"Inoculation" by Susan Donnelly

                       Inoculation

Cotton Mather studied small pox for a while,

instead of sin.  Boston was rife with it.

Not being ill himself, thank Providence,

but one day asking his slave, Onesimus,

if he’d ever had the pox.  To which Onesimus replied,

“Yes and No.” Not insubordinate

or anything of the kind, but playful, or perhaps

musing, as one saying to another:

“Consider how a man

can take inside all manner of disease

and still survive.”

Then, graciously, when Mather asked again:

My mother bore me in the southern wild.

She scratched my skin and I got sick, but lived

to come here, free of smallpox, as your slave.

                                    —Susan Donnelly

            I did some research on smallpox as it is no longer pertinent to my generation; I found that smallpox is caused by the virus variola and gives an infected person pus-filled blisters. Smallpox was highly contagious and spread through saliva by means of face-to-face contact, sneezing, coughing, etc. The virus was eradicated in 1979 after extreme measures to vaccinate people worldwide. I think it’s really cool that we as a human race have been able to make a disease that once killed millions of people, obsolete and saving millions of more lives as a result.

            I also researched Cotton Mather and found that he lived in the late 1600s to the early 1700s. He was involved in the Salem Witch Trials by convincing judges and juries to convict ordinary people of witchcraft by using spectral evidence. In the poem, “Inoculation” the sin that’s referred to, is Cotton Mather’s participation in the Salem Witch Trials and aid in conviction of innocent patrons. Cotton Mather studied smallpox and decided to give inoculations or vaccines to try to prevent the spread of the disease; patients were given small cuts and then the pus of active smallpox rubbed into the wounds which gave the patients a mild form of smallpox thus making them immune to getting it in the future. The first couple of patients that the inoculation was tested on were slaves.

            I like this poem because it made me do a little research into smallpox because all I had known of it previously was that it was eradicated before I was even born. This poem is very historical and almost biographical of Mather’s scientific participation into vaccinations and smallpox.

            My favorite line of this poem is the very last one where it says “…to come here, free of smallpox, as your slave,” because it’s really contrasting in the slave’s view of freedom. He accepts himself as being a slave but says he’s free of smallpox, which I find interesting because smallpox or any disease is imprisoning because it leaves one weak and incapable; Onesimus is helping Mather find a solution to the smallpox epidemic which by no means leaves him free of smallpox.

            The relationship between Mather and Onesimus was intriguing to me because they aren’t equals but there also doesn’t seem to be a clear cut division between the two. They seem to have mutual respect for each other, evident in the line of the first stanza, “Not insubordinate or anything of the kind, but playful, or perhaps musing….” To me the relationship and the conversation between the two is of not of a master and a slave but rather of colleagues, noting observations and bouncing ideas off one another in hopes to find a solution.