Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox [Hardcover]

Jennifer Lee Carrell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 30, 2003

History s first desperate efforts to conquer the spotted beast of smallpox. The dramatic story of 2 parents who dared to fight back against the disease. After barely surviving the agony of smallpox themselves, they both flouted 18th-cent. Eur. med. tradition by borrowing folk knowledge from African slaves & Eastern women in frantic bids to protect their children. From their heroic struggles stems the modern science of immunology as well as the vaccinations should the disease ever be unleashed again. Carrell transports readers back to the early 20th-cent. to tell the tales of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu & Dr. Zabdiel Boylston: two iconoclastic figures who helped save the cities of London & Boston from the deadliest disease mankind has known. Illus.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Long before vaccination for smallpox was developed in Europe in the 1790s, people in the Middle East, the Caucasus and Africa knew that small amounts of live smallpox virus injected under the skin would induce a mild form of the disease that rendered a person immune from full-blown smallpox. In her intriguing book, Carrell, a writer for Smithsonian magazine, switches between the stories of two courageous people in early 18th-century England and America who believed passionately in this procedure, called variolation. While living in Turkey, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, herself disfigured by the disease, had her son inoculated. When she convinced her physician to inoculate her daughter during a smallpox epidemic in London in 1721, public opinion was vehemently against her but, after the procedure appeared to work, physicians persuaded King George I to let them experiment on prisoners who agreed to submit to variolation in return for pardons. In Boston, also ravaged by smallpox in 1721, Zabdiel Boylston, a physician who had survived the disease, learned of variolation from slaves and successfully inoculated his own children. The authorities ordered Boylston to stop the practice, and outraged citizens even tried to kill him, but he persisted, encouraged by a few believers, including the influential Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather. In Boston, as in London, most people who underwent the procedure didn't get full-blown cases of smallpox, and variolation was finally accepted as the only way to protect against the disease before vaccination with cowpox, a benign virus, was developed in the 1790s. Carrell's novelistic treatment of this story, which concludes with an account of the friendship that developed between Lady Mary and Boylston when he visited London in 1725, is engaging in spite of an overabundance of fabricated conversations and scenes that slow the action.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New England Journal of Medicine

The severe epidemics of smallpox that swept through London and Boston in 1721 and 1722 caused scarring, blindness, and death. In Boston, almost 6000 people (out of a total population of 11,000) contracted smallpox, and more than 800 died. Doctors battled hopelessly against "the speckled monster" and applied the humoral therapies of bloodletting, blistering, and the so-called cool regimen, advocated by the distinguished English physician Thomas Sydenham. Into these geographically separate but similar scenes of chaotic misery stepped two unlikely heroes: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a highly intelligent, beautiful but pockmarked, English aristocrat, and Zabdiel Boylston, a locally trained colonial doctor. Lady Mary and Boylston promoted the new, exotic, and potentially dangerous practice of inoculation. (Figure) Inoculation was a folk practice that had been learned from Turkish women and African slaves, two groups generally deemed unreliable by both Europeans and colonial Americans. The practice involved taking a small amount of matter from a pustule of an infected person and inserting it into a scratch made in the skin of a healthy person. Usually a mild case developed and the infected person was thus protected for life from a severe case of natural smallpox. But the procedure was risky: contemporaries calculated that 1 of 91 persons infected in this manner died from the disease. Worse still, inoculated smallpox was contagious, something early inoculators soon discovered. But the horrible symptoms and the risks of dying from natural smallpox led Lady Mary and Boylston, among others, to try inoculation. Their conviction that this new procedure was safe and efficacious was dramatically demonstrated by their courage in administering it first to their own children. Numerous historians have written about this momentous revolution in medical practice. Inoculation laid the groundwork for vaccination, immunology, and medical statistics. Carrell's book, The Speckled Monster, adds a new twist to the topic; it is a fictional account based on extensive historical research (the subtitle of the book is "a historical tale"). Her narrative begins slowly but quickly picks up the pace as it interweaves events on both sides of the Atlantic and suggests their mutual influence. It is unapologetically heroic: Lady Mary and Boylston triumphed despite the substantial odds and obstacles against them. Lady Mary took on the formidable London medical establishment, whereas Boylston contended with providential clerics and foreign-trained physicians (particularly the cantankerous Scot, William Douglass). Both were threatened with mob violence. In sweeping and dramatic strokes, Carrell paints the ostracism Boylston endured as he made his rounds through colonial Boston; in England, Lady Mary suffered public criticism for daring to put her children deliberately in harm's way. The advantage of historical fiction is that it allows the author to recreate private conversations and psychological motivations that are often unavailable to historical analysis. Carrell has done this well, vividly reconstructing the horrors of smallpox and the hostility that often attends innovation. Her descriptions of sights, sounds, and smells envelop the reader in a tangible and immediate past. That said, Carrell freely admits to fabricating events and dialogue for which there is no evidence -- the most extreme instance (but one befitting a heroic narrative) is the contrived meeting and friendship between her two heroes, Lady Mary and Boylston, in London. The result is an enjoyable tale, but the historical truth is buried in the endnotes. Andrea Rusnock, Ph.D.
Copyright © 2004 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 474 pages
• Publisher: Dutton/Penguin (December 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0756786215
• ISBN-13: 978-0756786212
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #925,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I've wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. Early on, my fallback career choices were ballerina and astronaut. Much later, I thought I'd become a Shakespeare professor. Through some strange twists and turns, I've circled back to writing.

Storytelling should be an adventure, not just the stringing-together of other people's adventures. On the trail of stories, I have: rappelled from a six-story tower using an emergency hand-tied halter (while writing about the training of firefighters); tracked mountain lions on mule-back through the mountain range Geronimo used as home base and hideout; held Yo-Yo Ma's cello; ridden the roller-coaster ride of a professional cutting horse (herding cattle); and posed for David Hockney on a BBC set while stuffed into a medieval gown originally made for Star Trek, with a red-velvet turban improvised from a set of men's pants perched on my head. From the sublime to the ridiculous -- and all of it wondrous

I live in Tucson, AZ, with my husband, son, two dogs, and three cats (who try to help me type out my manuscripts).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars medicine vs politics, March 9, 2006

By 

Astrea (Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling the Smallpox Epidemic (Hardcover)

Not since Laurie Garret's THE COMING PLAGUE have I enjoyed a book more. The detail of the research is tremendous and the story it tells-- of a medical breakthrough for the western world despite politics, racism and ignorance is fascinating. It is so easy to lose sight of the true terror caused by this disease. Carrell's work brings it to life.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't put it down, April 16, 2006

By 

tudoreng "tudoreng" (Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox (Hardcover)

Maybe it's because I have a degree in both history and English, but this book suited my taste perfectly, and I was surprised at the negative reviews. I picked up the book and finished it in two days because I couldn't put it down. Ms. Carrell has made the tale read like a historical whodunit. I read her chapter, then her endnotes. If you like historical fiction and you also like historical nonfiction, I think you would enjoy this book.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars history comes alive, June 22, 2003

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Penelope A. Kendall "history buff" (Matthews, IN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling the Smallpox Epidemic (Hardcover)

An excellent book that reads like a novel but is the result of detailed research..as the chapter notes prove. More historians should write like this...