In These Infectious Times: The Popular Politics of Inoculation in Revolutionary America

In the Pennsylvania Chronicle March 11, 1771, Baltimore physician Henry Stevenson advertised for “Genuine or American Inoculation,” and touted this method as superior to contemporary European methods.  Stevenson was not alone. The “American method” of inoculation was celebrated throughout the colonies as a proud testament to American ingenuity.  The discovery and implementation of smallpox inoculation from a folk practice to the medical triumph of the eighteenth century was certainly a global and trans-Atlantic process, but for Americans in the 1760s and 1770s inoculation had become an all-American cure. Together Americans created a shared history about the discovery of mankind’s greatest medical discovery.  This American innovation became politicized in the decade prior to the American Revolution.  Although they did not always agree about where and when inoculation developed, Americans had no doubt that they discovered it without the help of the British. After accusing a British inoculator of stealing this American method, one writer charged that the British “intimated that such a discovery was not likely to be made by a people rude in their manner and unskilled in their sciences.” This paper argues that Americans throughout the 18th century developed a sense of pride in American science separate from their earlier identities as Englishmen and women. In doing so, they granted scientific innovation a new radical symbolic meaning and forged an American cultural identity well before the winning of national independence.