Illustrious Unknowns

摘要

Men and women of genius, they had an impact on their era. Their scientific discoveries were brilliant, but we don't know their names. Only rarely have slaves or children of slaves received recognition. Some of them served modern science with traditional know-how. the skin, put in one drop...nobody else will get sick," said Onesimus, in 1721, when a smallpox epidemic was raging in the thirteen British colonies that would become the United States. He showed his own scar as evidence. Cotton Mather, the Puritan pastor in Boston, found it hard to believe, but he finally published the "discovery" in a text - Some Account of What Is Said of Inoculating or Transplanting the Small Pox - and found himself the laughing stock of the era's medical profession, with the exception of Zabdiel Boylston.