Inoculation In Boston 1722 Analysis

Inoculation In Boston: A Disqualified Innovation In 1979, the World Health Organization announced the eradication of smallpox in the world. The use of vaccines has drastically improved people's health around the world. Vaccination evolved from inoculation, an old medical practice dating back to China in the fifteenth century. Interestingly, although people in the past did not fully understand viruses, inoculation utilizes the same principle as vaccination by pre-exposing a healthy individual to small amounts of viruses to allow the body to naturally gain immunity to the viruses. One may ask, if people in the past practiced inoculation, why did diseases, such as smallpox, still spread widely around the world and caused thousands of deaths? First, in his essay "The Inoculation Controversy in Boston: 1721-1722," John B. Blake's discusses how Bolyston, a physician, came to adopt inoculation and how people reacted to the adoption. Second, Everett M. Rogers’explains the three properties of innovation in his
Even though inoculation prevented the three subjects from getting smallpox, the people still rejected small pox. Blake wrote, “…within four days after Bylston’s first experiment it raised an horrid Clamour…” First, the test does not show a comparison between successful and failed inoculation; therefore, the people cannot estimate the risk of inoculation. Second, if inoculation failed, the patient would be infected with smallpox. Since there is no cure to smallpox, the failure of inoculation meant death of an originally healthy individual. In other words, Bolyston could not fully test inoculation on patients because if it fails, he could not repeat the experiment nor could he gain knowledge from the failure. Although we may argue that Boylston’s tests results proves the effectiveness of inoculation, the people rejected inoculation because it was not