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Previous Volume 347:298 July 25, 2002 Number 4

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By Jonathan B. Tucker. 291 pp. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001. $26. ISBN 0-87113-830-1.

Without the smallpox virus, the world today would be exceedingly different. Although issues surrounding smallpox have been the subject of speculative fiction, Scourge is a superb and engaging factual treatise — both historical and scientific — dealing with the impact of this highly contagious and often lethal infection from ancient times to the present. Beginning with the opening sentence, in which smallpox is denoted as "the world's most dangerous prisoner," the author relates a fascinating tale in which it is not armies and conquest that repeatedly change the course of civilization, but the variola poxvirus, manifested as two forms of . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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