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The Speckled Monster: A historical tale of battling smallpox by Jennifer Lee Carrell, Dutton, $25.95, ISBN 0525947361 Reviewed by Debora MacKenzie

DO WE really need yet another book about smallpox? I wondered that about The Speckled Monster: A historical tale of battling smallpox – until I noticed I couldn’t put it down. Before Jenner made smallpox vaccine out of vaccinia virus, people protected themselves from the dread disease by giving themselves mild cases of actual smallpox. Carrell recounts how the practice was championed, defying the medical establishment, by an aristocratic lady in Georgian England and an American frontier doctor.

Their lives are recounted as in a novel, complete with imagined dialogue (albeit based on real correspondence). If you don’t mind your history so embellished, the bonus is the vivid portrayal of just what it meant to have a disease like smallpox around – something we in our safe, vaccinated world tend to forget.