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A review by cheryl6of8
The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics by Stephen Coss
3.0
This book had a lot of great history in it and it changed my perspective on some pivotal figures in American history, leaving me more favorably inclined toward both Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, neither of whom I really liked at all prior to this. And it sure did have a lot of parallels to the present time and the present pandemic and the political rhetoric and the commercial inclinations of a free press and the role of public figures in private lives. But I would have liked it more if either the writing style had been slightly less academic or the audiopresentation had been slightly less broadcast journalism. One or the other would have made it easier to follow for more than 20 minutes at a stretch without zoning out As it was, some parts were a real struggle and since the audiobook I had was in MP3 format, with tracks of approx 30 minutes a piece, I didn't always want to go back and start a section over to catch what I had missed.
My takeaways were that more of us should know about Dr. Zabdiel Boyleston who risked so much to try innoculation in order to save the lives of his fellow Bostonians during the epidemic. And who performed one of the first successful mastectomies as treatment for breast cancer. Plus he was a clean freak so a lot more of his patients survived surgery before handwashing was a thing for doctors, let alone patients. An excellent and brave man who was mistreated by officials and Dr. Douglas, who had his own interests in seeing more people die and no extraordinary measures undertaken to address the outbreak. Also that James Franklin should be well known in his own right and not as the mean old brother that Ben was apprenticed to -- he is responsible for much of the American style of print journalism and was a boisterous defender of freedom of the press whose ideas, communicated in his newspaper, shaped the ideas of those who 50 years later would sign the Declaration of Independence. He was also quite gutsy if for less noble seeming reasons, probably because he was a cantankerous sort. But he helped to shape much of what was good about Benjamin Franklin (who I still think was a self-centered mysogynistic old bastard).
Definitely worth the read if you are into history, although I think it might be easier to tackle this one in print than to ear-read it as I did.
My takeaways were that more of us should know about Dr. Zabdiel Boyleston who risked so much to try innoculation in order to save the lives of his fellow Bostonians during the epidemic. And who performed one of the first successful mastectomies as treatment for breast cancer. Plus he was a clean freak so a lot more of his patients survived surgery before handwashing was a thing for doctors, let alone patients. An excellent and brave man who was mistreated by officials and Dr. Douglas, who had his own interests in seeing more people die and no extraordinary measures undertaken to address the outbreak. Also that James Franklin should be well known in his own right and not as the mean old brother that Ben was apprenticed to -- he is responsible for much of the American style of print journalism and was a boisterous defender of freedom of the press whose ideas, communicated in his newspaper, shaped the ideas of those who 50 years later would sign the Declaration of Independence. He was also quite gutsy if for less noble seeming reasons, probably because he was a cantankerous sort. But he helped to shape much of what was good about Benjamin Franklin (who I still think was a self-centered mysogynistic old bastard).
Definitely worth the read if you are into history, although I think it might be easier to tackle this one in print than to ear-read it as I did.