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Smallpox Rare Books on Exhibit in Library
The McGoogan Health Sciences Library has installed a new exhibit at the entrance of level 8. The exhibit, “Battling the Speckled Monster: Stories of Slaying Smallpox,” features three books from the McGoogan Library’s rare book collection and the H. Winnett Orr rare book collection.
Edward Jenner’s 1798 An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae publicized his discovery of the smallpox vaccine derived from cowpox, and illustrations were printed from copper engravings and hand painted with watercolors.
In The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Monatgu, viewers are introduced to one 18th-century woman’s fight to introduce smallpox inoculation to England through letters she wrote home to England while in Turkey.
The third book, A Treatise on the Small-pox and Measles, is a 19th-century translation of Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya Razi, known as Rhazes in the west’s, 9th-century landmark work distinguishing the difference between smallpox and measles.
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