Dr. Boylston became notorious and the colonial government remained deeply skeptical of his and Mather's experiment. The Boston City Council summoned him in early August to explain his procedures, and the Council condemned inoculation and ordered him to desist immediately. Despite the opposition, Boylston garnered support of local learned men like Cotton's father Increase Mather and four other "inoculation ministers" by the names of Benjamin Coleman, Thomas Prince, John Webb, and William Cooper. Inoculations resumed two days later. Dr. Boylston was assaulted in the streets for this and eventually threatened to the point he secretly hid in his house for two weeks. Cotton Mather was also terrorized by an angry public as rumors spread wildly about inoculations. Mobs eventually began forcing the variolated into isolation at Spectacle Island's quarantine house. Cotton Mather inoculated his nephew, Reverend Walter, and offered to let him stay at Mather's home while he recovered from smallpox, but a fearful mob became aware and attacked and threw a crude bomb directly into the room where Walter was staying. The device failed to explode, but a note tied to it read "Cotton Mather, I was once of your meeting, but the cursed lye you told of - you know who, made me leave you, you dog, and damn you, I will inoculate you with this, with a pox on you!" A prominent member of Boston's clergy to oppose inoculation was John Williams. Williams criticized variolation as sinful and "not in the Rules of Natural Physick." Cotton Mather countered that to reject inoculation would be a violation of the Bible's 6th Commandment since many people would die. Social and scientific impact The outbreak was the first time in American medicine where the press was used to inform (or alarm) the general public about a health crisis. The New England Courant, under the leadership of its new editor 16 year-old Benjamin Franklin, continued to publish satirical articles about the Mather and inoculation in the months following the epidemic. Boylston wrote an account of his experiences with inoculation in An Historical Account of the Small Pox Inoculated in New England. Most of Boston's clergy seemed to have supported inoculation, and some wrote an op-ed opposing Williams and Douglass's criticism: "tho [Dr. Boylston] has not had... an Academic Education, and congruently not the Letters of some Physicians in town, yet he ought by no means be called Illiterate, Ignorant, etc. Would