Benjamin Franklin\

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The names Benjamin Franklin and Jenny McCarthy don’t usually squeeze into the same sentence, but they did both make a similar stand 290 years apart: They were anti-Vaxxers.

We know well of the blonde celebrity’s inane crusade linking vaccinations and autism, but America’s key-and-kite man similarly stood strong against smallpox inoculations in the early 1700s. Just as confounding was that the witch-burning enabler Cotton Mather was on the right side, spearheading the successful experiment which provoked violent dissent. The caveat is that Franklin was a mere 16 at the time, though it does remind that we all need to constantly question our beliefs despite our intellects or qualifications or allegiances.

Mike Jay, a wonderful thinker (see here and here and here) has written about this strange moment in history in a WSJ book review of Stephen Coss’ The Fever of 1721, which looks at how this roiling controversy anticipated aspects of the American Revolution. An excerpt:

Inoculation was commonplace across swaths of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, Mr. Coss explains, but this inclined the doctors of Enlightenment-era Europe to regard it as a primitive superstition. Such was the view of William Douglass, the only man in Boston with the letters “M.D.” after his name, who was convinced that “infusing such malignant filth” in a healthy subject was lethal folly. The only person Mather could persuade to perform the operation was a surgeon, Zabdiel Boylston, whose frontier upbringing made him sympathetic to native medicine and who was already pockmarked from a near-fatal case of the disease.

“Given that attempting inoculation constituted an almost complete leap of faith for Boylston,” Mr. Coss writes, “he spent surprisingly little time agonizing over it.” He knew personally just how savage the toll could be. On June 26, 1721, just as the epidemic began to rage in earnest, Boyston filled a quill with the fluid from an infected blister and scratched it into the skin of two family slaves and his own young son.

News of the experiment was greeted with public fury and terror that it would spread the contagion. A town-hall meeting was convened, at Dr. Douglass’s instigation, at which inoculation was condemned and banned. Mather’s house was firebombed with an incendiary device to which a note was attached: “I will inoculate you with this.”

The crisis was the making of James and Benjamin Franklin’s New-England Courant, which stoked the controversy with denunciations of Mather that drew parallels between his “infatuation” with inoculation and his onetime obsession with witchcraft. But as the death toll mounted, the ban on inoculation collapsed under the weight of public demand.

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In 1752, according to Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania newspaper, a woman wed while naked, and though the details make the whole thing sound like an extended New Jersey joke, it apparently occurred. The topic was dear to the Founding Father’s heart since he was a devout nudist himself, given to a half hour of clothesless writing or reading each morning. I also recall reading (I believe in one version of The Book of Lists) that he participated in orgies in which the men dressed as priests and the women nuns. I can neither confirm nor deny such a thing. The following article from the July 7, 1934 Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalls the naughty nuptials. 

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Even though he was reputed to really like orgies, Benjamin Franklin was careful about his body when it came to food and drink, experimenting with vegetarianism and preaching temperance. Franklin’s disregard for alcohol made him an oddball in an age when most folks were continually soused. An excerpt from Joyce Chaplin’s The First Scientific American:

“Fat though he grew, the adult Franklin’s much-noted coolness and detachment may have been the result, at least in part, of his measured consumption of alcohol. His sobriety was striking in an age when people drank steadily–to consume calories, to keep warm, and to avoid tainted water. Tipsiness was so common that it went unnoticed, even in small children, pious clerics, and pregnant women. We might call them drunk; but drunkenness at the time meant inability to stand.”

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The stuff Franklin invented–in addition to helping invent our country–is just wild. His most famous work with electricity and bifocals are obviously great. But you know when you go into a grocery store and you use that grabby thing to get stuff down from a tall shelf? That was Franklin. He called it the “Long Arm.” An excerpt about the gizmo from the “Description of an Instrument for Taking Down Books from Tall Shelves” section of The Autobiography of Ben Franklin:

longhand22“Old men find it inconvenient to mount a ladder or steps for that purpose, their heads sometimes being subject to giddiness, and their activities, with the steadiness of their joints, being abated by age; besides the trouble of removing the steps every time  a book is wanted from a different part of their library.

For the remedy, I have lately made the following simple machine, which I call Long Arm.

The Arm is a stick of pine, an inch square and eight feet long, the Thumb and Finger, are two pieces of ash lath, an inch and half wide, and a quarter of an inch thick…To use this instrument, put one hand into the loop, and draw the sinew straight down the side of the arm; then enter the end of the finger between the book and the book you would take down…All new tools require some practice before we can become expert in the use of them. This requires very little.”

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