6 fatalities). Among them was Cotton Mather's son Samuel, whose chambermaid contracted smallpox at Harvard. On the 25 November 1721, Boylston inoculated 15 individuals at Harvard: thirteen students, professor Edward Wiglesworth, and tutor William Welsted. They all survived, leaving the university's student body and faculty fascinated by the procedure. Cotton Mather writes in a letter detailing Dr. Boylston's work in Boston: "The experiment has now been made on several hundreds of persons, upon both male and female, upon both old and young, upon both strong and weak, upon both white and black." Boylston was unable to continue his inoculation campaign beyond November due to opposition from Boston's Selectmen restricting him, as well as occasional violence from the public. But a tutor at Harvard inspired by his research, Thomas Robie, continued vaccinating patients at Spectacle Island. One of his patients was another tutor, Nicholas Sevier, who returned to Harvard sixteen days after he was inoculated to report on the success of his procedure. Harvard's academic community became more accepting of inoculation after the successful experiments of Boylston and Nicholas Sevier. Inoculation controversy and violence Cotton Mather believed inoculation was a divine gift to protect people from smallpox and Boylston felt duty-bound as a physician to protect his children and others from smallpox. Many contemporary Bostonians, however, were terrified of smallpox spreading from inoculated patients and outraged at the idea of deliberately infecting people. Inoculation also evoked anger from dubious physicians. One such physician, William Douglass, was a vehement inoculation opponent who published anti-inoculation pamphlets in response to Mather's experiment. One pamphlet published in The New England Courant read "Some have been carrying about instruments of inoculation, and bottles of poisonous humor, to infect all who were willing to submit to it. Can any man infect a family in the morning, and pray to God in the evening that the distemper will not spread?" Douglass believed only accredited medical professionals like himself should conduct such dangerous procedures, while he personally opposed inoculation. Boylston was ridiculed and satirized in the newspapers, portrayed as a quack by Douglass and other physicians. Variolation still did present a risk of death for 2% of those having the procedure. This was fertile ground for criticism. Furious rumors swirled around inoculation as The New England Courant published Douglass and Dalhonde's sensationalist articles against inoculation. One article by Douglass darkly joked about using inoculations against surrounding Native American communities.