“[M]ost plain, rational, and easie”: Rhetorical Disavowal in Early Eighteenth-Century Inoculation Pamphlets

Abstract

In the second decade of the eighteenth century, English physicians mobilized a rapidly expanding print culture to launch themselves into the thick of public debate with sharply worded pamphlets defending and denouncing the newly introduced practice of inoculation (the less effective forerunner of vaccination). This paper explores the new kind of medical rhetoric that flourished in the midst of this controversy, one that downplays medical authority and even disavows its own rhetorical character, much like the vaccination debates of today.

Notes

¹ I am indebted to RR reviewers Barbara Heifferon and Michael Zerbe for their invaluable feedback throughout the review process. I offer my appreciation as well to the current editor of RR and the late founding editor, Theresa Enos.

² See: Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler et al. “Effective Messages in Vaccine Promotion: A Randomized Trial.” Pediatrics 133.4 (2014): 2835-42.

³ I should note here that although the debate was highly transatlantic in nature (Dr. Arbuthnot’s “Vindication” appends a letter from Cotton Mather in Boston, while Wagstaffe similarly draws upon the letters of his American counterpart, William Douglass, in bolstering his anti-inoculation stance), my concern in this article is chiefly with the British debate sparked by the experiment on Newgate prisoners in 1721.

⁴ As Barbara Heifferon insists, there is a palpable need to bring “historical rhetoric of the early vaccination project into the mix to instruct us further” (76).

⁵ Inoculators’ tendency to dismiss their opponents’ arguments as superficially rhetorical typifies that of any embattled party engaged in heated verbal exchanges. Rhetoric in this context aligns with the Platonic view of “language that is infected by partisan agendas and desires, and therefore colors and distorts the facts which it purports to reflect” (Fish 205).

⁶ See: Timonius, Emanuel. “Letter from Emauel Timonius from Constantinople.” Philosophical Transactions 29 (1713): 72-76.

⁷ Adrian Wilson notes that “[i]noculation was promoted by the Royal Society through the 1720s, and gradually came to prevail against a stubborn resistance mounted by various critics” (25).

⁸ As Furdell observes: “[T]he worlds of medicine and print collided in early modern England” (193).

⁹ Guerrini notes that the “pamphlets varied widely in length and format . . . yet stylistically, controversial pamphlets, as opposed to the merely informational, were remarkably similar: they were rhetorical in the sense of aiming at persuasion rather than proof” (229-33).

¹⁰ Or, for that matter with another disease.

¹¹ Indeed, Maitland’s reply to Wagstaffe confesses his “surprise” that in the process of inoculating the child, Mary Batt, the virus subsequently spread to several of the household servants, one of whom died as a result of the infection.

¹² There was also no guarantee that inoculation would transmit a non-confluent or non-lethal strain of the virus to a patient.

¹³ Genevieve Miller’s footnote records that “little is known about Maitland” beyond the basic details of his professional practice (71).

¹⁴ As Andrea Rusnock observes, “Arbuthnot’s contribution to the inoculation debates was made anonymously and employed satire as well as mathematics to undermine opponents of inoculation” (47). For an explanation for the reason of Arbuthnot’s anonymity, please see Larry Stewart’s 1985 article, “The Edge of Utility.”

¹⁵ Heifferon notes that “The irony of today’s situation . . . is that we have conflated the ‘Other’ with the disease carrier whereas the ‘Other’ was previously conflated with the authors of the inoculation practice itself” (88).

¹⁶ There was no consensus on the origin of smallpox, however, Wagstaffe notes that “Timonius” claimed it “came from Asia, [while Pylarinus insisted it came] from Greece.”

¹⁷ See, for instance, Applebee’s Orig. Weekly Journal June 17, p. 2087 (1721).

¹⁸ As opposed, one infers, to other practices of simply exposing one’s children to smallpox deliberately, as was customary in rural areas of England.

¹⁹ According to Barbara Heifferon, this has a lot to do with the emergence of a “Side Effects Trope” in present-day anti-vaccination rhetoric, that “skew[s] our medical information” and which does not inform but rather terrorizes in its own way” (81).

²⁰ Maitland further comments, “Again, to avoid the Infection, what Un｜easiness and Disquiet of Mind, what Fears and Apprehensions do not even grown People labour under, especially the more delicate and tender? Don’t they renounce all Commerce with their best Friends and dearest Relations?” (14).

²¹ David Shuttleton refers to the “traditional models which considered smallpox to be the purging of the maternal legacy of an innate germ of corruption” (206).

²² Wayne Wild argues that eighteenth-century patients often “challenged their physicians with alternative and often antagonistic medical rhetorics; they probed the knowledge and competence of their doctors by engaging them in current medical jargon, thereby declaring their determination to play a role in therapeutic decisions” (8).

²³ Specifically, those of Arbuthnot and Maitland.

²⁴ Brian Vickers ventures one step further in his observation in regard to the “new scientists” of the eighteenth century that is equally applicable to inoculators’ stance on rhetoric: “[T]he [new scientists] were not against language or rhetoric, or the imagination. They were against their opponents’ misuse of them—or, perhaps mere simply, they were against their opponents” (68).

²⁵ George Grierson’s Dublin press published this letter as part of a collection of pro-inoculation pamphlets in 1722.

²⁶ See Burke, Permanence and Change (240) and Language as Symbolic Action (44-52). As Foss, Foss, and Trapp explain, “[A] person trained in medicine . . . will see life from a medical point of view or through a terministic screen of medicine. Such terminologies . . . by directing the attention differently, lead to different kinds and qualities of observations” (176).

²⁷ I am indebted to a peer reviewer for this point.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kelly McGuire

Kelly McGuire is an Associate Professor of English at Trent University in Canada, where she specializes in eighteenth-century literature and cultural history with an emphasis on the health humanities.