The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox

Rating:
Summary: history comes alive
Review: 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...

Rating:
Summary: timely and informative as well as a good read
Review: Carrell does a great job of bringing us into the intimate worlds of her characters, and making us care about them, as she fleshes out her historical novel. Her descriptions of smallpox are vivid. I would have liked more connection with the Turks to better explain the utter faith in their inoculation methods; seems a big jump of faith for a lady of such cloistered aristocratic English culture. I did like the counterpoint of England and the American colonies as the story unfolds. This book will make you grateful for the 21st century!

Rating:
Summary: Smallpox: a history of inoculation
Review: It's early in the 18th century, and smallpox epidemics are raging. Inoculation is viewed as quackery, a folk remedy used only in Africa and the Far East, but two brave mavericks, one in London and one in Boston, defy the elitist views of physicians of the era and commit themselves to the cause of inoculation as a defense against the scourge.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating
Review: This book kept me up half the night to finish it. Pretty good for a story where the eventual outcome is already well known.

Rating:
Summary: A Decent History, but...
Review: you can get half the tale directly from the horse's mouth in Lady Mary Wortley Montagus' "Turkish Embassy Letters". She describes her own disfigurement by the disease, her son's vaccination, and the practice of the Turkish practitioners (many of them women), who scraped or scratched the skin and gave people mild smallpox.

This is yet another practice that spread from the Islamic World into Western Medicine. While modern medicine tends to trace its decent to Greek Medicine, it easily owes as much to the Islamic religious schools that taught medicine. Avicenna, born Ibn Sina, wrote THE major medical text of medieval Europe, which was translated into Latin by Europeans trained at Islamic Schools in Spain. For that matter, records of Greek medicine were frequently destroyed by early Christian fanatics, and may not have survived at all if not for the Arab victory at Constantinople. The slaves almost certainly learned of variola vaccination during the spread of Islam into North Africa. It's not well accepted, but a lot of the slaves (still a minority, but sizable) who were shipped to North Africa were well-educated in Arabic, and many had Arabic blood.

There are more than enough books available in a decent library that can give this information, and all the information found in this book is readily available to anyone curious enough to look it up.