by
Doug Ward |
Healing the sick was an important part of the earthly
ministry of Jesus. The Gospel of Matthew reports, "Great crowds came to
him, bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute and many others, and
laid them at his feet; and he healed them" (Matt 15:30, NIV).
Jesus'
wondrous healings indicated the arrival of the initial stages of the Kingdom of
God. They pointed ahead to a time when "the eyes of the blind shall be
opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. ... the lame [man] leap as
an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing...." (Isa 35:5-6, KJV). When
asked by disciples of John the Baptist whether he was really the Messiah, Jesus
specifically mentioned such healings as evidence that he was indeed (Luke
7:20-23).
After
reading the Gospel accounts of the healings of Jesus, we may then be puzzled by
a striking assertion that Jesus made to his disciples:
"I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will
do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I
am going to the Father" (John 14:12, NIV).
How
could we possibly do greater things than Jesus? Christian writer Tim Stafford
observes that one reason we are perplexed by John 14:12 is our modern,
post-Enlightenment distinction between "natural" and
"supernatural". We think of Jesus' healings as miracles, which we
define as supernatural events, things that cannot be explained by the laws of
nature. There is no such distinction, however, in the thought world of the
Bible. The Bible pictures God actively in control of every aspect of existence.1
The
natural versus supernatural dichotomy can lead to erroneous thinking. For
example, it is common today to consider God as absent from the natural-the
realm of science-and to relegate God to the supernatural, defined as the areas
that science has not yet explained. As science comes to understand more and
more, this has the effect of shrinking God's perceived role and relevance.
In
connection with healing, the natural versus supernatural dichotomy has led some
Christians to mistakenly consider "miraculous" healing to be superior
to medical care, and even to deem it sinful for Christians to seek medical
care. To the contrary, Stafford suggests that medical advances are among the
"greater things" that Jesus promised his disciples would do. Stafford
writes, "Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, has healed a
hundred thousand times the number that Jesus healed. Any doctor today can heal
more people than Jesus did." He adds, "When penicillin was discovered,
that brought gladness to God's heart. Everything good is part of God's kingdom,
and we must take joy in it."2
I
agree with Stafford, and I believe there are a number of medical breakthroughs
that likewise have "brought gladness to God's heart." One is the
eradication of smallpox, a deadly disease that killed multiple hundreds of
millions of people and disfigured many times more who survived its ravages.
Smallpox was defeated by 1980 as the result of a concerted international
immunization campaign.3
One
important early step in the defeat of smallpox was the discovery that lifelong
immunity to the disease could be conferred by injecting scabs or pus from a
smallpox sufferer into an incision in the skin of a healthy person. This
practice, known as variolation (after variola, the name of the smallpox
virus), resulted in death only about one per cent of the time, a vast
improvement over the usual thirty per cent death rate of the disease.
Variolation
began in India sometime before 1000 B.C., reached China by 1000 A.D., and then
traveled to the Middle East and North Africa in the seventeenth century.4
In Britain's North American colonies the practice was first tried during a 1721
smallpox epidemic in Boston, thanks to the efforts of the Reverend Cotton
Mather. This episode in American history is vividly described by historian Tony
Williams in his book The
Pox and the Covenant (Sourcebooks, 2010).
Cotton
Mather (1663-1728) is best known to us as a Puritan religious leader, a popular
preacher at Boston's North Church. But as Williams explains, Mather was also an
avid student of science. A graduate of Harvard at age 15, Mather exemplified
the Puritans' love of learning, which was fueled by the conviction that God
should be glorified in all areas of life, and that God is glorified in all
areas of knowledge. Mather was elected to the British Royal Society in 1713,
the eighth American colonist to achieve that distinction. His enthusiasm for
science is displayed in his science text The
Christian Philosopher, published
in 1721.
Mather
first learned about variolation in 1716 from Onesimus, an African slave whom
some of his parishioners had purchased for him ten years earlier.5
Onesimus and other Africans in Boston had been immunized as children. Mather,
who himself was a smallpox survivor from a 1678 epidemic, went on to read more
about the practice in reports carried in the Royal Society's Philosophical
Transactions. Seeing the lifesaving potential of variolation, he determined
to promote its use the next time that smallpox hit Boston.
Mather's
opportunity came in 1721 when the H.M.S. Seahorse, a ship sailing from
Barbados, arrived at the port of Boston carrying some infected sailors. As
smallpox began to spread through the city, Mather wrote to local doctors,
urging them to try variolation. He was able to line up only one brave recruit:
Zabdiel Boylston, proprietor of Boston's largest apothecary shop. Boylston, who
remembered his own ordeal with smallpox in the epidemic of 1702-03, was a man
who was willing to take risks for the sake of saving lives. He began his
variolation efforts with members of his own household, reporting on the
(apparently successful) results in two Boston newspapers, the Gazette
and the News-Letter, on July 15, 1721.
The
Mather/Boylston variolation project set off a heated debate in the Boston
press. Many Bostonians were worried that variolation would only serve to
accelerate the epidemic. One vocal opponent of Mather and Boylston was a
prominent physician, William Douglass, whose main motivation seems to have been
professional jealousy. Douglass was proud of the fact that he was the only
doctor in Boston with a medical degree, and he considered Boylston to be an
unqualified amateur. He also claimed that variolation was contrary to God's
will. (Apparently he saw no problem with trespassing on Mather's turf.)
Several
of Mather's fellow clergymen rallied to his support, asserting in a July 27 Gazette
article that God had given humans reason and knowledge for their own benefit.
If variolation contravened God's will, couldn't the same be said of any
medical procedure? On the contrary, people should use all of the life-saving
tools granted by God and be thankful for them.
The
pronouncements of the clergy did nothing to quell the debate, however. As
Williams observes, Boston by 1721 was no theocracy. The depth of the
anti-authoritarian sentiment in Boston was evident in the pages of the Courant,
a new newspaper launched in 1721 by printer James Franklin. Assisted by an
apprentice, his fifteen-year-old brother Benjamin, Franklin specialized in
poking fun at the clergy and other authority figures. Much popular opposition
to variolation was voiced in the Courant.
Occasionally
the controversy advanced beyond the printed page. In one incident, comical in
retrospect, someone launched a homemade bomb through a window of Mather's home
at about 3 AM on November 14. Attached to the device was a note reading,
"Cotton Mather, you dog, damn you! I'll inoculate you with this, with a
pox to you!" Fortunately, the bomb was a dud.
Despite
virulent opposition, Mather and Boylston carried on and were ultimately
vindicated. All together there were 5889 cases of smallpox in the Boston
epidemic, 844 (about fourteen per cent) of which were fatal. In contrast, 280
people (including Mather's son Samuel) were variolated by Boylston, with only
six deaths-a fatality rate of two per cent. Variolation soon became an accepted
practice in the American colonies, endorsed and applied by William Douglass and
Benjamin Franklin, among others. Boylston was rewarded with election to the
Royal Society in 1726.
The
social fabric of Boston was strained by the epidemic, but the city ultimately
passed the test. The strong social welfare system put in place by the Puritans played
a key role in helping Boston get through the epidemic. It could also be argued
that Mather himself was one of the major forces holding Boston together.
Williams documents in detail Mather's heroic efforts on behalf of the people of
Boston. Throughout 1721 Mather worked tirelessly, serving the poor, comforting
the bereaved, and encouraging his parishioners with sermons and lectures. His
example shows that love and knowledge, applied in combination, can be a very
powerful force for good, illustrating John 14:12. Perhaps this is the biggest
lesson to be gained from the events chronicled in The Pox and the Covenant.
1Stafford gives an
excellent discussion of this point in Chapter 9 of his book Surprised
by Jesus: His Agenda for Changing Everything in A.D. 30 and Today,
InterVarsity Press, Downer's Grove, Illinois, 2006.
2Surprised by Jesus,
p. 134.
3For the story of this
campaign, see the book Scourge:
The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox by Jonathan B. Tucker (Grove
Press, New York, 2001).
4Scourge, pp.
15-16.
5There
were about two thousand slaves in Massachusetts in those days, but to the
credit of the Puritans, these slaves were generally not treated as mere
property. Mather's conviction that slaves should be educated and presented with
the Gospel is reflected in the name of his slave-see Col 4:9,18; Phil 10.
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