Inoculation

The poem Inoculation was very interesting to me for some reason… it was very powerful. The word inoculation stood out to me so I looked it up and it means vaccine, which completely makes sense with the whole small pox thing. When I looked up inoculation there also was information about Boston and how back in the day with the vaccine for smallpox they kept records of who had had the vaccine and who had not. It was a huge thing in Boston at the time. When Mather asks Onesimus if he had ever had the pox Onesimus’ response is “My mother bore me in the southern wild. She scratched my skin and I got sick, but lived to come here, free of smallpox, as your slave.” To me his response ultimately means he survived one disease just to be hit by another, but not one that he has, but the mental disease that the whites have that makes them believe it is okay to have slaves. Mather was so concerned with finding a cure for small pox, but maybe he should have also looked at the disease that he has himself. “Consider how a man can take inside all manner of disease and still survive.” I feel like this refers to Mather taking in the disease of not understanding the wrong with slavery; Mather was fighting to cure a disease (smallpox) while all along he had a disease of his own with slavery. At the end, of the day I find it sad and exactly true that the slave owners did have a disease because obviously something is wrong when slavery is normal. The last lines just really leave a sad lasting impression when Onesimus talks about he survived smallpox only to become a slave… all I can imagine is what is better… living or dying in that kind of a situation?