The Speckled Monster: A historical tale of battling smallpox by Jennifer Lee Carrell, Dutton, $25.95, ISBN 0525947361 Reviewed by Debora MacKenzie
DO WE really need yet another book about smallpox? I wondered that about The Speckled Monster: A historical tale of battling smallpox – until I noticed I couldn’t put it down. Before Jenner made smallpox vaccine out of vaccinia virus, people protected themselves from the dread disease by giving themselves mild cases of actual smallpox. Carrell recounts how the practice was championed, defying the medical establishment, by an aristocratic lady in Georgian England and an American frontier doctor.
Their lives…
