Benjamin Franklin

(upbeat music) Smallpox was really the scourge of the 18th century. It's an awful, awful disease that disfigured a person, with this kind of devastating specter that entered communities. You sickened and died very quickly. There was no cure for it. It was, could reach epidemic. It was very contagious. People died in the hundreds. And Franklin was always involved with this issue throughout his life for some tragic reasons. It began when he was a boy in Boston. Boston had a strong purine influence, very religious. In those days, many religious figures also dabbled in science. Cotton Mather was the leading cleric in the town. Mather's own family had been devastated by both Measles and sSmallpox. So when a Smallpox epidemic came to Boston in the early 1720s, a slave of Mather's, an African slave, told him that in Africa, there was something called inoculation. Which basically meant giving a small amount of the illness, injecting it in a person in the hope that that would then deter a full onslaught of the disease. Now, of course, to many people, this was a crazy idea. Why would you introduce this body of disease into a healthy body? But Cotton Mather was interested in it and he had read about it and he thought, I'm gonna try it. The epidemic spread, people began dropping like flies and Cotton Mather started inoculating people. In the end of course, many fewer people percentage wise who had been inoculated perished from the disease. But Benjamin Franklin went on to have a tragic association with it. years later, when a Smallpox epidemic came to Philadelphia. (slow bright music) At the time Franky was a child, the concept of inoculation, had just been promulgated. And Franklin was one of the few people in the colonies who was a hundred percent behind inoculation. He believed in it. Benjamin Franklin was an early proponent of inoculation. He knew that it worked, but Franky was often sick as a young child and wasn't inoculated. Tragically, there was a Smallpox outbreak in Philadelphia when Franky was four years old. And it was thought that because he had a very bad cold at the time, they should hold off until he recovered enough to be able to withstand the assault on a system that inoculation would in provide. He never was inoculated. He contracted Smallpox and he died. Franklin never forgave himself For Deborah and Benjamin Franklin, the huge tragedy of their lives was the death of Franky. This was a devastating blow to Debbie and Benjamin Franklin himself. Never could think about Franky, without feeling a certain wistfulness. That moments in Franklin's, Benjamin Franklin's subsequent life, when he would see young boys playing, who would, who were the age that Franky would've been, he always thought what a promising young boy he had been and what a loss he had suffered. Franklin had to explain publicly that he had failed to have the child inoculated against Smallpox and that giving the inoculation would've really compromised his health. This must have hurt incredibly to have to talk about the death of your child in your own newspaper This beautiful son named Franky, we have a portrait of him that Franklin commissioned and it really shapes Franklin for the rest of his life. That beautiful little son that he lost. There is a stereotype that people in the past couldn't possibly really have cared about their children because the death rate was higher. And that is just completely bogus. Of course they did. Of course they did. We know that people felt very deeply when children died and memorialized them. Franky was very much a very wanted child. They had to pick a terrible option and then regret that for the rest of their lives. Franklin did his part eventually to try to convince people to take it seriously and inoculate. He always wrote very passionately about the need for parents to inoculate their children. -

Narrator

Surely parents will no longer refuse to accept and thankfully use a discovery God in his mercy has been pleased to bless mankind with. Whereby some check may now be put to the ravages that cruel disease has been accustomed to make. For the loss of one in 10, thereby, is not merely the loss of so many persons, but the accumulated loss of all the children and children's children the deceased might have had multiplied by successive generations, Benjamin Franklin.