Polly Dogood

The Framers Would Have Read the Science

Wherein the Author confesses that her Family once set Type for the wrong Side of a Medical Question, observes that the Founders expected to be improved upon, and makes a modest Offer of eighteenth-century Physick to those who would govern by eighteenth-century Lights.

To the Readers of this Publick Blog,

I must begin with a Confession, because the Subject requires it.

In the Summer of 1721 the Smallpox came to Boston. The Reverend Cotton Mather had learned, from Onesimus, a Man he held in Bondage, of an African Practice called Inoculation: a little of the Pox given on purpose, so that a Person might take it mildly and live. Mather and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston urged it upon the Town, and the Town was furious with them for it. Somebody threw a lit Bomb through Mather's Window. It did not go off.

And the loudest Newspaper against Inoculation was the New-England Courant, printed by James Franklin, with his fifteen-Year-old Brother Benjamin setting the Type. It was the same Paper in which my Great-great-Grandmother Silence Dogood published her Letters the following Spring. My Family, in short, was on the wrong Side.

The Numbers, when they came in, were not close. Of those who caught the Smallpox the common Way, about one in seven died. Of those inoculated, about two in a hundred.

Grandpapa learned. He became a great Champion of Inoculation, and then, in 1736, he lost his own Son Francis to the Smallpox, a fine Boy of four, never inoculated. He wrote of it in his Autobiography, and I have never been able to read it dry-eyed: "I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen."

The safer should be chosen. I commend that Sentence to the present Secretary of Health, and to every Parent in the Republic.

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Men of the Enlightenment

That is the Point of my Confession. The Founders were not Men who thought they had already learned everything. They were Men who knew they had been wrong, and expected to be wrong again, and built for it.

Grandpapa proposed a Society "for Promoting Useful Knowledge," helped found a Library and an Academy, and flew a Kite into a Thunderstorm to find out what Lightning was. In 1777, with the Smallpox ravaging his Army, General Washington overruled his own Doctors' Doubts and ordered his Soldiers inoculated, at a Time when it was still widely feared and in some Places forbidden. Mr. Jefferson founded a University and spent his Retirement corresponding about Fossils, Vaccines and the Weather.

And they wrote Article Five, so the Constitution could be mended. General Washington explained why to his Nephew Bushrod in November 1787: "The warmest friends to and the best supporters of the Constitution, do not contend that it is free from imperfections," and the People, "as they will have the aid of experience on their side," might amend it "with as much propriety" as the Framers themselves, "for I do not conceive that we are more inspired, have more wisdem, or possess more virtue than those who will come after us." (The Spelling of Wisdom is his own; the Commas are mine. I leave it, as a Proof that even the Father of his Country was not perfect.)

Mr. Jefferson said it more sharply in 1816. "Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, & deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched." But "laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind," and "we might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilised society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

In Fairness to Mr. Jefferson, he also wrote that he was "certainly not an advocate for frequent & untried changes." He did not want a new Coat every Week. He only objected to being buried in the one he wore at twelve.

The Coat of 1328

I mention all this because our present Supreme Court has taken a great Fancy to History.

In 2022, in a Case about Pistols, it ruled that a Law must be "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation," and went looking for that Tradition in Sources reaching back to the late thirteenth Century, including an English Statute of 1328. The Court has since softened the Test somewhat. But I note that 1328 is a good deal older than the Coat Mr. Jefferson objected to. It is older than the Tailor.

The same Year, in overturning Roe, the Court asked whether a Right was "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition," and leaned again and again upon the Authority of Sir Matthew Hale, a great English Judge of the seventeenth Century, cited more than a dozen Times. I have looked into Sir Matthew. In March of 1662 he presided over the Trial of two elderly Widows at Bury St Edmunds, Rose Cullender and Amy Duny, accused of bewitching Children. Upon his Instructions the Jury convicted them, and they were hanged. Thirty Years later the Judges at Salem, Cotton Mather tells us, "much considered" Sir Matthew's Precedent.

I do not say a Man who tried Witches can have been right about nothing. I say only that the Founders would have checked his Science.

A modest Offer of Physick

Still, if we are to govern by the Lights of the eighteenth Century, I think we ought to be consistent, and I have a Proposal.

Let those who would hold our Rights to the Practice of 1791, or of 1662, or of 1328, take their Medicine by the same Calendar. Let them be bled for every Fever, as the learned Physicians of my Day did, with great Confidence. Let them be purged with Mercury, as Dr. Benjamin Rush, Signer of the Declaration, purged Philadelphia in the Yellow Fever of 1793; his Pills were so violent they were known as Rush's Thunderbolts, and Lewis and Clark carried them across the Continent. And should any of them fall into the Potomac, let them be revived as the Humane Society of London revived the half-drowned along the Thames in the 1780s: with a Bellows, and Tobacco Smoke, applied from the other End.

I volunteer the Justices first. It seems only fair that the Men who find the Past so wise should have the first Benefit of its Physick.

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Here is the plainer Version.

The Founders were the Woke of their Age: Men who had awakened to Reason, to Evidence and to the Rights of Man, and who meant the Country to keep learning after they were gone. They would have read the Science on Vaccines, as Washington did with his Army. They would have read the Science on the Climate, as Mr. Jefferson kept his Weather Diaries. They would not have frozen your Rights in the Year they happened to die, any more than they would have frozen Medicine at Leeches.

Grandpapa's Family was wrong once, and he spent his Life making up for it. The safer should be chosen. On the 3rd of November, choose a Congress that reads.

P.S. General Washington himself, at the End, asked to be bled, and his Physicians, the best and most trusted in the Country, drew a great Part of the Blood he had in a single Day. They did their Best by the Lights they had. That is the whole Argument for better Lights.