Author: William R. Clark
In the
seventeenth century, smallpox reigned as the world's worst killer. Luck, more than anything else, decided who would live and who would die. That is, until Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an English aristocrat, moved to
Constantinople and noticed the Turkish practice of "ingrafting" or inoculation, which, she wrote, made "the small- pox...entirely harmless." Convinced by what she witnessed, she allowed her six-year-old son to be ingrafted, and the treatment was a complete success-the young Montagu enjoyed
lifelong immunity from smallpox. Lady Montagu's discovery would, however, remain a quiet one; it would be almost 150 years before inoculation (in the more modern form of vaccination) would…
This was one of those books I purchased quite a while ago when I was in an HIV lab and I put it aside, and never quite got around to reading it. In the midst of a summer heatwave where I didn't want… Most neurosurgeons and astrophysicists are busy constructing the future. Some of these overacheivers suffer from a mild mental disorder called hypergraphia and compulsively write stuff down.
