Dr. Zabdiel  Boylston, 1676 or 1679 to 1766, apprenticed with his father, an English surgeon named Thomas Boylston. He also studied under the Boston physician Dr. Cutter, but never attending a formal medical school. Boylston following Cotton Matther’s ideas on the value of variolation, seen here variolating a small boy. Variolation actually gave a small, hopefully non-fatal, dose of smallpox to  ward off a fatal dose if acquired normally during and epidemic. Boylston conducted this large scale human experimentation in 1721 Boston, kept records, and proved that variolation was much safer than taking a chance on acquiring smallpox during an epidemic.