The "intelligent and sweeping" (Booklist) story of the crucial year that prefigured the events of the American Revolution in 1776--and how Boston's smallpox epidemic was at the center of it all.

In The Fever of 1721 Stephen Coss brings to life the amazing cast of characters who changed the course of medical history, American journalism, and colonial revolution: Cotton Mather, the great Puritan preacher, son of the President of Harvard College; Zabdiel Boylston, a doctor whose name is on one of Boston's avenues; James Franklin and his younger brother Benjamin; and Elisha...