Onesimus: the African who taught Boston how to fight smallpox
Enslaved in Massachusetts, he described an inoculation long practised in Africa. In the 1721 epidemic it cut the death rate sharply.
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Boston — Long before vaccines had that name, the knowledge that helped lead to them was carried across the Atlantic by a man who had been enslaved. He was known as Onesimus, a name imposed on him, and his birth name and birthplace are not known with certainty. He was likely Akan, from what is now Ghana.
A cut and a drop
He was first documented in the colonies in 1706, when a Boston congregation gave him to the Puritan minister Cotton Mather. In 1716 or shortly before, he told Mather how he and others in his society had been protected: take matter from a smallpox sore, cut the skin and put in a drop. The method was long practised among people in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Boston test
When smallpox struck Boston in 1721, Mather used this knowledge to press for inoculation. A physician, Zabdiel Boylston, carried it out. Of 280 people inoculated during the epidemic, six died, about 2.2%. Among 5,889 people who caught the disease without inoculation, 844 died, about 14.3%. The practice spread to other colonies and laid the foundation for vaccines.
Recognition came late
Boylston's tomb wrongly names him as the first to bring inoculation to America. Onesimus had bought a measure of freedom by then, raising funds to buy another enslaved man to take his place, though with conditions attached. In 2016, Boston magazine named him among the 100 best Bostonians of all time. Historian Ted Widmer noted that he knew far more about medicine than most Europeans in the town.
Background: Wikipedia).
