Onesimus

Onesimus (late 1600s–1700s

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.

Recognition for Onesimus's contributions to medical science came in 2016, when the Boston magazine declared him among the 100 Best Bostonians of All Time.

Mather referred to the ethnicity of Onesimus as "Guaramantee", which may refer to the Coromantee (also known as Akan people of modern Ghana).

Mather saw Onesimus as highly intelligent and educated him in reading and writing with the Mather family (for context, according to biographer Kathryn Koo, at that time, literacy was primarily associated with religious instruction, and writing as means of note-taking and conducting business).

Inoculation advocacy and controversy

In 1716 or shortly before,

Mather followed Onesimus's medicinal advice because, as Margot Minardi writes, "inferiority had not yet been indelibly written onto the bodies of Africans."

Nonetheless, a physician, Zabdiel Boylston, carried out the method Onesimus had described, which involved sticking a needle into a pustule from an infected person's body and scraping the infected needle across a healthy person's skin.