The Fever of 1721, Stephen Coss
The Fever of 1721, Stephen Coss
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The Fever of 1721
The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics

Author: Stephen Coss

Narrator: Bob Souer

Unabridged: 9 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/22/2016

Synopsis

In The Fever of 1721, Stephen Coss brings to life an amazing cast of characters in a year that changed the course of history, including Cotton Mather, the great Puritan preacher; Zabdiel Boylston, a doctor whose name is on one of Boston's grand avenues; James and his younger brother Benjamin Franklin; and Elisha Cooke and his protégé Samuel Adams.

During the worst smallpox epidemic in Boston history, Mather convinced Doctor Boylston to try a procedure that he believed would prevent death—by making an incision in the arm of a healthy person and implanting it with smallpox. "Inoculation" led to vaccination, one of the most profound medical discoveries in history.

A political fever also raged. Elisha Cooke was challenging the Crown for control of the colony and finally forced Royal Governor Samuel Shute to flee Massachusetts. Samuel Adams and the Patriots would build on this to resist the British in the run-up to the American Revolution. And bold young printer James Franklin launched America's first independent newspaper and landed in jail. His teenage brother, Benjamin Franklin, however, learned his trade in James's shop and became a father of the Independence movement.

About Stephen Coss

The Fever of 1721 is Stephen Coss's first book. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Heather

Extensively researched and well written, The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics is far more than a straight-forward history of the smallpox outbreak. Coss documents the outbreak and the struggle to test what would become a revolutionary preventive, but the......more

Goodreads review by Darcia

This is a fascinating snapshot of New England society during the early 1700s. While the book's central point is the smallpox epidemic and eventual inoculation, the focus is not at all that narrow. Within and surrounding this topic, we explore relationships, politics, medical care, and religion. The......more

Goodreads review by Bfisher

This book discusses the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721 as a nexus of political, religious and scientific controversy, but in ways that confound our expectations. We are presented with a pioneering newspaper (with cub reporter Benjamin Franklin inventing Silence Dogood), advancing the cause of free......more

Goodreads review by Carol

This first book by Stephen Coss is an imperfectly realized but fascinating account of a series of historical events of which I was previously unaware, surrounding the 1721 Boston smallpox epidemic and its influence on subsequent U.S. history. Most Americans are aware that Benjamin Franklin began his......more

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