Jennifer Lee Carrell - The Speckled Monster
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- Year:2014
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The Speckled Monster tells the dramatic story of two parents who dared to fight back against smallpox. After barely surviving the agony of smallpox themselves, they flouted eighteenth-century medicine by borrowing folk knowledge from African slaves and Eastern women in frantic bids to protect their children. From their heroic struggles stems the modern science of immunology as well as the vaccinations that remain our only hope should the disease ever be unleashed again. Jennifer Lee 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 the deadliest disease mankind has known. Read more...
Abstract: The Speckled Monster tells the dramatic story of two parents who dared to fight back against smallpox. After barely surviving the agony of smallpox themselves, they flouted eighteenth-century medicine by borrowing folk knowledge from African slaves and Eastern women in frantic bids to protect their children. From their heroic struggles stems the modern science of immunology as well as the vaccinations that remain our only hope should the disease ever be unleashed again. Jennifer Lee 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 the deadliest disease mankind has known
Abstract: The Speckled Monster tells the dramatic story of two parents who dared to fight back against smallpox. After barely surviving the agony of smallpox themselves, they flouted eighteenth-century medicine by borrowing folk knowledge from African slaves and Eastern women in frantic bids to protect their children. From their heroic struggles stems the modern science of immunology as well as the vaccinations that remain our only hope should the disease ever be unleashed again. Jennifer Lee 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 the deadliest disease mankind has known
Jennifer Lee Carrell: author's other books
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Jennifer Lee Carrell
Jennifer Lee Carrell
Rob Boddice
Janie Havemeyer
Henderson
Elizabeth A. Fenn
Jared Ross Hardesty
William H. Foege
Michael Willrich
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Table of Contents
Praise forThe Speckled Monster
An arresting and surprisingly entertaining portrayal of one of the worlds great medical triumphs.The Arizona Republic
An intriguing story of a timely topic.BookPage
A timely, gripping, and often exciting account of the efforts of two people, both survivors of smallpox, to combat the disease... This is an outstanding medical thriller that both informs and inspires.Booklist
Carrell makes these historical figures come alive ... A fascinating read.
Library Journal
For those who take their medicine with an air of mayhem.
Kirkus Reviews
Jennifer Lee Carrell holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard University. A writer for Smithsonian magazine, she has taught in the history and literature program at Harvard. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. This is her first book.
For Johnny
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
IN the long, serendipitous chain of events that brought this book into being, three people took big risks on an unknown writer: Brian Tart, editorial director at Dutton; Noah Lukeman, literary agent extraordinaire; and Jack Wiley, senior editor emeritus of Smithsonian Magazine. For the privilege and joy of writing this book, as well as for deep funds of patient guidance, I am greatly indebted to all three of them.
At Dutton, Amy Hughes also offered editorial insights with sharp perception and easy grace, and Anna Cowles smoothed the process at every turn.
Dr. John Oliphant provided expert research on the Royal Navy as well as eighteenth-century London more generally, and, at the eleventh hour, Richard J. Bell, graduate student in American History at Harvard University, produced wonderfully detailed research on Cambridge and Harvard in 1721. Rupert Baker, library manager at the Royal Society, and Michael Bosson of Harrowby MSS Trust both provided help above and beyond the call of duty. Professor Isobel Grundy of the University of Alberta, Canada, was astoundingly generous with her unpublished research on Lady Mary, as well as with encouragement; Professor Susan M. Fitzmaurice of Northern Arizona University shared her transcriptions of Edward Wortley Montagus unpublished letters. The library staffs at the Harvard Archives, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the Boston Public Librarys Rare Books Department, the American Antiquarian Society, the Royal Archives at Windsor Palace, the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth, England, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts all provided useful information and guidance.
I conducted most of the research, however, in libraries open either to the public at large, or to scholars with bona fide reasons to use their collections. In particular, I am grateful to the Arizona Health Sciences Library, the Tucson-Pima Public Library, and the University of Arizona Library in Tucson, Arizona; the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, the Harvard Archives, the Houghton Library, and the Widener Library of Harvard University; and the British Library, the National Portrait Gallerys Heinz Archive and Library, the Public Record Office, and the Royal Society Library in London.
Clive Coward of the Wellcome Trust Medical Photographic Library; Caroline Jennings of the Bridgeman Art Library; James Kilvington of the National Portrait Gallery, London; Susan Danforth, curator of maps and prints at the John Carter Brown Library; David Cobb, curator of the Harvard Map Collection; and the staff at Art Resource all helped to locate relevant images.
Lady Marys unpublished poems appear by kind permission of the earl of Harrowby (Harrowby MSS Trust). Her published works are reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Cotton Mathers Angel of Bethesda is quoted with permission from the American Antiquarian Society. Quotations from the Boston Gazette are reprinted from Readex Micro-prints Early American Newspapers Series with permission from Readex. Zabdiel Boylstons letter to Benjamin Colman is quoted with permission from the Massachusetts Historical Society. The Royal Societys papers are quoted with permission from the Royal Society, and the Sloane MSS are quoted with permission from the British Library.
Kathy Allen, Charlotte Lowe Bailey, Dan Shapiro, Kristen Poole, Martin Brueckner, and my mother, Melinda Carrell, read and reread the manuscript and offered many suggestions for improvement. My father, Bill Carrell, gave it a physicians critical eye. Derek Pearsall sent Drydens smallpox poem my way.
My debt to my husband, Johnny Helenbolt, is boundless.
INTRODUCTION
IN Georgian London, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu sweeps out of a palatial bedroom in a swirl of satin and silk, her three-year-old daughter in tow. The servants are impassive as she floats by, but in her wake their faces pinch in disgust and their eyes meet in knowing glances. Unnatural, hisses the nurse to a maid. Ignoring them, she descends the grand staircase like the dukes daughter she is, but at the tall doors to the street, she pauses. She has grown accustomed to the delicate razors wielded in the plumed, powdered, and diamond-frosted high society of aristocrats and artists: countesses and poets once proud to claim her acquaintance now make ostentatiously absurd claims to parade out of any room she enters. But even that is less harrowing than what happens in public. She sets her shoulders and nods to the footmen, who swing open the doors. As she steps into the street, heads turn, and people begin pointing and jeering.
Just as the door closes on the safe haven of her coach, a servant in silver livery hands her a tray of carefully stacked notes: even as some mothers teach their children to taunt her, others send footmen day and night to beg for her presence. When they find her away from home, they fan out through the winding lanes of London to track down her carriage, wherever she may be.
In colonial Boston, Zabdiel Boylston rides down a muddy street; his black slave Jack follows on a mule, packing a satchel full of the tools of Boylstons trade: hes a general surgeon and an apothecary, or pharmacist. Hes never been to college, but the townspeople call him doctor anyway, in honor of his skill. After years of practice, and before that, years of apprenticeship with his father, hes the most trusted medical man in town. A recent arrival from Scotland, William Douglass, is beginning to protest, however: Dr. Douglass may be eleven years younger than Boylston, but after studying at no fewer than four European universities, he has earned a proper medical degree. His peacock pride is infuriated by the mere presence of this untrained competitor for his fees, and even more so by the trust the provincial fools of Boston put in him.
So far, Boylston has paid no mind to Douglasss sneers: he cares little for tradition or titles. What he cares about are honest hard work and results.
That was before the recent outbreak of smallpox, however. Now, like Lady Mary, Boylston is hooted at and splattered intentionally with filth whenever he steps into the street. For fear of lynch mobs, his wife and friends beg him not to go out after dusk, but the stealthy knocks keep coming, followed by urgently whispered requests: Will you come now, before its too late?
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