A review by debbiecuddy
The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics by Stephen Coss

3.0

I liked it well enough, but was disappointed because this book is really about early struggles for a free press in Massachusetts; smallpox and inoculation were presented as one of the factors in that struggle. I would have enjoyed a more in depth look at the epidemiology of smallpox at that time and the history of inoculation. One of the interesting points, that I wish had been more deeply explored, was that inoculation had been used for hundreds of years in parts of Africa and Asia, yet was rejected by Europeans because they viewed people from these areas as inferior.