Onesimus, an African-born slave born in the late 1600s, was enslaved and, in 1706, given to Cotton Mather, a New England Puritan minister, who was instrumental in the Salem Witch trials and prosecuting pirates. His real name is not known and Mather was the one who named him Onesimus, after a 1st century slave mentioned in the Bible. The name means "useful, helpful, or profitable".
Around 1716, Onesimus told Mather of an inoculation performed on him and others in Africa that protected him from smallpox, where a thorn is inserted into a pus-filled spore of an infected person and injected into the skin of a healthy person, making them immune to the disease.
When smallpox broke out in Boston in 1721, Mather promoted the inoculation method as protection, citing Onesimus as the source. Of course, Bostonians were having none of the African medicine, butr a physician Zabdiel Boylston performed the method on his 6-year-old son and two slaves. Two hundred eighty people were inoculated in 1721-1722. Only 6 of them died, a rate of 2.2%, compared to 14.3% of people who were not inoculated.
In 2016, Onesimus was declared one of the "Best Bostonians of All Time".
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