THE SPECKLED MONSTER

An overlong but informative tale of civilians versus the medical establishment—set, in this case, in the disease-ridden 18th century.

The world has largely forgotten the horrors of smallpox, writes journalist and literary historian Carrell in this debut. Though the last known case was recorded in 1977, smallpox had claimed “a victim count in the hundreds of millions,” killing “more people than the Black Death and all the bloody wars of the twentieth century put together.” The tide began to turn in London and Boston when two who had survived the disease, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, employed folk medicine to protect their families, learned in Montagu’s case from Turkish servants and in Boylston’s from African slaves. Involving a rudimentary kind of inoculation, their borrowed cures earned them a reputation for quackery at first, and plenty of jeering from local folk and medical authorities alike. But Bostonians and Londoners eventually came around, with invitations “to try it on a child or two”—understandably, inasmuch as inoculation, and later vaccination, reduced the odds of dying of smallpox by orders of magnitude. The best parts of Carrell’s narrative involve her careful accounting of the effects of Montagu and Boylston’s daring experiments: “The Earl of Berkeley’s son did marvelously well: only 70 or 80 small pustules which clung to him a mere nine or ten days and then scurfed off, leaving no trace of their passage.” But Carrell inclines toward a too-inclusive use of historical material, resulting in a narrative that runs on far too long, one less well controlled and less compelling than those of, say, medical mysterians Laurie Garrett (The Coming Plague) and Richard Preston (The Hot Zone). Still, there is much good information here—and even a somber warning that, though apparently eradicated, any number of possibilities exist for smallpox to make a comeback, as well as for some equally deadly disease to sweep across the world in its stead.

For those who take their medicine with an air of mayhem.