Poetry Response: Inoculation

I found Inoculation to be a very interesting poem indeed. Rather difficult to understand though. I think the writer is comparing small pox to slavery. He is making the point that slavery is like small pox and some do survive. The opening two lines set up the rest of the poem. “Cotton Mather studied smallpox for a while/ instead of sin. Boston was rife with it” The writer is saying he studies small pox, probably wants to help people when sin(slavery) is staring him right in the face, where he should really be helping people. He asks his slave if he has ever had smallpox. The slave gives a very interesting answer. He says that his mother tried to kill him with small pox. But the boy survived and became a slave for the man. The poem is rich with irony in that the boy survived small but was forced into slavery, worse than smallpox?