history / united states / state & local / new england (ct, ma, me, nh, ri, vt)

Author Stephen Coss brings to life an amazing cast of characters in a year that changed the course of medical history, American journalism, and colonial politics. Featured players were Cotton Mather, the great Puritan preacher and son of the president of Harvard College; Zabdiel Boylston, a doctor whose name is on one of Boston's grand avenues; James Franklin and his younger brother Benjamin Franklin; and Elisha Cooke and his protege, Samuel Adams. In 1721, during the worst smallpox epidemic in Boston history, Mather convinced Doctor Boylston to try a procedure that he believed would prevent death--by making an incision in the arm of a healthy person and implanting it with smallpox. "Inoculation" led to vaccination, one of the most profound medical discoveries in history. But the public did not understand this. Outrage forced Boylston into hiding and Mather's house was firebombed. In the meantime, the colonies were chafing under the control of the English Crown and began thinking about independence, aided by Benjamin Franklin's skills as a journalist and printer. Between medicine and politics, the atmosphere in Boston in 1721 simmered for years and ultimately boiled over, leading to the full drama of the American Revolution many years later.

Born Betsy Bowen into grinding poverty, the woman who became Eliza Jumel was raised in a brothel, indentured as a servant, and confined to a workhouse when her mother was in jail. Yet by the end of her life, "Madame Jumel" was one of America's richest women, with servants of her own, a New York mansion, a Saratoga Springs summer home, a major art collection, and several hundred acres of land. During her remarkable rise, she acquired a fortune from her first husband---a French merchant---and almost lost it to her second---notorious vice president Aaron Burr. Divorcing Burr amid charges of adultery, Jumel lived on to the age of 90, astutely managing her property and public persona. After her death, the battle over her estate went all the way to the United States Supreme Court---twice. Family members told of a woman who earned the gratitude of Napoleon I and shone at the courts of Louis XVIII and Charles X. Claimants to her estate painted a different picture of a prostitute, the mother of George Washington's illegitimate son, a wife who defrauded her husband and perhaps even plotted his death. Eliza Jumel's real story---so unique that it surpasses any invention---has yet to be told, until now.