The Speckled Monster Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  PART ONE - London

  Chapter 1 - TWO MARYS

  Chapter 2 - THREE REBELLIONS

  Chapter 3 - A DESTROYING ANGEL

  Chapter 4 - BIDDING THE WORLD ADIEU

  Chapter 5 - MY DEAR LITTLE SON

  Chapter 6 - ROSEBUDS IN LILY SKIN

  PART TWO - Boston

  Chapter 1 - ZABDIEL AND JERUSHA

  Chapter 2 - CURIOSITIES OF THE SMALLPOX

  Chapter 3 - THE BEAUTY OF THE SEA

  Chapter 4 - CAGING THE MONSTER

  Chapter 5 - DEMONIC WINGS

  Chapter 6 - FATHERS AND SONS

  PART THREE - Hell Upon Earth

  Chapter 1 - SALUTATION ALLEY

  Chapter 2 - PRYING MULTITUDES

  Chapter 3 - AN INFUSION OF MALIGNANT FILTH

  Chapter 4 - THE CASTLE OF MISERY

  Chapter 5 - SIGNs AND WONDERS

  Chapter 6 - NEWGATE

  Chapter 7 - AN HOUR OF MOURNING

  Chapter 8 - THE KING’S PARDON

  Chapter 9 - RAW HEAD AND BLOODY BONES

  Chapter 10 - JUST RETRIBUTION

  Chapter 11 - IN ROYAL FASHION

  After math

  1

  2

  3

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  SOURCES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Praise for The Speckled Monster

  “An arresting and surprisingly entertaining portrayal of one of the world’s great medical triumphs.”—The Arizona Republic

  “An intriguing story of a timely topic.”—BookPage

  “A timely, gripping, and often exciting account of the efforts of two people, both survivors of smallpox, to combat the disease . . . This is an outstanding medical thriller that both informs and inspires.”—Booklist

  “Carrell makes these historical figures come alive ... A fascinating read.”

  —Library Journal

  “For those who take their medicine with an air of mayhem.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Jennifer Lee Carrell holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard University. A writer for Smithsonian magazine, she has taught in the history and literature program at Harvard. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. This is her first book.

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Previously published in a Dutton edition.

  First Plume Printing, February 2004

  Copyright © Jennifer Lee Carrell, 2003

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Carrell, Jennifer Lee.

  The speckled monster : a historical tale of battling smallpox / by Jennifer Lee Carrell.

  p. ; cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-0-452-28507-1

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  For Johnny

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IN the long, serendipitous chain of events that brought this book into being, three people took big risks on an unknown writer: Brian Tart, editorial director at Dutton; Noah Lukeman, literary agent extraordinaire; and Jack Wiley, senior editor emeritus of Smithsonian Magazine. For the privilege and joy of writing this book, as well as for deep funds of patient guidance, I am greatly indebted to all three of them.

  At Dutton, Amy Hughes also offered editorial insights with sharp perception and easy grace, and Anna Cowles smoothed the process at every turn.

  Dr. John Oliphant provided expert research on the Royal Navy as well as eighteenth-century London more generally, and, at the eleventh hour, Richard J. Bell, graduate student in American History at Harvard University, produced wonderfully detailed research on Cambridge and Harvard in 1721. Rupert Baker, library manager at the Royal Society, and Michael Bosson of Harrowby MSS Trust both provided help above and beyond the call of duty. Professor Isobel Grundy of the University of Alberta, Canada, was astoundingly generous with her unpublished research on Lady Mary, as well as with encouragement; Professor Susan M. Fitzmaurice of Northern Arizona University shared her transcriptions of Edward Wortley Montagu’s unpublished letters. The library staffs at the Harvard Archives, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the Boston Public Library’s Rare Books Department, the American Antiquarian Society, the Royal Archives at Windsor Palace, the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth, England, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts all provided useful information and guidance.

  I conducted most of the research, however, in libraries open either to the public at large, or to scholars with bona fide reasons to use their collections. In particular, I am grateful to the Arizona Health Sciences Library, the Tucson-Pima Public Library, and the University of Arizona Library in Tucson, Arizona; the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, the Harvard Archives, the Houghton Library, and the Widener Library of Harvard University; and the British Library, the National Portrait Gallery’s Heinz Archive and Library, the Public Record Office, and the Royal Society Library in London.

  Clive Coward of the Wellcome Trust Medical Photographic Library; Caroline Jennings of the Bridgeman Art Library; James Kilvington of the National Portrait Gallery, London; Susan Danforth, curator of maps and prints at the John Carter Brown Library; David Cobb, curator of the Harvard Map Collection; and the staff at Art Resource all helped to locate relevant images.

  Lady Mary’s unpublished poems appear by kind permission of the earl of Harrowby (Harrowby MSS Trust). Her published works are reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Cotton Mather’s Angel of Bethesda is quoted with permission from the American Antiquarian Society. Quotations from the Boston Gazette are reprinted from Readex Micro-print’s Early American Newspapers
Series with permission from Readex. Zabdiel Boylston’s letter to Benjamin Colman is quoted with permission from the Massachusetts Historical Society. The Royal Society’s papers are quoted with permission from the Royal Society, and the Sloane MSS are quoted with permission from the British Library.

  Kathy Allen, Charlotte Lowe Bailey, Dan Shapiro, Kristen Poole, Martin Brueckner, and my mother, Melinda Carrell, read and reread the manuscript and offered many suggestions for improvement. My father, Bill Carrell, gave it a physician’s critical eye. Derek Pearsall sent Dryden’s smallpox poem my way.

  My debt to my husband, Johnny Helenbolt, is boundless.

  INTRODUCTION

  IN Georgian London, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu sweeps out of a palatial bedroom in a swirl of satin and silk, her three-year-old daughter in tow. The servants are impassive as she floats by, but in her wake their faces pinch in disgust and their eyes meet in knowing glances. “Unnatural,” hisses the nurse to a maid. Ignoring them, she descends the grand staircase like the duke’s daughter she is, but at the tall doors to the street, she pauses. She has grown accustomed to the delicate razors wielded in the plumed, powdered, and diamond-frosted high society of aristocrats and artists: countesses and poets once proud to claim her acquaintance now make ostentatiously absurd claims to parade out of any room she enters. But even that is less harrowing than what happens in public. She sets her shoulders and nods to the footmen, who swing open the doors. As she steps into the street, heads turn, and people begin pointing and jeering.

  Just as the door closes on the safe haven of her coach, a servant in silver livery hands her a tray of carefully stacked notes: even as some mothers teach their children to taunt her, others send footmen day and night to beg for her presence. When they find her away from home, they fan out through the winding lanes of London to track down her carriage, wherever she may be.

  In colonial Boston, Zabdiel Boylston rides down a muddy street; his black slave Jack follows on a mule, packing a satchel full of the tools of Boylston’s trade: he’s a general surgeon and an apothecary, or pharmacist. He’s never been to college, but the townspeople call him “doctor” anyway, in honor of his skill. After years of practice, and before that, years of apprenticeship with his father, he’s the most trusted medical man in town. A recent arrival from Scotland, William Douglass, is beginning to protest, however: Dr. Douglass may be eleven years younger than Boylston, but after studying at no fewer than four European universities, he has earned a proper medical degree. His peacock pride is infuriated by the mere presence of this untrained competitor for his fees, and even more so by the trust the provincial fools of Boston put in him.

  So far, Boylston has paid no mind to Douglass’s sneers: he cares little for tradition or titles. What he cares about are honest hard work and results.

  That was before the recent outbreak of smallpox, however. Now, like Lady Mary, Boylston is hooted at and splattered intentionally with filth whenever he steps into the street. For fear of lynch mobs, his wife and friends beg him not to go out after dusk, but the stealthy knocks keep coming, followed by urgently whispered requests: Will you come now, before it’s too late?

  Always, he gives Jack the nod, puts on his coat, and goes out.

  This is a tale of two smallpox-haunted cities and the two unlikely heroes, both outsiders to the elite ranks of the medical profession, who began the fight against that terrible disease in the Western world in the 1720s. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Zabdiel Boylston were not scientists; their struggles against smallpox were not systematic or even logical, according to the medical knowledge of the day. Their crusades against the “speckled monster” of smallpox were deeply personal.

  Beyond speaking English, Lady Mary and Boylston had almost nothing in common. Lady Mary was the daughter of one of the British Empire’s wealthiest and most powerful dukes, and the wife of one of its wealthiest private subjects. Shuttling between palatial London town-homes and grandiose country estates, she had been surrounded by opulence almost since birth. She was a study in contrasts: celebrated since childhood as a small, black-haired beauty, she cared more for rapier duels in the world of the mind than fame in the world of fashion. She spent hours reading romances and travel adventures in her father’s plush library, and she loved biting word-play and wild flights of the imagination. Very early, she began scribbling her own stories. She was a Georgian Scheherazade who had the habit of telling her life’s story as a fairy tale, but her heroines, like herself, were not docile princesses meekly awaiting rescue—though in the age’s spirit of mockery, she christened one of them Princess Docile. Lady Mary’s heroines were rebels who got themselves into trouble.

  She was also one of the greatest letter writers to grace the English language. Even in hurried or teasing notes, she tells stories, deftly sketching scenes and dialogue and catching quirks of character. Thankfully, many of her correspondents recognized masterpieces when they saw them and saved her letters. She herself edited the letters she wrote home during her travels to Turkey, arranging for their publication after her death.

  Her diary has a more frustrating history. Begun when she was young, it grew to many volumes: if it had survived, it would offer a woman’s early eighteenth-century rival to the chatter of Samuel Pepys, whose diary remains one of the most entertaining and encyclopedic descriptions of late seventeenth-century life in London. Unfortunately, Lady Mary’s diary, like a great deal of women’s writing from that period, was burned by her loving family, for the sake of preserving reputations, hers included. All that remains of her journals are the memories that her granddaughter, Lady Louisa Stuart, retained of having read a few of the volumes many years before, set down in writing in 1837 as “Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M. W. Montagu.”

  In high contrast, Zabdiel Boylston wrote only when necessary. Boylston was a third-generation colonist who had grown up hunting, fishing, farming, and doctoring on the fringes of a vast wilderness half the world away, in the western hamlet of Muddy River, Massachusetts. Now known as Brookline, his birthplace was tiny and provincial even by the standards of the booming frontier port where he would eventually make his home: Boston, then sandwiched between the sea and the seemingly endless American forest.

  To Boylston, words were tools to be used sparingly. He had learned his profession not from books but from long practical apprenticeship with his physician father. In 1726, certainly at the behest of the Royal Society and possibly at the request of the Princess of Wales, he told his side of the story in An Historical Account of the Small-Pox Inoculated in New England, including his case notes for inoculations performed in Boston in 1721 and 1722. It is a deliberately dry format, careful and concise; even so, a wry wit shines through. Though capable of humor, he was for the most part laconic, stubbornly upright and independent—an early incarnation of the American frontier hero.

  Boylston and Lady Mary shared one crucial experience, as even a fleeting glance at their scarred faces could have told: they had both won vicious battles against smallpox. They knew firsthand the horror of a disease that could turn people into grossly swollen, groaning monsters barely recognizable as human, bubbling with pus and reeking with the sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh. They knew the agony of skin that felt sheeted in flame, and a mouth and throat so full of sores that some victims died of thirst rather than endure the pain of swallowing. That lone shared struggle turned out to be enough to make them change the world—at the same time and in the same way, though unknown to each other.

  In telling this tale, I have tried to remain faithful to its two heroes, not only as historical figures but as storytellers. In honor of Lady Mary’s love of a well-told story, I have done my best to lift dry, briefly outlined scenes back into drama, relying on evidence from elsewhere to add details of sight, smell, and sound; food, clothing, and furniture; medical beliefs and scientific facts; music and poetry; even weather. Where history reports dialogue indirectly or leaves it merely suggested, I have returned it to full conversational life—while kee
ping as close to what was actually said as possible, often by borrowing known words from similar situations. I have drawn connections left implied by timing or juxtaposition. At times, the narrator speaks with the words and phrases of Lady Mary, Boylston, and their cohorts—not always set apart in quotation marks—to allow the reader to look at the world through their eyes, as well as to look at them, like marvelous butterflies pinned beneath museum glass.

  The notes, in the form of short essays at the back of the book, are in honor of Boylston—and all those who like their certainties sharply demarcated from surmise, or who just enjoy the tension and spring between history and story.

  For all our current fears, we are inestimably lucky to live in a world in which the threat of smallpox has shifted from ordinary to extraordinary. Paradoxically, in the absence of smallpox as an everyday enemy, it is hard to realize just how lucky we are. Sheer numbers may help. By the time the disease was vanquished in 1977, it had become far and away the most voracious killer ever to stalk the human species. With a victim count in the hundreds of millions, smallpox has killed more people than the Black Death and all the bloody wars of the twentieth century put together.

  The eradication of smallpox from nature remains one of the greatest victories of modern medicine. Across the 1960s and ’70s, doctors and health workers by the hundreds of thousands hunted the disease down in its last hiding places in Asia and Africa, driving it relentlessly toward extinction by a “scourged earth” policy. By lure, education, bribery, and finally by force, they vaccinated everyone within reach of the variola virus that causes smallpox.