Dr. Zabdiel Bolyston, 1679 in Brookline, Massachusetts– March 2, 1766,  was willing to accept the challenge Mather had presented and began variolating patients on June 26, 1721 and kept records of the success of this mass vaccination experiment. He apprenticed with his father, an English surgeon named Thomas Boylston. He also studied under the Boston physician Dr. Cutter, never attending a formal medical school, which was not unusual at that time in colonial America.