Onesimus

Onesimus was a man, likely of Akan origin in West Africa, who was enslaved and brought to Boston in 1706, where he was given to the Puritan minister Cotton Mather by Mather's congregation and renamed after a figure from the New Testament. Around 1716 Onesimus told Mather that in his own society in Africa, people protected themselves against smallpox by cutting the skin and introducing a small amount of matter from an infected person, a practice known as variolation that had been used for generations across parts of Africa and continued among enslaved communities in the Americas. When smallpox struck Boston in 1721, Mather drew on this account to promote inoculation, and physician Zabdiel Boylston carried it out on 280 people, whose death rate of about 2.2 percent was far below the roughly 14.3 percent among those who went uninoculated, despite many colonists' initial ridicule of medical knowledge credited to an enslaved African; Onesimus himself worked for wages while enslaved and sought unsuccessfully to purchase his own freedom in 1716.