The Speckled Monster Read Free Page A

of the eighteenth century, European medicine was helpless against the disease, but loath to admit it. Recognizing that failure, Lady Mary and Boylston were willing to look elsewhere for relief.
    The paradox of using smallpox to fight smallpox was not a product of methodical Western science. Its discovery and development lie hidden in the unrecorded history of the folk medicine of the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Africa. Many people around Lady Mary and Boylston sneered not only at their lack of training, but at their willingness to pay serious attention to rumors coming from even more absurdly “ignorant” sources: Ottoman women and African slaves.
    In the 1720s, Louis Pasteur’s germ theory lay another 140 years in the future, and the mechanisms of disease were as yet little understood. No one knew why inoculation might work; they only gradually became certain that it did work. Observers did know two important facts about smallpox, however. They knew that the disease was virulently contagious, and suspected that it was passed by breathing “bad” air somehow infected by victims, or by the presence of victims’ clothing and bedding. Secondly, it was already common knowledge that those who had survived smallpox were forever after immune: with smallpox, there was no double jeopardy.
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    This is a history of long ago, but the quarrels that erupt through this story are still very much with us. Inoculation was controversial for the same reasons that smallpox vaccination remains controversial: it is dangerous—though the degrees of danger are greatly different. In all kinds of inoculation—variolation, vaccination proper (with the vaccinia virus), flu, polio, measles—doctors make patients a little bit sick, at least locally, in order to keep them healthy on the whole. Or so they hope.
    But all vaccinations carry risks: some percentage of patients will have adverse reactions, or prove to have no ability to fight the disease they’ve been exposed to, and will sicken seriously and possibly die. With smallpox vaccination, the risk of death is one or two in a million for primary vaccinations, and one in four million for revaccinations. For variolation, it ranges between one in fifty to one in a hundred. No one, now, is going to say that one-in-fifty odds are an acceptable risk. In a world without smallpox, neither are the one-in-a-million odds of the old vaccine—which is why the United States began phasing it out in 1972.
    But what of a world in which smallpox is a maybe? When that “maybe” could result in a global pandemic that could kill millions within months if not weeks? Precisely how much of a maybe makes the odds of vaccination worthwhile?
    It is one thing to argue about numbers, another entirely to argue about your own children, as both Lady Mary and Boylston discovered.
    In the end, their tale is a history of hope: through the hatred, dying, threats, and shouting there is always visible a defiant will to live, to learn, and to love. That, as much as anything else, is what has made this tale of two heroes and a terrible disease worth the telling.

How difficult a thing it is, to set Truth in a clear light in this case to the satisfaction of an unbelieving world.
    â€”Zabdiel Boylston
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I am going to write a history so uncommon that in how plain a manner so ever I relate it, it will have the air of a romance.
    â€”Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

PART ONE
    London

1
    TWO MARYS
    EARLY in December 1694, an assassin emerged from the streets of London to sneak westward across the park, slip unseen through the halls of Kensington Palace, and attack the beautiful and beloved young queen.
    Six years before, it had taken a revolution to put Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange, on the British throne, but on this wintry day her attacker was neither counterrevolutionary nor common robber. Nothing more than a tiny protein-coated and exuberantly proliferant tangle of DNA,