Today we can hardly imagine the devastation wrought by smallpox. Not only was it a dreadful personal torment, entailing days or weeks of suffering a painful, odorous hell before death, it was also a community and familial catastrophe, killing hundreds and sparing few. Jennifer Lee Carrell conveys the immensity of the smallpox pestilence, the scarring, destruction, and death that we have been spared through the works of the men and women she chronicles.
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Jennifer Lee Carrell
Dutton, $25.95, pp 496 ISBN 0 52 594736 1 www.speckledmonster.com
Rating: ★★★
In the first half of the 18th century, the desperate yet resourceful Dr Zabdiel Boylston in Boston and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in London challenged all previous suppositions—even challenging death itself—and inoculated their families to prevent the spread of smallpox. Edward Jenner is well known for vaccination, the transmission of cowpox to stimulate immunity to smallpox. Inoculation was much more risky and involved the transmission of fresh smallpox-infected pus into the sore of an individual who had not had the disease. This book travels from the personal tragedies of this process to the political ramifications.
Succession to the British throne was dependent on smallpox. Queen Mary II and Queen Anne died from it. Years later, the Hanoverian princess of Wales wanted her children, the heirs to the throne, to be free from the spectre of smallpox.
Lady Mary, a duke's daughter in the early 1700s, was nearly killed by smallpox. It left her previously exquisite face scarred for life. She married Lord Montagu, who became the ambassador to Turkey. There she embraced Turkish lifestyles and dress, and discovered that the Turkish women in the harems were inoculated. She had her son and later her daughter inoculated. At the same time a few courageous physicians, with the backing of the princess of Wales, began experimenting on prisoners, using Lady Mary's experience.
Zabdiel Boylston was the only survivor of smallpox in his family and became a physician/apothecary in Boston. Cotton Mather, an influential minister, had seen most of his first family die from smallpox. So when smallpox came to Boston, the two—using journal articles from a physician in Turkey—attempted inoculation, first on their own families and later on friends. Physicians, ministers, and politicians alike fought the practice, even threatening Dr Boylston that he would be charged with murder.
The Speckled Monster is the tale of daring individuals staving off a personal and community nightmare through a dangerous and complicated procedure before the germ theory had even been contemplated. It reminds us of the blessings of the suppression of smallpox and makes us hope for its continued eradication.
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