Episode Details

In this episode, we explore massachusetts as the american beta test. So in 1690, there was this group of just incredibly desperate colonists in New England. And they made this financial gamble that by all accounts should have completely destroyed them. Oh, absolutely. It was a completely reckless move. Right. Because they had just sent this huge military expedition up to conquer Quebec. And, well, the soldiers came back entirely defeated. And obviously, they were demanding their pay. Yeah, you really don't want a bunch of armed, angry, unpaid soldiers hanging around your colony. No, definitely not. But the problem was the colonial government's vault was just just completely empty. I mean, they had no gold, they had no silver, nothing. Zero hard currency. Exactly. So they did something that was, at the time, totally unprecedented. They decided to just literally print money out of thin air. Just made it up. Yeah. They issued these paper bonds backed by, well, absolutely smallpox epidemic in 1721. Yeah, the 1721 smallpox outbreak is really defining moment for public health in America. It forced this incredibly bitter debate about medical science. And this is where the source material presents a pretty massive contradiction, I think, because, you know, for you listening, we generally hold this popular image of the New England Puritans as these very strict anti -science religious zealots. in witch trials, basically. Exactly. Yet during this epidemic, it was a prominent Puritan minister, a guy named Cotton Mather, who aggressively championed the cutting edge science of smallpox inoculation. He was way ahead of his time on that. He was begging the public to adopt it. Meanwhile, the actual medical doctors in Boston, like this guy named William Douglas, violently opposed it. I am having a really hard time reconciling this. Why is the Puritan minister the one pushing the medical frontier? It