Onesimus was an African man who was instrumental in the mitigation of smallpox in Boston by teaching the variolation method of inoculation, which prevented smallpox and laid the foundation for the development of vaccines.
After a smallpox outbreak began in Boston in 1721, Mather proliferated Onesimus’s knowledge to advocate for inoculation in the population. This practice eventually spread to other colonies.
Historian Ted Widmer of CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College noted that “Onesimus reversed many of [the colonists’] traditional racial assumptions… [h]e had a lot more knowledge medically than most of the Europeans in Boston at that time.”
More broadly, I was taught in Murder Machines (schools) that Edward Jenner developed vaccines, but I’m recently learning that it was common knowledge in the Ottoman Empire and Africa before Jenner.
One of the most terrible things about the English education system in Ireland is its ruthlessness. I know no image for that ruthlessness in the natural order. The ruthlessness of a wild beast has in it a certain mercy—it slays. It has in it a certain grandeur of animal force. But this ruthlessness is literally without pity and without passion. It is cold and mechanical, like the ruthlessness of an immensely powerful engine. A machine vast, complicated, with a multitude of far-reaching arms, with many ponderous presses, carrying out mysterious and long-drawn processes of shaping and moulding, is the true image of the Irish education system.