THE HISTORY: Overview
What would you do to save your children?
The Speckled Monster transports readers back to the early eighteenth century to tell the historical tales of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, two iconoclastic figures who helped save London and Boston from the deadliest disease mankind has known.
After barely surviving the agony of smallpox themselves, they dared to fight back when 'the speckled monster' threatened their children. Flouting the accepted (but useless) practices of Western medicine at the time, they borrowed folk knowledge from African slaves and Eastern women in heroic bids to shield their families.
Almost instantly, they found themselves at the center of a storm of controversy.
From their heroic struggles stems the modern science of immunology as well as the vaccination that remains our only hope should smallpox ever be unleashed again.
