Gomes Prize for The Contagion of Liberty

On 15 Nov 1773, 250 years ago today, the Essex Hospital on an island off Marblehead took in its second round of patients for smallpox inoculation.

The dispute over that hospital, which culminated in its destruction in late January, is a reminder that not all conflicts in Revolutionary New England broke down along the lines of Patriot v. Loyalist.

Some of the local merchants who had invested in the hospital were stalwarts of the local resistance—as were some of the local laborers and seamen who destroyed it.

That sestercentennial anniversary seems like a good occasion to note that the Massachusetts Historical Society just gave the 2023 Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize for best nonfiction work on the history of Massachusetts to Andrew M. Wehrman for The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution.

Wehrman is a professor of history at Central Michigan University. Back in 2008, he received the Walter Muir Whitehill Award for his article, “The Siege of ‘Castle Pox’: A Medical Revolution in Marblehead, Massachusetts, 1764–1777.” Wehrman’s book expands on that incident to trace the debate over how to fight smallpox through the Revolutionary War.

By that time, most people understood how inoculation worked—the scientific dispute had been settled decades earlier. But there were practical problems of isolating people who had been inoculated until they stopped being infectious. Those problems were why folks in Essex County destroyed the smallpox hospital off their coast, and why Gen. George Washington waited so long before having his troops inoculated.