Today in Salem: A new, smallpox-infected specter is afflicting the girls in full force. Girls in the nearby town of Andover have been seeing and hearing the pariah Martha Carrier’s specter for a month now. No one is surprised that she’s a witch. She and her family recently brought the terrifying scourge of smallpox to their town, where 13 people died, including seven members of Martha’s own family. Her children are scarred, and the Carriers have been shunned ever since. Now the Devil himself has named her the Queen of Hell, and her furious presence is being felt in earnest.
In Boston, five new prisoners are waking to the smells of dung and wet dirt. One of them, the pious Mary Esty, has been here before and is wearing heavier irons than anyone else. Of the other new prisoners, four of them have surprised and dismayed the quarrelsome (and possibly pregnant) Elizabeth Proctor, who had no idea that her 15-year-old daughter, stepson, sister, and sister-in-law had been accused and arrested.
In the corner, as always, the beggar Sarah Good curls around her baby, who’s growing thinner by the day. The baby’s weak cry sounds more like a small cat than a baby, but there’s nothing to be done, as Sarah’s breasts are slack. Her four-year-old daughter, Dorcas, leans into her, sleeping against what softness is left in her shoulders.
In Cambridge, the shipmaster is begging the jail keeper to remove the eight pounds of irons that are shackled to his wife. Last night he’d managed to have her transferred from Boston to the jail in nearby Cambridge, close to home. But the jail keeper had immediately clapped and shackled eight pounds of irons onto her legs. She’d sobbed and convulsed so severely, all night long, that the shipmaster is afraid she’ll die if she spends just one more night there (never mind chained). But the jail keeper just goes about his business, looking away, as if the shipmaster is nothing more than a fly buzzing about.
WHO was Martha Carrier?
Martha, age 39, was from Andover, Massachusetts. Before her marriage, she moved to the nearby town of Billerica, where she lived with her sister and brother-in-law. There she met Thomas Carrier, a 7’4” Welshman who was twenty years her senior. They married when she was 21, and had their first child two months later.
Her husband was rumored to be one of the “headsmen” who executed King Charles I. Were people afraid of him, an extraordinarily tall executioner? Did their obvious premarital relations make them the subject of gossip? Was Martha’s obnoxious behavior toward her neighbors overly aggressive? It’s impossible to know why, but they were asked to leave Billerica, and soon moved back to Andover to live with Martha’s parents.
At that time, the highly contagious smallpox virus regularly swept through entire communities, leaving terror and death in its wake. Two years before the Trials, it broke out in Martha’s family, and seven of them died, including her father, both of her brothers, two nephews, one sister-in-law and one brother-in-law. Not just that, but six other people from Andover died, too. From that point on, the Carriers were outcasts, believed to be the cause of the epidemic.
Martha Carrier’s name was cleared of all charges nearly twenty years after her death. In 1999, Billerica’s Board of Selectmen unanimously voted to rescind the 1676 banishment of the Carrier family, 323 years earlier.
LEARN MORE: If people were so afraid of smallpox, why were they fighting about inoculation? What role did the media play?
A disease that’s highly contagious, with a 30% fatality rate, is terrifying in any context. Imagine: In a small family of only 3 people, it’s likely that one person will die. In the average Puritan family, two or three of the children would probably die (if not their parents). Across the community, they would lose up to a third of the ministers, the farmers, the midwives, adults in every occupation. Those who survived were almost always left with scarring, sometimes severe. Some became blind.
Wouldn’t people do anything they could to reach immunity? The answer: “Yes, but.”
In colonial days, there was no ”germ theory.“ People didn’t know exactly how smallpox spread, only that it did, sometimes through the air, and sometimes through things that had been touched by sick people. Aggressive quarantines weren’t always successful, since there was a lag between when a person was infected and when they showed symptoms. And there was no such thing as a vaccine.
There was, however, “inoculation,” where a small amount of pus or a scab from someone with smallpox would be rubbed into a small incision in a healthy person’s skin. That healthy person usually became ill with a much milder case, and then became immune. These days science tells us why that’s true, but at the time the belief was based on anecdote and experiences in other countries. And while some people fully believed in the practice, others thought it just spread smallpox even more.
Cotton Mather, one of the prominent ministers involved with the Salem Witchcraft Trials, is largely credited with introducing inoculation to the colonies, and vigorously campaigned for it during a 1721 smallpox epidemic. It engendered a fierce public debate; in fact, a small bomb was hurled through Mather’s window, with the message “Cotton Mather, you dog, dam you! I’ll inoculate you with this; with a pox to you.’’ And the doctor who was administering inoculation received so many threats that he hid in his house for two weeks.
Emotions ran high on both sides of the debate, and was fueled by the media of the time. Newspaper and pamphlet articles from both sides condemned their opponents with name-calling, sarcasm, and verbal abuse. (One anti-inoculation newspaper was headed by its 16-year-old editor, Benjamin Franklin. His own son would die of smallpox 15 years later.) Both sides had merit, and both sides claimed support from God: In the short-term, inoculation did spread smallpox, since people who were inoculated came down with a mild-case of it. But in the long term it built immunity.
The proof was in the pudding, as they say. Once the outbreak was over, the death rate in the inoculated population was 2%, as compared to the 15% death rate of the non-inoculated in that specific epidemic. After that, the procedure was used for decades until the first vaccines became available.
The last major smallpox epidemic in the United States was in Boston between 1901-1903; the last outbreak was in 1949. In 1980, the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated. No cases of naturally occurring smallpox have happened since.
Notes:
1721 Boston smallpox outbreak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1721_Boston_smallpox_outbreak
History of Smallpox
https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html
Making the right decision: Benjamin Franklin’s son dies of smallpox in 1736
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2653186/
The Boston Smallpox Epidemic, 1721
http://www.researchhistory.org/2011/04/13/the-boston-smallpox-epidemic-1721/
To Inoculate or Not to Inoculate?: The Debate and the Smallpox Epidemic of Boston in 1721
https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1071&context=constructing
Tomorrow in Salem: ***Sensitive Content (infant mortality)*** The beggar Sarah Good loses her baby