Cranston Public Library

Smallpox was a terrifying human scourge. It covered the skin with hideous, painful boils, killed a third of its victims, and left survivors disfigured for life. This riveting book tells the story of smallpox, of efforts to eradicate it, and of the dangers it still poses today.

Latina novelist Alma Huebner is suffering from writer's block and is years past the completion date for yet another of her bestselling family sagas. Her husband, Richard, works for a humanitarian organization dedicated to the health and prosperity of developing countries and wants her help on an extended AIDS assignment in the Dominican Republic. But Alma begs off joining him: the publisher is breathing down her neck. She promises to work hard and...

While conducting research for a school paper on smallpox, Mitty finds an envelope containing 100-year-old smallpox scabs and fears that he has infected himself and all of New York City.

"After their pa falls deathly ill with smallpox, Jimmy and his sister, Hour, travel into Deadwood, South Dakota to seek help. While their pa is in quarantine, the two form unbreakable bonds with the surrogate family that emerges from the tragedy of loss. In a place where life is fragile and families are ripped apart by disease, death, and desperation, a surprising collection of Deadwood's inhabitants surround Jimmy, Hour, and Jane. There, in the most...

London, 1880. Left destitute after her father's death, Frances Irvine is forced to abandon her life of privilege and emigrate to South Africa. In a remote and inhospitable land, she becomes entangled with two very different men - one driven by ambition, the other by his ideals. Only when the rumor of a smallpox epidemic takes her into the dark heart of the diamond mines does she see her path to happiness. But this is a ruthless world . . .

"More than fifty years before the American Revolution, Boston was in revolt against the tyrannies of the Crown, Puritan Authority, and Superstition. This is the story of a fateful year that prefigured the events of 1776. In The Fever of 1721, Stephen Coss brings to life an amazing cast of characters in a year that changed the course of medical history, American journalism, and colonial revolution, including Cotton Mather, the great Puritan preacher,...

Describes the history of smallpox in the Americas, covering the arrival of the Spanish as carriers, its spread throughout the New World, the development of the smallpox vaccine, the elimination of the disease, and its potential use as a terrorist weapon.