
Slavery in the Northern Colonies
Lectures in History
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Cotton Mather's Inoculation of Enslaved People
In the book of Philemon, there was an enslaved man named Onissimus who had run away from his master. He actually becomes crucial to some of Cotton Mather's lay experiments around vaccination. People were so mad about this inoculation, they thought that enslaved people were telling him he was getting it from faulty people and that these inoculations could kill them.
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