Analyzing Onesimus's Poem 'Smallpox'

This poem introduces a slave owner who has been studying smallpox and how Boston had a bad case of it going around. He asks his slave had he ever had smallpox, and Onesimus, the slave, answers yes and no, with humor. Onesimus says: “Consider how a man can take inside all manner of disease and still survive.” This came of as describing slavery as a disease to me. So, basically Onesimus is saying how he may have not contracted the smallpox disease, but the conditions and contaminants of slavery were hindering enough on their own. The author’s use of diction really stands out in the last lines of the poem and are italicized reading: “My mother bore me in the southern wild. She scratched my skin and I got sick, but lived to come here, free of smallpox,