The Courant was ordered in early October by the town council to publish a house-by-house count on those affected so far by smallpox: 2,757 cases, 1,499 recoveries and 203 deaths were counted. The outbreak peaked in October when 411 people died in that month alone. Judge Samuel Sewall recorded in his diary the deaths of his friends and neighbors like one Madam Checkly on 18 October. Thanksgiving sermons were also affected by the outbreak, and on 26 October most congregations held a single sermon at 11 in the morning out of fear of smallpox spreading during gatherings. The next day Judge Sewell attended the funeral of local child Edward Rawson before attending the burial of one of Sewell's own tenants, while a local college student and "many others" were buried that Friday night. 8% of Boston's population would die during the epidemic, and hundreds of other Bostonians would recover with severe scarring or disabilities. Public inoculation campaign Cotton Mather sent letters to Boston's 14 other physicians regarding the outbreak imploring them to wage a medical campaign against smallpox by inoculating their own patients or volunteers. Mather had been interested in inoculation since 1715 when a slave named Onesimus informed Mather about a procedure in Africa which made him immune to smallpox for life. The scars were commonly found on enslaved people kidnapped from Africa, and valued by slave traders. Mather read physician Emmanuel Timoni's description of a similar procedure witnessed while serving Great Britain's ambassador in Turkey. The procedure Timoni called inoculation involved drying pus from a smallpox patient and rubbing or scraping it into a healthy person's skin, giving them a mild case of pox that conferred lifetime immunity. Mather wanted to prove variolation was a relatively very safe and effective procedure to protect people against smallpox. Most physicians, however, feared the possibility of smallpox fatally spreading and the social implications of deliberately infecting others. Zabdiel Boylston of Harvard University was the only doctor who positively responded to Mather, beginning America's first public campaign of inoculation. On 26 June 1721, Boylston first inoculated his six-year-old son Thomas, and then his 36-year-old slave and the slave's two-year-old son. To the doctor's relief, all survived relatively mild cases of smallpox without disability or disfigurement. Boylston then felt confident enough about the procedure's safety, and over a period of five months during the outbreak inoculated 247 people in and around Boston (with