Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82

Abstract

Pox Americana is great as a story but flawed as historical epidemiology. Elizabeth A. Fenn explains that epidemic smallpox in scattered parts of North America occurred from 1775 to 1782, the years of the American War for Independence. That event has received the lion's share of historians' attention. By drawing our attention to the smallpox that raged in Canada, the United States, the Spanish Southwest, Hudson Bay, and Alaska, Fenn demonstrates that microbes as well as human actors played no small part in North America's history. She has done a prodigious amount of primary research and presents it in a lively, readable book that would be wonderful for undergraduates. Fenn is not, however, the first scholar to tell the story of smallpox and the American Revolution. H. Thursfield (“Smallpox in the American War of Independence,” Annals of Medical History, 1940) argued that “smallpox was the most dangerous foe which the colonists had to fight” and that inoculation “was a factor of considerable importance in the eventual outcome of the War of Independence.” Oscar Reiss has also developed those points in his Medicine and the American Revolution (1998). Fenn does not cite either scholar's work; much of her understanding of smallpox comes from the World Health Organization, especially its campaign for global eradication. Perhaps because she is interested in the modern and global history of smallpox, Fenn is not careful to convey its early modern profile and narrower geopolitical contexts.