Publisher Description
THE SPECKLED MONSTER is both a hair-raising tale of courage in the face of the deadliest disease that has ever struck mankind, and a gripping account of the birth of modern immunology. Jennifer Lee Carrell’s dramatic story follows two parents who, after barely surviving the agony of smallpox themselves, flouted eighteenth-century European medical tradition by borrowing folk knowledge from African slaves and Eastern women in frantic bids to protect their children. Their heroic struggles gave rise to immunology, as well as the vaccinations that remain our only hope should the disease be unleashed again. Carrell transports readers back to the early eighteenth century to tell the tales of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston: two iconoclastic figures who helped save London and Boston from this scourge.
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“First of all, funny story about this book. Well, not so much funny as highly disappointing. I got a copy of the Speckled Monster from the library and started reading it. It was so good! A real page-turner, as they say. It’s non-fiction, but written in a very fiction-based way – not just a rehashing of diaries and newspaper articles, but with characterization and story development. It reads much like a novel. I loved it. It was slow-going, because it’s very dense and full of information about the beginnings of inoculation, in both England and the American Colonies. Then I turned a page, and the printer had taken pages 300-330 and replaced then with 269-99. So I had to track down a new copy through the wonderful Chicago Public Library system. So just a word of warning. Make sure you have a correct copy. But it’s well-worth it. There’s political intrigue, death, love, and lots of gross descriptions of smallpox sufferers.”
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Sarah (5 out of 5 stars)
