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Posted on 11/02/2001 7:22:19 AM PST by untenured

terrifying contagious disease, the threat of biological warfare and an American population "living a life of incessant dread": Elizabeth A. Fenn's "Pox Americana" goes back to the future to examine an all-too-relevant part of our past. The American Revolution coincided with a smallpox plague that swept across North America, decimating the population and determining the course of history.

From the nature of the many references on which Ms. Fenn's lively research draws, it's clear that the epidemic has generally been regarded as a footnote to the full story of the Revolutionary War. Or it has figured tangentially in accounts of explorers' forays into the New World. Not this time: Ms. Fenn's entire focus is on the disease, how it spread and where its larger importance lies. "While the American Revolution may have defined the era for history," she writes, "epidemic smallpox nevertheless defined it for many of the Americans who lived and died in that time."

"Today, despite rumors and intelligence reports, we live in a smallpox-free world," she writes, in one of the instances where "Pox Americana" turns chilling. "The pages that follow make our good fortune clear."

Ms. Fenn, a professor of history at George Washington University, begins by charting the course of the disease from its asymptomatic incubation period to its monstrous effects. (One early report told of pox that caused victims to shed flesh "in pieces full of evil-smelling beast ies.") She goes on to explain its devastating impact upon a population that had no previous exposure to the virus called variola.

"No one — not a single individual — had acquired immunity to variola or any other Old World pathogen," she writes about the American Indians who were especially hard hit. "Everyone was susceptible." Cruelly, the disease was even deadlier when passed among relatives or tribe members than it was when traveling from stranger to stranger.

"Pox Americana" places this threat within the context of wartime chaos, as troop movement and civilian flight helped to spread the contagion. It fell to those in command, like George Washington — who had survived smallpox at 19 and bore only a few slight scars on his nose as a reminder — to determine the best course of action.

In the midst of a "maelstrom of people and microbes," Washington was able to show unusual foresight. In 1776 his army was in Boston, where a controversial plan to quarantine citizens — and even to dip potentially contagious letters in vinegar — ultimately saved the city. During the winter of 1777-8, at Valley Forge he inaugurated the first large- scale, state-sponsored immunization in American history.

The inoculation method called variolation — which meant allowing oneself to be infected with the virus, as John Adams was, and then enduring a mild bout with the disease — was at first so controversial that it provoked furious reactions. In 1721 Cotton Mather's house had been firebombed because he supported inoculation, a method that might indicate "a distrust of God's overruling care," as another minister put it. And when variolation was forbidden in New England, it became available only to those Bostonians wealthy enough to travel to the mid-Atlantic colonies for treatment, provoking the outrage of the poor.

It soon became clear that the Boston outbreak was only one of the epidemic's first salvos, as it struck soldiers at the siege of Quebec and in Virginia. Black slaves, who had been recruited to fight for the British in Virginia and were ultimately abandoned, were among the most brutally savaged by variola.

"Nothing instilled fear in American soldiers and civilians so much as the prospect that the British might use smallpox as a weapon of war," Ms. Fenn writes. The British had already shown their willingness to unleash the disease in deliberately murderous fashion. A book by a British officer advised troops, "Dip arrows in matter of smallpox and twang them at the American rebels, in order to inoculate them; this would sooner disband these stubborn, ignorant, enthusiastic savages than any other compulsive measures." And a British trader wrote about Ottawa Indians in 1763: "Out of our regard to them, we gave them two Blankets and a Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect."

As the book explains in scholarly yet detectivelike detail, the desired effect wound up afflicting Indian tribes all over the continent. Separate strains of smallpox were spread north from Mexico (where silver mines proved a fertile incubator for the virus) all the way up to British Columbia and Alaska in the west, Hudson Bay in the east.

Along the way the disease did much to demolish Indian cultural traditions and generational ties, making future settlers' conquest of the American plains that much easier. And as Ms. Fenn fascinatingly points out, the arrival of guns and horses among Indians only exacerbated the progress of smallpox. Fighting and traveling became much more frequent, thus increasing deadly contagion.

"The guiding principle is simple," Ms. Fenn writes. "Smallpox comes from where smallpox was." So "Pox Americana" sifts carefully through journals and records of the late 18th century to reconstruct the path of the disease. Using sources as varied as the burial records kept by Catholic priests in the Southwest and the diaries of explorers traveling up the Pacific coast, she pieces together a gripping, untold story and even tries to arrive at an accurate statistical tally for the seven-year blight. She estimates that at least 130,000 lives were lost to variola at that time, even if "in a word, the documentation is spotty." This is much too serious a book to treat that as a pun.

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