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When Boston Clergyman Cotton Mather learned of the new technique, he tried to persuade local doctors to inoculate as many citizens as possible during the epidemic of 1721. But the city's leading physician called inoculation an "infatuation" and denounced as heathen any treatment adapted from "the Musselmen and faithful people of the prophet Mahomet." Only Mather's friend Dr. Zabdiel Boylston agreed to try the new tactic. Complained Mather: "Not only the physician who began the experiment but I also am the object of the [people's] fury." One opponent of inoculation threw a bomb through Mather's window. Another tried to set Dr. Boylston's house afire. In the course of the epidemic more than 5,000 people caught the disease and 844 of them died, whereas there were only six deaths among the 286 who had been inoculated. That was the first large-scale proof that inoculation was effective. As the treatment gained adherents, it became almost a fad. Fashionable ladies in Paris wore bonnets with spotted ribbons (to simulate the pox). Empress Catherine of Russia summoned an English doctor to inoculate her and her courtiers (for which she paid him a fee of £10,000 plus £2,000 for expenses, an annuity of £500 for life, and a barony in the Russian empire). Despite these successes, critics kept insisting that inoculation spread the disease. As a result, the practice was banned at one tune or another in almost all the colonies. The New York law of 1747, for example, "strictly prohibits and forbids all [doctors] to inoculate for the small pox any person or persons ... on pain of being prosecuted to the utmost rigour of the law."
As the troop movements have spread the disease, demands for inoculation, legal or not, have increased. Says Hannah Winthrop, wife of Natural Philosophy Professor John Winthrop of Harvard: "The reigning subject is the small pox. Men, women and children eagerly crowding to inoculate is I think as modish as running away from the troops of a barbarous George was last year."
Even when successful, inoculation can be an extremely unpleasant experience. One of Dr. Boylston's grandnephews, now a member of the Continental Congress, decided to have his wife and four children inoculated. They all confined themselves in a friend's house in Boston, along with a cow to provide milk. Two of the children soon developed eye inflammations, and one of them became covered with what her mother described as "above a thousand pussels as large as a great green pea... She can neither walk, sit, stand or lay with any comfort." The mother also reported that all the children "puke every morning but after are comfortable." The fourth child had to be inoculated three times before the treatment brought out pustules, and then he was delirious for two days. All in all, the family had to stay confined for seven weeks and to pay 18 shillings per person per week, as well as one guinea per inoculation.