that's largely the work of cotton mather. he's 29 at this point come a shining light of the new england ministry. he descends from a very illustrious father, he seems to write a book every time he breathes. he's a person to whom the authorities would regularly turn for help in figuring out how to prosecute this, how to think about witchcraft, members of the court are sometimes mystified by the procedures and you will see them turn to cotton mather to ask them -- ask him to help them figure out what the proper diagnostic is and what has been done in the past. if you look at what cotton mather responds to those men, he never writes a statement that doesn't have the word nevertheless in it. on one hand this come on the other and that, he's really invested in the prosecution. for his own reasons. i say that because at the end of the epidemic, after everyone has realized this has gone too far, that somehow justice has not been served, cotton mather will privately be writing he has no regrets about what happened to those 40 women,

i heard about it from my slave name on this thomas and cotton mather told the story at some point after being given an islamist as a as a slave, as a gift from his congregation down there in boston. what a gift to the human, mather asked, only imus if he had ever had smallpox before, and omniscience was must have been very clever and innocent. i said. well, yes and no, and then describes the experience. right. he had had smallpox via inoculation, and he said it was an unknown procedure for where he came from. mather tried to get others in boston. he prints it in the newspapers, tries to get others in boston to use inoculation during an outbreak of smallpox. he only manages to convince one doctor in boston to do it. doctors abdul boylston. boylston inoculates first members of his family, then then some 200 people. and in the aftermath, it turns out that the inoculated patients fared much better than those who had the disease. naturally. now, this was controversial. there are debates and heated arguments, even a bomb thrown into cotton mather's window. but over time, during subsequent out